The Dark Knight Rises Poster

Christopher Nolan's final chapter in the Batman saga will likely be the biggest movie of 2012, and for good reason.  Nolan's films can be somewhat easily divided into blockbusters (the Batman movies and Inception) and smaller, more "artistic" fare (Memento, The Prestige), but doing so creates something of a false dichotomy, as even Nolan's action-packed, theater-packing pictures have a brilliant psychology and masterful filmmaking in their DNA.

Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, and Anne Hathaway are a few of the new faces who join series regulars Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman.  The film picks up eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, presenting a Batman who is no longer in peak physical shape.  The apparently paradoxical poster (that hints at Batman's fall even as the film's title suggests otherwise) paints a foreboding picture for the Caped Crusader.

The Dark Knight Rises arrives in theaters July 20, 2012.