My co-worker Sara Vilkomerson wrote a great story on the Dark and Stormy Knight (/Batman movie).
Here is a quote from film critic and historian David Thomson:
“The cinema has always been a machine that allows us that kind of fantasy play that we don’t normally have,” echoed Mr. Thomson. “It’s a persuasive, lifelike dream form, and it coincides historically with both the breakdown of formal religions and the clear demonstration of a wonderful world where people do terrible, terrible things. When you put all these things together, it’s not really terribly surprising that there’s something that is interested in saying, I wonder if I could do something as bad as that? As dark as that? When movies began it was, can I be as brave as that? Can I be as virtuous as that? True as that? That’s still there—there are still characters like that,” he said. “But the dark has come in.”