Half Truth

Are Warners’ “Batman” ads fudging? They accurately quote Newsweek’s Jack Kroll saying that “Batman” is “hip” and the cast “first rate,” particularly Jack Nicholson. But, in its entirety, Kroll’s review was largely negative.

Kroll lamented that the pic doesn’t offer enough background about its title character, that action sequences “fall flat,” that the pic “falls flat on the amazement scale” and fails “to produce a memorable conflict between its hero and villain.”