The Dark Knight

A film set in Gotham, and a sequel. Batman has been working for a year. Organised crime is squeezed, the district attorney Harvey Dent is taking them to court, and there is hope in the city. Then the Joker arrives. He comes in through a bank robbery, offers the mob a deal on laundering their money, and then turns on all of them. The man has no past. Twice in the film he explains the scars on his face and the two accounts do not match; the narrative never says which is true. From there the film is not a chase but a series of dilemmas. Each time the Joker leaves two options and both are bad: two boats, two hostages, one death a day until a name is given. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but a rule: Batman has one, and the film argues to the end about whether it is a weakness or the only thing holding anything up. The Harvey Dent line is the real tragedy. The city's lawful hope, and something else entirely by the end. It was shot largely in Chicago. The hospital demolition was done on a real building, and the lorry flip was performed with an actual articulated truck on LaSalle Street rather than in a computer. About half an hour of the film was shot on IMAX cameras, the first dramatic feature to use them at that scale, and the frame changes shape in those sequences. Heath Ledger plays the Joker. He worked alone in a hotel room for weeks and kept a diary for the part. He died before the film opened and his Academy Award was given posthumously. Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are in the cast. Christopher Nolan directed and wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan Nolan. Who it is for: anyone who wants a thriller out of a comic book adaptation. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a straightforward hero story; the film is long, dark, and nobody wins at the end.