The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Dir.: Christopher Nolan
Plot: A reclusive Bruce Wayne is forced to reassume his alter ego Batman to protect Gotham from a ruthless terrorist with designs on Gotham.

SPOILERS ABOUND

You can’t have your cake and eat it. This is a fundamental rule of many things in life, and movie making is one of them. The Dark Knight Rises tries to straddle the line between bleak psychological drama and extremely fast motorbikes and doesn’t quite manage it. The result is a frustratingly uneven epic - bolstered with good performances, excellent direction and some memorable set pieces but ultimately overlong, turgid and weighed down with questionable subplots and 2D characterisations.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, Season 2 (1962-3)

The first series of The Dick Van Dyke Show is really good fun, as well as being a textbook example of how to develop rounded, likeable characters. However, this is the season which really gets going, comedically-speaking. It's a mixture of old-fashioned comedy - slapstick, Borscht Belt one-liners, musical interludes - and modern tropes which now make up the staple of sitcoms everywhere. The humour of contemporary domestic tensions, social relationships and suburban pressures was really pushed to the fore for the first time, with smart characters stuck in unavoidable farce yet showing unexpected moments of self-awareness that were previously unseen on television. This season of the show particularly is a fascinating bridge from old to new.