Batman

Memories of the campy television series starring Adam West faded into the Gotham City skyline in director Tim Burton‘s dark n’ dreary take on the Caped Crusader, a big-screen response to the serious (and seriously violent) revisionist comic book tales of the ’80s such as Frank Miller’s “Batman: Year One” and “The Dark Knight Returns.” Here, Gotham is reimagined as a foreboding industrial metropolis (but not the Metropolis, of course) where billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) spends his nights as a masked vigilante, striking fear into the hearts of the city’s criminals; he’s dethroned as the town’s number-one superfreak after betrayed mobster Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson) inadvertently reinvents himself as the maniacal Joker, the Clown Prince of Crime who plans to turn every good citizen into a grinning corpse via deadly cosmetics. Kim Basinger looks good and screams even better as photojournalist Vicki Vale, Wayne’s love interest and the object of the Joker’s desire; meanwhile, longtime Hammer horror fan Burton got to geek out and cast Michael Gough as Alfred, Bruce’s trusted majordomo and confidante. What was originally considered by Warner Bros. to be something of a hard sell during production ended up being the highest-grossing movie of 1989 and the cause of a whole new wave of Bat-mania. – IFC Staff