Terrence Rafferty

"....And whenever the "weird menace to all crime" (as the hero is described in one of the early comics) ventures out on a mission, he runs into a mysterious woman who dresses like a cat and carries a whip. He can't tell whose side the new animal in town is really on. The audience knows, however, that the Catwoman is really Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), the jittery, put-upon secretary of Max Shreck, who treats her like dirt and then literally pushes her too far. She reinvents herself as a feline feminist avenger, taking to the streets and the rooftops in a skintight black cat suit (which she's stitched from the shiny material of a rain slicker), and gleefully humiliating bad men wherever she finds them--that is, everywhere. At one point, she accounts for herself with the tersely eloquent formulation "Life's a bitch; now so am I." She is, of course, the perfect feminine counterpart of the hero, whose costumed forays into the night are also fuelled by an obsessive desire for vengeance. In their daytime drag, as Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle, they seem to recognize something in each other; in their bat and cat getups, the sparks really fly. This hilariously twisted relationship--an apache dance in animal costumes--isn't just an improvement on the hero's romance with deadly-dull Vicki Vale in the first picture; it's the glory of "Batman Returns," the source of the movie's best gags and most striking visual ideas. There's a lot of high-powered talent in "Batman Returns," but Pfeiffer dominates the movie. The cat clothes seem to release something strange and wild in her, as they do in Selina Kyle: this performance is ferociously sexy and uninhibitedly, over-the-top funny.

Terrence Rafferty, The New Yorker, June 29, 1992