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The Dark Knight is not only the summer's best movie; when the dust settles, it should also be seen as one of the year's handful of very best movies. It isn't so much that director Christopher Nolan -- working from a script with his brother Jonathan Nolan from a story also credited to him and David S. Goyer -- has utterly reinvented the superhero genre; it's that someone has finally made a superhero movie that doesn't cater to kids or fanboys. It's a movie packed with the danger, edge, menace, relevance and thematic heft of some of the screen's great urban crime dramas. The plot is relatively simple but unfolds with so much fury, grand scale wreckage and subtext -- especially in IMAX, which is essential -- following its every twist and turn may take a viewing or two.

Crime has so overrun Gotham City that cocky, heavy-lidded underworld kingpin Salvatore Maroni (Eric Roberts) and his minions, facing a brutal crackdown engineered by Lt. Gordon (series vet Gary Oldman) and district attorney Harvey Dent (newcomer Aaron Eckhart), turn to a Hong Kong-based crime master Lau (Chin Han). When Batman (Christian Bale, in fighting trim) lays the Asian smoothie waste in a sly sequence of cloak and dagger work by Michael Caine (smooth as silk as Bale's right-hand man), thrilling aerial Bat-flight from skyscraper to skyscraper and explosive pyrotechnics, the gangsters unleash a mad dog, the Joker (Heath Ledger) -- a guy described as someone "who likes to watch the world burn." That's when the malevolent fun and true greatness kick in.

Ledger's slow-draw, head-rolling, tongue-flicking, clown-faced performance is every bit as good as the advance hype. Better, even. In a daredevil turn that lays to waste previous attempts at playing the Joker, Ledger accomplishes work of such assurance, beauty, dark humor and terrifying volatility that he supercharges every frame he is in. We're talking an iconic, instantly legendary performance right up there with the screen's all-time greatest boogiemen. The twisted, symbiotic dynamic between he and Batman, bizarre outsiders who are shunned and reviled yet necessary to the "normal" world, fuels the movie; at one point, Ledger calls Bale "a freak like me." The supporting performances by Eckhart, Oldman and Morgan Freeman -- plus a few surprises -- are strong, although as love interest Rachel Dawes, Maggie Gyllenhaal struggles to inject inner life and poignancy to an underwritten role she still plays miles better than Katie Holmes who originated it in Batman Begins. The special effects and action sequences are top of the line, if occasionally chaotic, and frequent enough to pummel as much as entertain, and some of the dialogue (especially by Oldman and Bale) is sometimes unintelligible. But those are paltry quibbles. The Dark Knight is a dark, weird, nasty, hugely entertaining stunner.

by Stephen Rebello

credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. ™&©DC Comics.