TheRetroCritic

With Bane and Catwoman taking on The Bat this month, I thought I'd take a quick look back at my own favourite Batman villains. Bear in mind I haven't read every single Batman comic-book or seen every single episode of every single cartoon series so there might be some bad guys out there I am not familiar with or not familiar with enough to include in this list. Might amend the list later, we'll see... In the meantime, here are my own picks for best bat-villains: 10 HARLEY QUINN If you'd asked me about Harley Quinn as a kid I would have probably spat in your face. I really wasn't a big fan of the character back in the days of the Animated Series , mostly because she just seemed tacked-on as a character and seemed to only be there to interrupt The Joker and serve as comic relief. That may all be true to a certain extent but looking back at some of the episodes she was in I realized they did try to make her as three dimensional as they could and you do

It could have gone either way. After Batman Begins , a film that was half about slowly rebuilding the iconic character and his franchise in the eyes of the fans and half about being a kickass Batman flick, it could have all started going downhill straight away or the sequel could have used Begins as a template to build something bigger and better on. Yeah they got it right. What Batman Begins really needed was a good villain and The Dark Knight certainly delivered that. The late Heath Ledger giving a unique, unsettling performance as The Joker and Aaron Eckhart, so good as Harvey Dent, giving us THE best and most intimidating Two-Face ever put to screen. And that's saying a lot seeing as the Two-Face from the Animated Series scared the shit out of me as a kid in that first couple of episodes. It's the first time in a Batman film where you really feel that the hero is actually in danger of losing everyone he cares about and losing the fight overall. The unpredictable J

Well, we're like 10 trailers in and although I'm getting more and more excited about The Dark Knight Rises , I'm still thinkin' all these teasers are hiding a hell of a lot from us. Still don't know whether Anne Hathaway's Catwoman will work at all, we'll see I guess... Anyway: This first trailer brings together some brief new footage with familiar stuff but the addition of a bombastic score and some nifty fast-paced editing just makes it all that little bit more epic. "Mr Wayne..." This TV spot also brings in some short bursts of new stuff including: Whatever's happening here... Bat pod jump... Bat plane... Gotta love that Bat plane... And Batmanuel... Can't wait :)

Holy new footage Batman! Bat-jump your way to Empire Magazine to check it out: good stuff.

The Bat. The Cat. The Poster.

Yet more Batmaney goodness...

Ok, I'm rising... I've risen: chill. Ok I'm risin', I'm risin'! Jeez...

Ooh, fire! Mmmm fiery...

Getting The Bat back on track was a long time coming but I guess it had to happen. Leaving a once thriving franchise in tatters, with millions of fans still shell-shocked and trembling at the very thought of an Arnold Schwarzenegger ice pun, would have been too cruel. So Christopher Nolan ( Memento , Insomnia ) stepped in, bringing with him a darker, grittier style usually suited to gloomy thrillers. Starting from the top, Nolan re-introduced the character completely from his origins all the way to him becoming Gotham City's saviour. This meant no Joker killing Bruce Wayne's parents (petty robber Joe Chill doing the deed instead) and a lot of time spent with Wayne being a ninja trained by Liam Neeson as part of the League Of Shadows, a vigilante group led by Ra's Al Ghul. The second half of the film would be pure entertainment. Batman in Gotham kicking ass, or at least trying to. The villains he faces include Falcone, a mob boss played by Tom Wilkinson, whose accent

More Catwoman, more of Bane sounding like Sean Connery, more Bat-Plane!

My 2012 preview on Fotorater.com .

Ok, so I'm actually watching Knight And Day while posting this and I still have no idea what DAY is in that god forsaken ass title. Why?! I mean, I know Cruise's character's parents are called Knight but he's actually called Roy Miller and Diaz's character is called June Havens so... Well, I guess her sister's called April which is another month which contains days... Nope.  That can't be it. They fucked up: they fucked up bad. You can't just sacrifice sense for THE cheesiest pun out there! See! Oh dear, looks like I'll have to check out what my country of origin, La France, has to say about that translation-wise... No no no no NO!!! Bordel de merde!!! KNIGHT makes sense!!! Then again, Night And Day makes sense but... that's the pun! You've unpunned the pun! Now it both makes sense and is completely altogether meaningless. Night And Day... that could be about anything! Come on Italy, you can do this, you can fix it! Rea

It's HERE ! Finally!

So by now we're all wise to the whole The Dark Knight Rises viral campaign Operation Early Bird which consisted of clues leading the masses to some nifty free tickets for the 6 minute prologue showing in IMAX cinemas all over the US and UK. (admittedly the map of the entire world was a tad excessive) But it looks like pretty much everyone's gathered their free shit and is all ready for this wednesday's Cine-Bania. Everyone? Come ON Quebec! The whole world is waiting! Do you not like overhyped movies? Do you not want to find Leonid Pavel? Do you not enjoy spoiling movies you will eventually watch in their entirety for yourselves? Jeesh.

New poster! Dramatic! I like it.

Well, it looks like we're finally able to take a look at Anne Hathaway's take on Catwoman for Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises . Here's the pic: Um, ok... Not sure I get it, you guys. The carnival mask, the bluetooth headsets, the Batpod... This is clearly BATGIRL.  She looks like a cat like I look like Michelle Pfeiffer (I don't).  Lets wait till we get a decent image/poster before judging Rises but... *crosses fingers*

Eeeeee! So yeah, here's the Dark Knight Rises teaser. A nice little treat on a rainy day like this one (London). Can't say it reveals much of anything but we do get a sense that something epically badass is about to go down. Not sure how Catwoman will fit into all this Bane on Bat man-fight action and still not convinced the Bane/Catwoman/Rhas Al Ghul villain combination was a good idea to begin with but I can't deny that based on this teaser, it doesn't look like Nolan's jumped the shark just yet. Along with a quick glimpse of Tom Hardy's Bane we get a Commissioner Gordon in hospital looking not too good continuing his awesomely overblown speech from the end of Dark Knight . Unless he's taking over the Two-Face role, I'm guessing either Bane beat the hell out of him or Al Ghul's latest dastardly plan involves some other potent poison spreading throughout Gotham City... ...or Anne Hathaway's catsuit looked too silly and a suicide attempt f

  "Hey you guys, we need someone to play a tiny obese evil clown, is John Leguizamo free?". This is the kind of question the producers of 1997 supernatural comic book film Spawn were asking themselves. Who did they originally cast as Spawn then? Danny DeVito? Against all odds, Leguizamo's trippy turn as a Joker-style maniacal clown turns out to be the film's driving force and best asset. Which is not to say there's nothing else appealing about the film: a lot of effects are pretty creative and the whole thing is admittedly entertaining. Unfortunately once you see what Hell looks like you soon forget the good stuff and find yourself wishing you were playing a 90's PC video game instead of watching a film in which entire sequences could have been directly lifted from one of those very games. Like I said, some effects are creative and some do work but that Devil thing and its army of minions all standing around moving like tiny CGI puppets in a sea of fire i

After the catoonish lunacy of the Adam West 60's TV series which had the Dark Knight dancing, surfing, running to crime scenes ON FOOT and stroking his chin repeatedly speaking bat-nonsense and adding the word "bat" before any device, it was definitely time for something a little more, shall we say, edgy? Not that the old series weren't fun: they were great! But as far as comic book heroes go, this one had more potential than the West series could ever produce. So who better to bring out the gothic weirdness and quirky theatrics of The Bat than Beetlejuice maestro Tim Burton? Michael Keaton is the troubled caped crusader, an unlikely choice but one which proved to be surprisingly spot-on: he brings humour and likeability to a character which could easily be bland and "one-note". Of course, the real scene-stealer here is Jack Nicholson's devilish joker who prides himself on being the world's first "homicidal artist" by trashing a museu