Christopher Nolan is daring us to ask the question. Is The Dark Knight Rises the best third film in a series ever? After going through this exercise for a few days now, there really isn’t much of a list to delineate and rank. Let’s review the obvious candidates and determine how Nolan’s finale stacks up.  

When one of the guys behind Mr. Show and Between Two Ferns creates a podcast-turned-television series, you can’t expect a modern day Johnny Carson. Scott Auckerman's Comedy Bang! Bang! playfully spoofs the conventional talk show format, featuring interviews, shorts and skits  

Terence Davies (screenwriter and director of The House of Mirth) once again takes on dual roles with this adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play about the self-destructive love affair between the wife of a British judge and a pilot in the Royal Air Force.  

This time out, with director Scott Speer, another crew of anonymous dancers “step up” and out into the streets, flash mob-style, not just for the sake of wild abandon but also to protest the buyout of a low-income neighborhood for massive redevelopment.   

The simple premise of this suburban comedy — about a group of dads who form a neighborhood watch group to patrol their block, but soon discover an extraterrestrial menace threat far beyond their control — feels like a lazy opportunity for Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill to hang out and crack wise on the studio dime.   

Beasts of the Southern Wild, the savage visual poem from debut director Benh Zeitlin (which he co-wrote with playwright Lucy Alibar), takes us on an adventure from its opening frame, yet what makes it so special and downright impossible to imagine in any other form, is Hushpuppy’s voice.  

An unscripted series about a family-owned private security company in Ringgold, Ga., might be an unlikely follower to AMC’s grippingly dark Breaking Bad. But those who stuck around and actually watched the series premiere of Small Town Security (11 p.m. Sundays, AMC) got a glimpse at true TV gold.  

There are moments when the stars and planets are in near-perfect alignment as a comet crosses the night sky and the movie gods cast their smiles on the screen, and a film dares to come close to living up to the undeniable hype that has been heaped upon its frames. It would appear that Christopher Nolan has produced just such an occurrence with the finale to his Batman trilogy.  

Take This Waltz focuses on Margot (Michelle Williams), a freelance writer married to a cookbook author (Seth Rogen) but who develops feelings for a neighbor (Luke Kirby), an artist and rickshaw driver. Waltz feels like an avant-garde performance devoted to women on the verge. What happens to women who long for more than life has given them but then encounter an opportunity to grab hold of something more?  

When high school chemistry teacher/part-time car washer Walter White was faced with this grim conundrum, he sought out a former student-turned-delinquent and created a new formula of crystal meth to pay for his medical bills and provide a safety net for his growing family. A six-time Emmy-winner, Breaking Bad goes beyond your standard good-person-gone-bad/drug-related drama. The writing is outstanding and each character’s performance is spot-on.  

Manny (Ray Romano), Diego (Denis Leary) and Sid (John Leguizamo) are on the road again — well, this is the Ice Age, so it’s really a pre-road time, but these three seem to be laying the pathway out with each new adventure — which means that they are edging closer and closer to drifting into the modern age.  

The next stop, To Rome With Love, finds Woody Allen cruising through the Eternal City in a madcap fantasy of misdirection, misinterpretation and almost-missed opportunities for a collection of characters whose lives and misadventures don’t intersect.  

Let’s get something straight about The Amazing Spider-Man, the franchise reboot from director Marc Webb of (500) Days of Summer fame. Comics, especially the new millennial generation editions, have no problems with reimagining and reconfiguring the continuity of these mythic characters.   

During the past seven years, audiences have seen Mary-Louise Parker’s Nancy Botwin transform from loveable, suburban pot-dealing widow/mom to arsonist to Mexican cartel queen to prison lesbian and back again in Weeds.  

Oliver Stone’s late career filmography lacks the raw controversy of his glorious critical and box office run of the 1980s and 90s, but now it seems like the crazy passion of old has been drained from him.