Batman Returns - Enzian Theater

35mm Screening! Screening as part of the Enzian Holiday Series!

Tim Burton’s darkly stylish sequel blends comic book spectacle with gothic fairytale, cementing Burton’s singular vision of Gotham City. The film reunited Michael Keaton as the brooding Bruce Wayne/Batman, while introducing two of the franchise’s most memorable villains: Danny DeVito as Oswald Cobblepot, a grotesque yet tragic incarnation of The Penguin, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, whose feline alter ego became one of the most iconic antiheroines in film history.

Amid Gotham’s snowy, neon-lit Christmas, Batman faces chaos as The Penguin’s circus gang terrorizes the city and corrupt tycoon Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) schemes to drain its energy. After Shreck’s secretary Selina Kyle is reborn as Catwoman, the trios intertwined destinies collide in a tragic showdown of betrayal, desire, and destruction.

Upon release, Batman Returns was notable for its strikingly dark tone and twisted holiday imagery—where Christmas cheer is subverted into a nightmare of consumerism, corruption, and fractured identities. Though controversial for its violence and mature themes (leading to a backlash from parents’ groups and toy companies), the film has since earned a reputation as a bold, gothic outlier in the history of superhero movies.

1992, 126 minutes, USA, Directed by Tim Burton, Rated PG-13

“Batman Returns is undeniably a Christmas movie. With the Scrooge-like Max Shreck and a sewer-dwelling penguin person, the Gotham created by Burton and co. is cartoonishly bleak."
– Cassondra Feltus, BLACK GIRL NERDS
“Transcends its genre and shines its Bat-Signal on our foibles and neuroses, conveying a collective humanity with neither heroism nor villainy, just a long, slow trip into the dark.”
– Noah Gittell, WASHINGTON CITY PAPER
“Burton uses the summer's most explosively entertaining movie to lead us back into the liberating darkness of dreams.”
– Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE
“Something about the filmmaker's eccentric, surreal, childlike images seems to strike a deep chord in the mass psyche: he makes nightmares that taste like candy.”
– David Ansen, NEWSWEEK
“Burton, once an animator at Disney, understands that to go deeper, you must fly higher, to liberation from plot into poetry. Here he's done it. This Batman soars.”
– Richard Corliss, TIME MAGAZINE
“Among the 1990s' most fruitful marriages of high-brow auteurist style and pulp source material. A Burtonesque layer cake: at bottom, his take on German Expressionism; then the Gotham grotesquerie; topping it all off is a fissuring, fracturing fairytale.”
– Brian Gibson, VUE WEEKLY