Batman Returns

Tim Burton‘s demented, melancholy holiday fable is the true Nightmare Before Christmas as Gotham City — now a bleak, snow-covered postmodern variation on Charles Dickens’ London — faces a new threat: the deformed, sinister Oswald Cobblepot, aka the Penguin (Danny DeVito), whose team-up with industrial tycoon Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) to run for Mayor hides a twisted plan to kill all of the town’s first-born sons. Meanwhile, the Caped Crusader (Michael Keaton) faces off with the mischievous, impossibly sexy and completely insane Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), an anarchic menace who might very well be his soul mate. Perhaps much more a “Tim Burton movie” than a “Batman movie” as the director explores his favorite themes of isolation, loneliness and what happens to people who just weren’t hugged enough as children (or adults, at that), “Batman Returns” might be the only film with attempted mass child genocide, a blood-spurting nose bite and grotesque sexual innuendo like “Just the pussy I was looking for” to ever get a Happy Meal tie-in; in the classroom of superhero movies, this is the goth kid in the back row who no one talks to as he silently draws pictures of the other superheroes and sets them on fire. – IFC Staff