The Dark Knight Rises isn't a movie. It is masterful visual literature.

Rating: 9/10 (1 August 2012)

Apparently, Hollywood suits must truly believe this year will witness humanity's end or how does one explain the basement cellar masterpieces they've uncorked for our 'last supper consumption'? First, it was the brilliant season two of Game of Thrones. Then, the deliriously dazzling Avengers. The grand, otherworldly main course must be 'The Dark Knight Rises'. Caveat emptor: If you are looking for entertainment, this is not it. TDKR isn't even a movie. It is simply masterful visual literature, its niggling imperfections be damned. The Dark Knight Rises is director Nolan's Sixth Day: he's wholly recreated the majestically bitter-sweet Batman mythos in his own image from the miry clay of arrogant, epic imagination and ambition, while thundering down new rules of storytelling from his cinematic Sinai. This third instalment brings the trilogy full circle, starting with a funeral and ending with one, in nearly 180 intellect- electrifying and emotion-draining minutes, aided and abetted by the savage beauty that is the musical score and some delicious blink-or-you'll-miss-it cameos. The Dark Knight Rises bristles with parables and allegories, ingenious plot devices, mind blowing set pieces and jaw dropping pyrotechnics, invoking every luminary from Charles Dickens to Baron Von Clausewitz. It is riddled with immaculately choreographed intrigue and lots of emotional shrapnel. It relentlessly admonishes that the most sacred responsibility of every parent, leader, government or even generation remains to love and positively mentor the charges involved. It warns that humanity's excesses have made an apocalypse, political or financial, inevitable. But the movie is also about hope and the inspirational power of the lone, lonely hero while reminding us that, like true love, there's nothing glamorous about heroism...it's about bloody-knuckled determination and pain-wreathed sacrifice. This movie is finally about the Batman, and I fell in love with him for the first time. Christopher Nolan bows out of the franchise in a seismic, nuclear thundercloud. He will never top this one.