THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (PG-13) Besides Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings series, no modern cinematic trilogy has examined heroism better than Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight movies. By the time the British director took over the Caped Crusader franchise, Batman was in dire need of a revamp. Tim Burton brought the comic book character to the screen with the first two installments, the sterile Batman and the more creatively macabre Batman Returns, and then Joel Schumacher upped the camp and ran the series into the ground with three wretched movies. Nolan, owing a huge debt to Frank Miller's revisionist comic books from the late 1980s, refashions Batman as a brooding, humorless avenger compelled to spectacularly clean the fabled Gotham City of crime one thug at a time.

Batman Begins reexamined the origin of the crime fighter, giving Batman (Christian Bale) the grand canvas he deserved. It's rich in mood (Gotham feels oppressively alive), and Bruce Wayne's struggle to reinvent himself and understand the path he's taken is impressive. But while Nolan diligently served popcorn thrills, you could sense he wanted to dive deeper into the dark id of the character in a manner anathema to Hollywood norm. With The Dark Knight, Nolan offered up something thematically deeper, delivering a bona fide grim crime epic. Though fascinating on a number of levels, The Dark Knight nevertheless felt overreaching. Excising the fantastic for Michael Mann-like "realism," the movie transformed Gotham back into Chicago/New York and Heath Ledger's death overshadowed how disjointed and passionless his performance really was. And with the script's betrayal of The Joker's classic backstory, Ledger played a criminal who only thinks he's The Joker. Nolan's designer nihilism approach shoved Batman to the shadows.

The Dark Knight Rises raises the dramatic stakes to a colossal level, satisfactorily completing Batman's character arc in an appropriately mythic manner. The movie strikes a perfect tonal balance between the first entry's dark fantasy and the second's intense darkness. It feels like a cohesive comic book movie, and the new villain, Bane (Tom Hardy), makes for a terrifying foe. Hardy dominates his scenes with imposing ferocity yet manages to evoke a savage grace. His line readings are eccentric and, despite his monstrous physicality, Hardy manages to exude traces of humanity in his beast, especially in the final act. It's a brilliant performance. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as idealistic cop John Blake is also outstanding. The Dark Knight Rises is smashing entertainment and restores hope that there's still some life in the otherwise moribund superhero subgenre.