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100It's a rare, beautifully made movie that offers you another world. [23 June 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E1]
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100In short, Batman is terrific - funny, smart and sensitive too, the perfect cinematic date.
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100The movie fixes you in its gravitational pull. It's an enveloping, walk-in vision... As rich and satisfying a movie as you're likely to see all year.
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80Jack Nicholson as The Joker helpfully provides all the colour.
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80Nicholson embellishes fascinatingly baroque designs with his twisted features, lavish verbal pirouettes and inspired excursions into the outer limits of psychosis. It's a masterpiece of sinister comic acting.
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80The Batblast of the summer.
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75Burton's Gotham City-constructed on a massive sound stage in London- is a striking blend of spindly gothic, decaying art deco and broodingly bland institutional architecture that seems to lie just a couple of subway stops down from Ridley Scott's ''Blade Runner'' and Terry Gilliam's ''Brazil.'' It's great to look at, but we seem to have been here before. [23 June 1989, Friday, p.A]
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75There's a cold intelligence at work here. Though its pleasures are plentiful enough to reward a second viewing, only Nicholson has saved Warners from a wing-clip. [23 June 1989, Life, p.1D]
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70It has so many unpredictable spins that what's missing doesn't seem to matter much. The images sing. [10 July 1989]
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70It's relatively easy to convey the claustral in interior scenes, but [designer] Furst and the director Tim Burton do it even when the setting is a great flight of steps before the municipal building or the huge square where Batman and the joker confront each other. [31 July 1989, p.24]
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63It would be a lot better if it didn't lean exclusively on bone-crunching action for its climactic thrills, and the story continues long after its ideas have started to sag. [29 June 1989, Arts, p.10]
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63Batman is largely content to skim the surface and bask in the light of its visual style.
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60Despite its interesting, grim tone and undeniably striking visuals from director Burton and production designer Furst, the film fails to synthesize its strengths into a compelling whole.
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60The main problem is that Burton operates best on a modest scale; saddled with a blockbuster, he doesn't know how to animate all the dead space.
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50The movie's problem is that no one seemed to have any fun making it, and it's hard to have much fun watching it. It's a depressing experience.
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40It's neither funny nor solemn. It has the personality not of a particular movie but of a product, of something arrived at by corporate decision.
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30The Joker has been demoted into a broad-scale sociopath, without a tempter's power or a mythic villain's complexity. And that's the movie's real undoing. [23 June 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 42 out of 53
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Mixed: 4 out of 53
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Negative: 7 out of 53
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By no means is this is a