^^Really it's only the first two movies that matter. After that, the entire franchise is just a bad joke.
Finally got to see the animated Batman: Year One that came out some years back. It's always been one of my favorite Batman stories in the comics, but I'm always pretty apprehensive about bothering with these DC animated movies now; most that I've seen have been pretty weak. So I was happy to find that this was actually one of the few truly great ones. Excellent animation (such a stronger visual identity than the other DC animated flicks), great action, great acting (Brian Cranston is the perfect Jim Gordon; still think he should have been cast for the new movies).
It's funny, Batman Begins was supposed to be this gritty, "realistic" take on Batman, yet it ended with microwave weapons and ninjas. I always thought if they wanted to make a realistic version, they would have been much better off directly adapting Year One. And seeing this animated version, that opinion still feels dead-on. As "realistic" Batman stories go, this one is tops. Police corruption, petty crime, a cop trying to navigate it all, and some nutjob on the side running around in a costume and pissing off the higher-up society folk. We don't need no microwave emitters, supervillains, and city-wide disasters. We'll never see a live-action Batman flick like this, because it just isn't "big" enough (it ends with little more than a kidnapping and a fistfight on a bridge), but this is really my favorite kind of Batman yarn.