Batman.

If you want a good perspective on Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker, read Richard Brody's review of The Dark Knight Rises:

Nolan doesn’t hang dollar signs on his screen; he’s not looking to impress viewers with the colossal scale of his project, but, rather, with his own grim and relentless labors. “The Dark Knight Rises” is not a movie of conspicuous consumption but of conspicuous production, with Nolan himself playing the unfortunate Atlas who bears a cinematic world of dour doings on his lonely shoulders, all the while needing viewers to know how hard he’s working for them. The problem with the movie isn’t any lack of warmth or humanity (qualities that don’t need to be displayed because they’re often effectively evoked through cold and inhuman means) but a lack of wonder. Nolan never seems to surprise himself, and his own inventions have little inspiration but, rather, a sense of a problem solved.

But for the sake of the kid that read the whole Knightfall series over a series of summer Saturdays spent not buying anything in Borders, I'll say I enjoyed the way they handled Bane in this movie.

But, hey, everybody's got a review of this movie. I've got a theory about Christopher Nolan's artistic past and future. Inception was a movie about making movies, right? What if we read Nolan's whole career this way? Here's what I'm thinking:

• At some point in the hazy past, the Nolan brothers wrote a script for a romantic comedy. It would have been their All the Real Girls. It would have summed up all their hopes, dreams, and joys. The writing retreat was perfect, idyllic even. They were sure that this would be their classic.
• Something went wrong. Perhaps a professor critically eviscerated the screenplay in cold blood, or perhaps it was just a tragic accident. Or maybe it turns out that Christopher Nolan DESTROYED IT HIMSELF AND CAN'T EVEN REMEMBER.
• The Nolans, tormented by the loss of the screenplay, turned their anguish towards the obsessive creation of clockwork thrillers about obsessive men trying to solve the problem of the past by mastering some dark technique.
• However, several years ago, Christopher Nolan found a new idea for a screenplay. Perhaps it's not the story of young love he wrote and lost as a young man. But it involves children somehow. He wants to write a movie about parenthood. (We see the first hints of this turn in The Prestige, where one of the men obsessed by his craft far beyond the point of reason has a child and thereby gets a little perspective on life.)
• But he's in too deep with the studios. They won't let him get out. Desperately, he takes on one last big-budget blockbuster. This one's the toughest of all. He puts together the best team he's got, but there's just not enough time. The script doesn't make any sense. They improvise. They have to. Because if they can just make a gazillion dollars for Warner Brothers, Christopher Nolan can go free.

So that's the coded message here. Nolan, like Bruce Wayne, needs to put the thriller business behind him. The question is, what kind of movie is he going to make next?

My money's on a comedy about two zany suburban couples each trying to secure their respective toddlers a spot in an elite preschool, starring Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Scarlett Johanson, and featuring Michael Caine as the quirky headmaster. But there's also some chance it's a story that follows a married couple (Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard) for two decades as they raise a family in a weird composite of Chicago and London, featuring Michael Caine as the husband's dad or publisher. The possibilities are endless, but the actors are few.