Something to watch tonight: Saturday 30 August

The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan, 2012)

Apologies for this arriv­ing on a week­end. There were some tedi­ous tech­nic­al issues which I won’t go into.

This week back in 2012, I was trav­el­ling to Telluride in Colorado for the annu­al film fest­iv­al.1 I flew in to Denver and had a couple of days to accli­mate myself before the drive across the state to the San Juan Mountains so I went to vis­it a cinema.

By that, I don’t mean I went to a movie. I went to vis­it a cinema. The Century 16 in Aurora, Colorado, wasn’t in oper­a­tion. In fact, it was sur­roun­ded by fences and make­shift memori­als because a few weeks earli­er a gun­man had entered cinema 9 dur­ing a screen­ing of The Dark Knight Rises and opened fire on the audi­ence, killing 12 people.

It remains bey­ond com­pre­hen­sion that you might be murdered simply by choos­ing to go to the pic­tures, so I felt that I owed those vic­tims and sur­viv­ors a moment or two of my time to hon­our their lives:

I wasn’t expect­ing to be quite as moved as I was by this and stuck around for longer than I had planned, think­ing of how a night at the pic­tures could be dis­turbed by some­thing so much worse than annoy­ing talk­ers and texters.

Where to watch The Dark Knight Rises

Aotearoa: Streaming on Prime Video or Neon

Australia: Streaming on Prime Video, Foxtel Now, Stan or Binge

Canada: Streaming on Crave

Ireland: Streaming on Prime Video

India: Streaming on Prime Video or Hotstar

USA: Streaming on HBO Max2

UK: Streaming on Prime Video

Recent comments

We are always very grate­ful for your com­ments and it turns out that there are lots of fans of Utopia among you.

Reader LC said:

I couldn’t watch more than about five epis­odes. My exper­i­ence in large gov­ern­ment type places is small, but enough that it drove me insane with its accuracy.

Reader M wrote:

Hilarious show and a bit like Veep* in that it feels like the same epis­ode on repeat with only incid­ent­al changes in the story arc.

*anoth­er effect­ive pal­ate cleanser for us – this is poten­tially a top­ic with legs of its own

I haven’t seen Veep — and there is rather a lot of it — but Reader ML of Otago was anoth­er in favour:

Great to read this trib­ute to Rob Stitch. As sat­ir­ists go, he’s up there with Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci (The Day Today, The Thick of It, Veep…) in terms of impact and influ­ence, and he and his team might even be funnier.