Gravitas … Jeffrey Wright plays Batman’s sidekick Lieutenant James Gordon. Did Warner Bros make the right decision by pitching the new film firmly in grownup territory? If anything, the PG-13-rated (15 in the UK) The Batman is even more violent than Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, but crucially it is the caped crusader’s brutal and freaky new nemesis, Paul Dano’s Riddler, who takes on most of the grim heavy lifting when it comes to brutality. Still, it’s a huge change from the oversized frat-boy gone loco portrayed by Ben Affleck in more recent films, and a welcome return to the superhero’s gothic roots. The Cobain connection acts more as a mood palette than anything else, with the idea of Batman as a suffering hero hardly that different from the iteration essayed by Christian Bale in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. And yet ultimately there’s little to link the dead rock star with Bruce Wayne other than a shared penchant for shedloads of mascara and Michael Giacchino’s doom-laden score (which seems to have been inspired by Nirvana’s Something in the Way). Reeves has gone on record to suggest that he imagined this new Batman as Kurt Cobain, if the singer had been a billionaire whose tortured soul has Wayne Manor as an echo chamber, rather than the 90s grunge scene. Lies … Robert Pattinson delves into every dirty corner of Gotham City.

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