“Dark Knight” a Wonderful Batman Movie

Buoyed by a brilliant performance by Heath Ledger as criminal mastermind The Joker, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (B) is a complex superhero movie that posits that people dressed as bats and harlequins could really be in the realm of political theater and then asks what would happen if they were. The addition of Aaron Eckhart as Two Face, a villain #2, causes Christian Bale’s hero to recede a bit from prominence, and that always hurts a Batman movie in my book. The political machinations are also not quite as interesting as Nolan would like to believe. Still, it’s a pretty good drama that just happens to be a superhero movie. The part of Katie Holmes is now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and I still don’t know what that character does.