10. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

It’s a fine finale to a seismic trilogy, but The Dark Knight Rises is not without chinks in Batman’s Nomex suit. The follow-up to 2008’s smash The Dark Knight and conclusion to all that began with 2005’s Batman Begins, The Dark Knight Rises sees Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) come out of self-imposed exile to stand up to Bane (Tom Hardy), a swollen masked warlord who overtakes Gotham City. Woven into the story is Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, a femme fatale thief who initially antagonizes before aiding Batman.

While echoes of DC’s comics lore are more present than ever, namely Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and the multi-author storylines “Knightfall” and “No Man’s Land,” Rises remains a Nolan special, a superhero event film steadfast in its War on Terror and Occupy era verisimilitude. But it’s not invincible. Its poorly-aged finale features cops in a ground war, and Bane’s falsehoods about his populist messaging (plus his fingers on a nuclear trigger) don’t make his cause in toppling the elite class any less unsavory. And sure, there’s endless opportunity for nitpicking. (How does Bruce get back to Gotham from The Pit?)

But The Dark Knight Rises is triumphant in its Pyrrhic victory, a story of legacies made immortal in ideas over people. When Bane scorns to Batman, “Peace has cost you your strengh. Victory has defeated you,” it is perhaps Nolan’s most self-reflective moment yet. After 2010’s Inception, Nolan was a newly-minted auteur. The Dark Knight Rises is Nolan striving to say he’s not a fluke, that victory hasn’t defeated him, and his work bends over backwards to the point of breakage to prove it.