Obviously, a lot of noise surrounded The Dark Knight Rises, starting with the hype and anticipation. Then came the extreme reactions to some early negative reviews. And then the midnight-screening mass shooting in Colorado appropriately redirected attention to important matters.

The deaths of 12 people and the injuries to dozens more in that Colorado movie theatre on July 20 highlighted that neither a movie nor Batman is anywhere near as important as human lives.

Yet the arts are still integral to our existence, and whatever you think of Christopher Nolan's trilogy as films, these movies will stand as key markers in the lives of many millions of people and in the movie business, and they will be viewed as reflections of their cultural and political time. Like the original trio of Star Wars movies, we can already see them as significant pop-art artifacts.

For those reasons alone, Nolan's Batman movies deserve close scrutiny. They also reward inspection and consideration, as the writer/director has conceived and executed them with a rigor and density unusual to blockbusters. (Expect spoilers, although I've tried to be circumspect about late developments in The Dark Knight Rises until the final section.)

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

The Dark Knight Rises, as you've perhaps heard, is the concluding chapter in Christopher Nolan's series of grandly scaled, intensely serious-minded Batman adventures that began with 2005's fittingly titled Batman Begins and continued with 2008's The Dark Knight. It is also, as you perhaps hoped, a terrifically satisfying wrap-up to the trilogy - flawed, at times distractingly flawed, but powerful and resonant and deeply emotional. After my lukewarm responses to The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man, I would've been relieved to exit this summer's latest superhero blockbuster merely content. Instead, I left Nolan's 165-minute comic-book epic simultaneously jazzed and sated, and more than ready to see it again.

TO ROME WITH LOVE

After Woody Allen's rather staggering success with Midnight in Paris - personal-best box-office, the man's first Academy Award in 25 years - I guess it was inevitable that critics, as a whole, would greet the filmmaker's follow-up project with a collective "meh." And that's certainly happened with Woody's new To Rome with Love. (Not that it matters, but the comedy is currently sitting with a "45-percent fresh" rating - i.e., "not fresh at all" - at the review aggregator RottenTomatoes.com.)

MAGIC MIKE

Walking into the auditorium for a nearly sold-out, mid-afternoon screening of Magic Mike - "nearly sold-out" and "mid-afternoon" being phrases that rarely go together at the cineplex - I gauged the audience of obviously ecstatic patrons and said to my friend, "This is gonna be fun." Man, we had no idea.