Batman Returns

Batman Returns could mark a happy beginning for Hollywood -- not because it might make a mint but because it dispenses with realism and aspires to animation, to the freedom of idea and image found in the best feature-length cartoons. Read full review

I find it the most adventurous and imaginative American film I've seen this year - and also the weirdest. Read full review

The passion that was brought to creating the perilous and dark world is just so spectacular to take in. If modern superhero films had even one iota of the creativity of this one, they wouldn’t grow so tiresome. Read full review

The new film is simply more confident, more idiosyncratically dark, weird, gnarled and twisted than "Batman." And because it's more obviously permeated by Burton's style and sensibility, it's also more fun. [19 June 1992, p.47]

Like the hero himself, the movie is larger than life - a horrific fantasy that gets carried away with itself as the mood builds and the tension mounts Read full review

Burton has once again managed to pursue his quirky personal concerns in the context of broadly commercial entertainment, although the idiosyncracies of the villains clearly interest him far more than the programmable heroics of the title character and the related mandatory action sequences. Read full review

Burton continues to capture the essence of the Batman legend and more importantly his audiences imagination. Read full review

To come out of the summer haze and enter the dark (and cool) wonder of Batman Returns is a pleasure not to be denied. Even more than before, this cartoon opera about cloistered personalities bathes exultantly in moody blues, gothic music swirls and a symphony of character tragedy. Read full review

Visually, Batman Returns is marvelous to behold. There are images on that screen that make you laugh with delight and admiration for the sheer imaginativeness of it. But Burton also brings up some really interesting themes only to lose interest somewhere along the way. Read full review

This baby takes place in Tim Burton's id. It's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Read full review

Our rooting interest is not for any macho act by Batman to save the city but for each character to achive some sort of emotional peace. That makes for a strange but refreshing action story. Read full review

Burton uses the summer's most explosively entertaining movie to lead us back into the liberating darkness of dreams. Read full review

Burton is a first-rate stylist, but this time he's actually better at suggesting the inner life of his characters. [19 June 1992, p.G6]

This demented toyshop of a movie is a bit of a mess, but it's a visionary mess. Of how many sequels can that be said? Read full review

Mr. Burton's new Batman Returns is as sprightly as its predecessor was sluggish, and it succeeds in banishing much of the dourness and tedium that made the first film such an ordeal. Read full review

Batman Returns offers many jolts of pleasure, yet it’s also a mess — a gilded sketchbook of a movie that keeps falling open to random pages. Read full review

As Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands reminded us, Burton always has been more absorbed by what his audience sees than by what his movies say. It's part of his unique talent as a filmmaker, but it leads him to ignore the flaws in the structure of what is, after all, supposed to be an exciting adventure film. Read full review

The ripe dialogue (''I was their No. 1 son,'' wails the Penguin about the parents who flushed their deformed baby down the sewer, ''and they treated me like No. 2!'') and rich settings decked out in deco can't disguise that little happens. The frantic action circles the same city block, as if trying to find a spot to park. [19 June 1992, p.1D]

Scene by scene, Batman Returns is more outrageous, inventive and fun than the original Batman. Yet, by its apocalyptic ending, Batman Returns is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. [19 June 1992, p.22]

I give the movie a negative review, and yet I don't think it's a bad movie; it's more of a misguided one, made with great creativity, but denying us what we more or less deserve from a Batman story. Read full review

Batman Returns, the most eagerly awaited and aggressively hyped film of the summer, is, for better and worse, very much the product of director Tim Burton's morose imagination. His dark, melancholy vision is undeniably something to see, but it is a claustrophobic conception, not an expansive one, oppressive rather than exhilarating, and it strangles almost all the enjoyment out of this movie without half trying. Read full review

Director Tim Burton and his screenwriters bring a heavy-handed, plodding realism to bear on what should be pop-mythic material. Read full review

For all the movie's richness and dazzle, for all that money dripping off the screen, Batman Returns is a gorgeous failure -- flashy, intermittently appealing but, in the end, a big mess. Batman Returns lacks a coherent story. It lacks a point of view and a focus. And so everything suffers, even the art direction. [19 June 1992, p.D1]

The film preaches the gospel of unpredictable change, of ironic metamorphosis, of a psychological ebb and flow from love to lust, hope to despair, good to evil. But if the message is fluid, the medium is static at best and chaotic at worst - there's very little controlled motion in this picture. [19 June 1992]