The Batman

It’s not that Matt Reeves’s “The Batman” isn’t good in many ways, its dark color palette in service of the eponymous character’s nocturnal habits as opposed to mere crutch, the deaths of Bruce and Martha Wayne kept offscreen because their fallout is all in there in Robert Pattison’s ghostly husk as Bruce. (Jeffrey Wright plays his Lt. Gordon in a less comic if strangely similar key as his medical practitioner in “Only Lovers Left Alive.”) But if the movie is sort of remixing David Fincher’s “Seven,” Reeves eschews a showdown between hero and villain (Paul Dano’s Riddler, evocatively portrayed through voyeuristic, mouth-breathing shots underlining that this Batman variation is not for kids) for a grand finale at odds with the gloomy intimacy, the ending itself becoming less an encapsulation of the overriding (agreeable) neo-noir fatalism than how it is fatalistically mere set up for Season 2 – er, another movie.