Christopher Nolan

Anne Hathaway's Catwoman transformation has come full circle.  The actress stepped out for the New York premiere of "The Dark Knight Rises" on Monday looking far from the suit-clad vixen we've seen on bus sides and billboards for months.  On the heather gray carpet, Hathaway sported her "Les Miserables" pixie cut and a brilliant white gown with a long train -- a look that her character Selina Kyle might find a bit precious.  ...

A little more than a hundred years ago, in the period represented in the recent films "The Illusionist" and "The Prestige," a conjurer succeeded in his attempt to live forever. The secret of the magician's immortality is herein revealed: He assembled 159 sequential photographs of himself producing a rabbit from a hat and created what he believed to be the "first animated film of a performer."

Regarding your review of Christopher Nolan's "Under the Eye of the Clock" by Jackson Cope ( Book Review, March 6): I strongly disagree with Cope's review, which I felt to be biased, unenlightened, and grossly insensitive to the creativity of this young writer, who just also happens to be handicapped. My initial thought was that Cope must be overreacting in his effort to avoid "charity" because of the writer's severe handicaps, but upon second reading of the book and of the review, I must believe that he is simply too rigid to see the magnificence of Nolan's use of language.

"Are you watching closely?" a voice asks at the beginning of "The Prestige." The question, like almost everything else about this passionate, atmospheric entertainment, is a calculated piece of misdirection. No matter how hard you try, you can't be watching this twisty tale closely enough to avoid its elegant traps and snares.

The plot is difficult to explain in a 30-second TV spot (something about dreams within dreams). The star has a choppy box-office track record (most do these days). The director is not a household name (yet). When Warner Bros. on Friday opens "Inception," a complex action thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio as an agent who invades people's dreams, the studio will give filmgoers something that they say they want but rarely support: a movie that is not a sequel, adapted from a comic book or inspired by a toy. For Warner Bros.

Charles Dickens probably never realized what a gift he'd given dithering journalists when he opened "A Tale of Two Cities" exactly 150 years ago with the classic sentence, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It's tempting to fall back on that venerable truism when examining the last decade of film, but the reality is that, frankly, it was close to the worst of times, with some good things thrown in to keep us from getting suicidal about the state of cinema. I'm not just talking about the proliferation of graphic horror films, slasher and splatter epics and a whole new genre felicitously labeled torture porn.

Adam West barely recognizes Gotham City these days. "Batman is so dark now," the 80-year-old actor said with a carefree chuckle. "The new films, they are grim, Gothic, full of explosions, mayhem. It's the way of things, I suppose; the whole world seems darker." Well, the world was also heaving with angst back when West wore the cape for 26 months of prime-time silliness that began in January 1966. The native of Walla Walla, Wash., became an icon of camp with his masked-man deadpan and, for much of America, his version was the definition of the Caped Crusader for decades.