The Dark Knight Review

The Dark Knight works because Christopher Nolan builds it as an escalation engine: every scene raises the price of the previous one, from the opening bank heist to the ferry dilemma, and the Joker exists purely to force impossible choices. Heath Ledger's performance is the best in the genre's history, all wet-lipped improvisation and sudden stillness, and the interrogation-room scene between him and Christian Bale plays like a thesis statement with fists.

Wally Pfister's IMAX photography, the camera falling with Batman off the Sears Tower, the eighteen-wheeler flipped for real on a Chicago street, gave the comic-book movie a physical credibility it has chased ever since. Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent is the actual protagonist, a fall arc the film executes with tragic precision.

The dialogue occasionally stops to announce its themes, characters explain the symbolism of Batman a beat after the images already have, which is the single tier-costing habit here. Hans Zimmer's one-note Joker theme, a razor on a string, does more with less than any score of its era. Fifteen years of imitators have not landed a punch on it.