Reviews provided by RottenTomatoes
Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune: There are flashes of commercially oriented action and humor, but the overall feeling is one of a languid depression sprung straight from the heart of its author. Read more
Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune: This time the richness of the Batman movie is not in its production design but rather in Burton's and screenwriter Daniel Waters' Freudian view of adult human behavior. Read more
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: [Burton's] dark, melancholy vision is undeniably something to see, but it is a claustrophobic conception, not an expansive one, oppressive rather than exhilarating, and it strangles almost all the enjoyment out of this movie without half trying. Read more
Jay Boyar, Orlando Sentinel: Burton and company return to the prickly humor that gave such a jolt to the earlier film -- frequently finding it in unexpected places. Read more
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: More of the same, but nowhere near as good (funny, disturbing, obsessive) as the uneven original, revealing arrested development on every level. Read more
Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Exhaustingly inventive. Read more
David Ansen, Newsweek: 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. Read more
Terrence Rafferty, New Yorker: As in the first movie, Burton gives the material a luxurious masked-ball quality and a sly contemporary wit without violating the myth's low, cheesy comic-book origins. Read more
Janet Maslin, New York Times: Because the film's predominant motif is that of wounded individuals re-inventing themselves as wily villains, its most memorable episodes are early ones explaining each main character's transformation. Read more
Desmond Ryan, Philadelphia Inquirer: As Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands reminded us, Burton always has been more absorbed by what his audience sees than by what his movies say. Read more
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Odd and sad, but not exhilarating. Read more
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Burton uses the summer's most explosively entertaining movie to lead us back into the liberating darkness of dreams. Read more
Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: 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. Read more
Geoff Andrew, Time Out: Bigger, louder, more relentlessly action-packed than its predecessor, Batman Returns batters its audience into submission. Read more
Todd McCarthy, Variety: Where Burton's ideas end and those of his collaborators begin is impossible to know, but result is a seamless, utterly consistent universe full of nasty notions about societal deterioration, greed and other base impulses. Read more
Desson Thomson, Washington Post: Comes closer than ever to Bob Kane's dark, original strip, which began in 1939. Read more
Rita Kempley, Washington Post: Like a hyperactive 11-year-old, the director seems both uncomfortable with adult emotions and unable to focus on the overall portrait. Read more