Film Reviews: The Dark Knight

This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

Showdown in Gotham Town

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Published: July 18, 2008

Dark as night and nearly as long, Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie feels like a beginning and something of an end. Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind — including “Batman Begins,” Mr. Nolan’s 2005 pleasurably moody resurrection of the series — largely by embracing an ambivalence that at first glance might be mistaken for pessimism. But no work filled with such thrilling moments of pure cinema can be rightly branded pessimistic, even a postheroic superhero movie like “The Dark Knight.”

Apparently, truth, justice and the American way don’t cut it anymore. That may not fully explain why the last Superman took a nose dive (“Superman Returns,” if not for long), but I think it helps get at why, like other recent ambiguous American heroes, both supermen and super-spies, the new Batman soared. Talent played a considerable part in Mr. Nolan’s Bat restoration, naturally, as did his seriousness of purpose. He brought a gravitas to the superhero that wiped away the camp and kitsch that had shrouded Batman in cobwebs. It helped that Christian Bale, a reluctant smiler whose sharply planed face looks as if it had been carved with a chisel, slid into Bruce Wayne’s insouciance as easily as he did Batman’s suit.

The new Batman movie isn’t a radical overhaul like its predecessor, which is to be expected of a film with a large price tag (well north of $100 million) and major studio expectations (worldwide domination or bust). Instead, like other filmmakers who’ve successfully reworked genre staples, Mr. Nolan has found a way to make Batman relevant to his time — meaning, to ours — investing him with shadows that remind you of the character’s troubled beginning but without lingering mustiness. That’s nothing new, but what is surprising, actually startling, is that in “The Dark Knight,” which picks up the story after the first film ends, Mr. Nolan has turned Batman (again played by the sturdy, stoic Mr. Bale) into a villain’s sidekick.

That would be the Joker, of course, a demonic creation and three-ring circus of one wholly inhabited by Heath Ledger. Mr. Ledger died in January at age 28 from an accidental overdose, after principal photography ended, and his death might have cast a paralyzing pall over the film if the performance were not so alive. But his Joker is a creature of such ghastly life, and the performance is so visceral, creepy and insistently present that the characterization pulls you in almost at once. When the Joker enters one fray with a murderous flourish and that sawed-off smile, his morbid grin a mirror of the Black Dahlia’s ear-to-ear grimace, your nervous laughter will die in your throat.

A self-described agent of chaos, the Joker arrives in Gotham abruptly, as if he’d been hiding up someone’s sleeve. He quickly seizes control of the city’s crime syndicate and Batman’s attention with no rhyme and less reason. Mr. Ledger, his body tightly wound but limbs jangling, all but disappears under the character’s white mask and red leer. Licking and chewing his sloppy, smeared lips, his tongue darting in and out of his mouth like a jittery animal, he turns the Joker into a tease who taunts criminals (Eric Roberts’s bad guy, among them) and the police (Gary Oldman’s good cop), giggling while he-he-he (ha-ha-ha) tries to burn the world down. He isn’t fighting for anything or anyone. He isn’t a terrorist, just terrifying.

Mr. Nolan is playing with fire here, but partly because he’s a showman. Even before the Joker goes wild, the director lets loose with some comic horror that owes something to Michael Mann’s “Heat,” something to Cirque de Soleil, and quickly sets a tense, coiled mood that he sustains for two fast-moving hours of freakish mischief, vigilante justice, philosophical asides and the usual trinkets and toys, before a final half-hour pileup of gunfire and explosions. This big-bang finish — which includes a topsy-turvy image that poignantly suggests the world has been turned on its axis for good — is sloppy, at times visually incoherent, yet touching. Mr. Nolan, you learn, likes to linger in the dark, but he doesn’t want to live there.

Though entranced by the Joker, Mr. Nolan, working from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan Nolan, does make room for romance and tears and even an occasional (nonlethal) joke. There are several new characters, notably Harvey Dent (a charismatic Aaron Eckhart), a crusading district attorney and Bruce Wayne’s rival for the affection of his longtime friend, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, a happy improvement over Katie Holmes). Like almost every other character in the film, Batman and Bruce included, Harvey and Rachel live and work in (literal) glass houses. The Gotham they inhabit is shinier and brighter than the antiqued dystopia of “Batman Begins”: theirs is the emblematic modern megalopolis (in truth, a cleverly disguised Chicago), soulless, anonymous, a city of distorting and shattering mirrors.

From certain angles, the city the Joker threatens looks like New York, but it would be reductive to read the film too directly through the prism of 9/11 and its aftermath. You may flash on that day when a building collapses here in a cloud of dust, or when firemen douse some flames, but those resemblances belong more rightly to our memories than to what we see unfolding on screen. Like any number of small- and big-screen thrillers, the film’s engagement with 9/11 is diffuse, more a matter of inference and ideas (chaos, fear, death) than of direct assertion. Still, that a spectacle like this even glances in that direction confirms that American movies have entered a new era of ambivalence when it comes to their heroes — or maybe just superness.

In and out of his black carapace and on the restless move, Batman remains, perhaps not surprisingly then, a recessive, almost elusive figure. Part of this has to do with the costume, which has created complications for every actor who wears it. With his eyes dimmed and voice technologically obscured, Mr. Bale, who’s suited up from the start, doesn’t have access to an actor’s most expressive tools. (There are only so many ways to eyeball an enemy.) Mr. Nolan, having already told Batman’s origin story in the first film, initially doesn’t appear motivated to advance the character. Yet by giving him rivals in love and war, he has also shifted Batman’s demons from inside his head to the outside world.

That change in emphasis leaches the melodrama from Mr. Nolan’s original conception, but it gives the story tension and interest beyond one man’s personal struggle. This is a darker Batman, less obviously human, more strangely other. When he perches over Gotham on the edge of a skyscraper roof, he looks more like a gargoyle than a savior. There’s a touch of demon in his stealthy menace. During a crucial scene, one of the film’s saner characters asserts that this isn’t a time for heroes, the implication being that the moment belongs to villains and madmen. Which is why, when Batman takes flight in this film, his wings stretching across the sky like webbed hands, it’s as if he were trying to possess the world as much as save it.

In its grim intensity, “The Dark Knight” can feel closer to David Fincher’s “Zodiac” than Tim Burton’s playfully gothic “Batman,” which means it’s also closer to Bob Kane’s original comic and Frank Miller’s 1986 reinterpretation. That makes it heavy, at times almost pop-Wagnerian, but Mr. Ledger’s performance and the film’s visual beauty are transporting. (In Imax, it’s even more operatic.) No matter how cynical you feel about Hollywood, it is hard not to fall for a film that makes room for a shot of the Joker leaning out the window of a stolen police car and laughing into the wind, the city’s colored lights gleaming behind him like jewels. He’s just a clown painted on black velvet, but he’s also some kind of masterpiece.

“The Dark Knight” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Consistently violent but not bloody.

THE DARK KNIGHT

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Christopher Nolan; written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, based on a story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer; Batman character created by Bob Kane; Batman and other characters from the DC comic books; director of photography, Wally Pfister; edited by Lee Smith; music by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard; production designer, Nathan Crowley; produced by Charles Roven, Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 32 minutes.

WITH: Christian Bale (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Michael Caine (Alfred), Heath Ledger (the Joker), Gary Oldman (James Gordon), Aaron Eckhart (Harvey Dent), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Rachel Dawes) and Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox).

Related
Film: Batman’s Burden: A Director Confronts Darkness and Death (March 9, 2008)


Batman Is Back — TIME Reviews The Dark Knight

By Richard Corliss
http://www.time.com/time/
Wednesday, July 09, 2008

There's a beautiful high-angle shot, early in The Dark Knight, that looks down on Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in full Batman regalia as he perches atop a Gotham skyscraper, surveying the city he lives to protect, then leaping off and spreading his majestic bat wings to swoop down into the night. Bruce's trajectory is also the film's. It traces a descent into moral anarchy, and each of its major characters will hit bottom. Some will never recover, broken by the touch of evil or by finding it, like a fatal infection, in themselves.

The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's second chapter in his revival of the DC Comics franchise, will hit theaters with all the hoopla and fanboy avidity of the summer season's earlier movies based on comic books. It's the fifth, and three of the first four (Iron Man, Wanted and Hellboy II) have been terrific or just short of it. (The Incredible Hulk: not so hot.) It's been one of the best summers in memory for flat-out blockbuster entertainment, and in the wow category, the Nolan film doesn't disappoint. True to format, it has a crusading hero, a sneering villain in Heath Ledger's Joker, spectacular chases — including one with Batman on a stripped-down Batmobile that becomes a motorcycle with monster-truck wheels — and lots of stuff blowing up. Even the tie-in action figures with Reese's Pieces suggest this is a fast-food movie.

But Nolan has a more subversive agenda. He wants viewers to stick their hands down the rat hole of evil and see if they get bitten. With little humor to break the tension, The Dark Knight is beyond dark. It's as black — and teeming and toxic — as the mind of the Joker. Batman Begins, the 2005 film that launched Nolan's series, was a mere five-finger exercise. This is the full symphony.

A Better Class of Criminal

Gotham has a new white knight: a fearless district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who's determined to nab malefactors through the law with the same gusto that Batman, the dark knight, applies using his gadgets and charisma. The Mob (led by Eric Roberts) they can handle, with the help of stalwart police lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman). But the Joker — this guy is nuts. He does deals with the Mob, then crosses them up. He makes a point with his pencil by ramming it into a gangster's head. "This town," he says, "deserves a better class of criminals." So do action movies, and here he is, vowing to bring down Batman and Dent, just for the mad fun of it.

In its rethinking and transcending of a schlock source, The Dark Knight is up there with David Cronenberg's 1986 version of The Fly. It turns pulp into dark poetry. Just as that movie found metaphors of cancer, AIDS and death in the story of a man devolving into an insect, so this one plumbs the nature of identity. Who are we? Has Bruce lost himself in the myth of the hero? Is his Batman persona a mission or an affliction? Can crusading Dent live down the nickname (Two-Face) some rancorous cops have pinned on him? Only the Joker seems unconflicted. He knows what he is: an "agent of chaos." Your worst nightmare.

No, really. This villain, as conceived by Nolan and his scriptwriter brother Jonathan and incarnated with chilling authority by Ledger, is not the elegant sadist of so many action films, nor the strutting showman played by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman. He isn't a father figure or a macho man. And though he invents several stories about how he got his (facial and psychic) scars, he's not presented as the sum of injustices done to him. This Joker is simply one of the most twisted and mesmerizing creeps in movie history.

And the actor, who died in January at 28 of an accidental prescription-drug overdose, is magnificent. Echoing the sly psychopathy and scary singsong voice of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Ledger!), Ledger carries in him the deranged threat of a punk star like Sid Vicious, whom he supposedly took as one of the models for his character. The Joker observes no rules, pursues no grand scheme; he's the terrorist as improv artist. Evil is his tenor sax, Armageddon his melody. Why, he might blow up a hospital or turn ordinary people into mass murderers to save their own lives.

The Joker may be insane, but he's a shrewd judge of character. He knows that Batman has two vulnerable spots: his girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, assuming the role Katie Holmes had in the first film) and his hidden identity. So the Joker starts preying on Rachel, and he says he'll stop terrorizing Gotham if Batman will come out from under the mask. A modest request from the bin Laden of movie villains, yet Bruce is reluctant. Or rather, the film is, since the informing principle of any franchise is perpetuation of the series. No secret, no Batman — just a moneybags with a Messiah complex.

The other would-be hero on a downward spiral is the district attorney. He's brave and ballsy enough to fight the Mob and the Joker, but when a tragedy makes his guilt roil, Dent gets bent. Old Two-Face has a mission of his own, and like the Joker, he can be a one-man plague — but with some of the poignance of classic tragedy.

Free Fall to Destiny

The mayhem and torture wreaked here, by saint or scum, are so vivid and persistent that it's a wonder, and a puzzle, why The Dark Knight snagged a PG-13 rating. (Don't take your 9-year-old son unless you think he'd enjoy seeing a kid just like him tremble in fear while a gun is held to his head by a previously sympathetic character.) But kids would have trouble following the movie, let alone understanding it. For teens and adults, it's a strap-yourselves-in trip, handsome and assured as only a big-budget picture can be. (Part of it was shot in the IMAX process, which lends the action scenes a startling clarity and depth.) And for reassurance, Nolan brings back old friends from Batman Begins: Michael Caine as Bruce's butler Alfred and Morgan Freeman as Fox, who takes care of Bruce's toys.

Actually, they're just diversions from the epochal face-off of Bruce and the Joker. For a good part of the film, when the two embrace in a free fall of souls — one doomed, the other imperiled — you may think you're in the grip of a mordant masterpiece. That feeling will pass, as the film spends too many of its final moments setting up the series' third installment. The chill will linger, though. The Dark Knight is bound to haunt you long after you've told yourself, Aah, it's only a comic-book movie.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1821365,00.html


Heath Ledger Peers Into The Abyss in The Dark Knight

Christopher Nolan's Batman returns, delivers the kick-ass goods

By Scott Foundas
The Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/
Wednesday, July 16th 2008

What a brooding pleasure it is to return to Christopher Nolan's Gotham City—if "pleasure" is the right word for a movie that gazes so deeply and sometimes despairingly into the souls of restless men. In The Dark Knight, the continuation of Nolan's superb 2005 reboot of the Batman franchise, Batman Begins, fair Gotham is a modestly cleaner, better-lit place than it was when last we saw it, if still a far stretch from the shining city on a hill its winged protector believes it can be.

A superhero movie of unusual psychological complexity, Batman Begins was, in the tradition of all such origin stories, about a heretofore-ordinary man coming into a heightened sense of his super-ego. But Nolan, who has one of the great procedural minds among contemporary filmmakers, was hardly content to offer up the death of a young boy's parents as a tidy Freudian backstory for what turns a Bruce Wayne into a Batman. Instead, Nolan's Batman (played with iron-jawed intensity by Christian Bale) was the product of many wayward years in the wilderness followed by still more years of rigorous training at the hands of a Svengali-like master, Ra's Al Ghul. Only then, quite late in the day (and the running time), was young Wayne ready to become Batman. At which point, in a twist that now seems perhaps a touch too Shakespearean (by way of George Lucas), the pupil found himself forced to use the master's teachings against the master himself.

In The Dark Knight, nothing is nearly so cut-and-dried. Whereas the radicalized Ra's, with his arsenal of dirty bombs and his urge to eradicate Western "decadence," was a supervillain of the sort that anyone who reads the papers has been conditioned to expect, the Joker of The Dark Knight is all the more terrifying for not having a plan or an identifiable motive. A committed anarchist in a dusting of floury foundation, a smear of crimson lipstick, and pools of Louise Brooks eye shadow, this Joker isn't the ebullient prankster of Batman movies (and TV shows) past, but rather a freakishly disturbing embodiment of those destructive human impulses that can't so easily be explained away. His only rule is to show others the folly of rules, the absurdity of striving to impose order upon chaos. "Some men just want to watch the world burn," observes the ever-wise butler Alfred (Michael Caine). Except that this Joker doesn't merely want to watch; he wants to strike the match.

By now, of course, you know that the Joker is played by Heath Ledger in the last role he completed before his death, this past January, at the age of 28. And it is perhaps the best compliment one can pay to this gifted young actor to say that his performance here would have cemented his legend even if he'd lived to see the film's release. The Joker enters into The Dark Knight gradually, at first a tangential figure in a not particularly interesting Mafia money-laundering subplot. But even then, Ledger seems to make the film grow larger whenever he's onscreen (no matter if you happen to already be watching it in the giant-screen IMAX format). Having shown a penchant for the chameleonic as the sensitive, soft- spoken cowpoke of Brokeback Mountain and the terminally good-vibrating surf-shop owner of Lords of Dogtown, Ledger here again invests in a character from the inside-out, lending the Joker's every physical tick and vocal inflection a signature flair.

No wonder Ledger was reportedly exhausted after finishing work on the film; watching him, you can see how demanding he was on himself, how much he refused to play any predictable beats, whether the Joker is casually advising a room of armed thugs to not "blow things out of proportion" while outfitted in the latest in suicide-bomber haute couture, or slicking his hair back with his hands and sashaying across the dance floor to greet the comely assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, less milquetoast than Katie Holmes). But the genius of the performance is how fully Ledger convinces us that the Joker is capable of doing anything at any moment—even, if the occasion calls for it, to stop being the Joker.

In making the transition from low-budget independent films to studio tentpole projects, Nolan (who co- authored The Dark Knight with his brother, Jonathan), has sacrificed none of his abiding obsessions. Like the amnesiac amateur detective who occupied the central role in Nolan's Möbius-strip sophomore feature, Memento, the Bruce Wayne of Dark Knight is increasingly gripped by an existential crisis, wondering whether he is the hero or the villain of his own story. And like the rival illusionists of Nolan's 2006 film The Prestige, the longer Batman and the Joker engage in their battle of wills—the one confident in the inherent goodness of mankind, the other equally certain that man is but a savage beast—the more the distance collapses between them. Triangulating their position is D.A. Harvey Dent (played with gleaming, Kennedy-esque righteousness by Aaron Eckhart).

That makes The Dark Knight sound like heavy stuff—and it is. But I should add that Nolan also delivers the kick-ass goods, from an opening bank heist à la Michael Mann to a climactic episode of vehicular mayhem à la William Friedkin. So The Dark Knight will give your adrenal glands their desired workout, but it will occupy your mind, too, and even lead it down some dim alleyways where most Hollywood movies fear to tread. By the end of this second installment in that rare franchise one hopes won't end anytime soon, Batman seems to have less in common with his superhero brethren than with those old frontiersmen of movies past. Like The Searchers' Ethan Edwards and High Noon's Will Kane, he's left to ride off into the darkness, pondering the uncertain destiny of principled men in an unprincipled world—as are we.

This Joker Holds All the Cards

Heath Ledger's Clown Gives 'The Dark Knight' Its Power

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Thursday, July 17, 2008; C01

Handsome is as handsome doesn't in "The Dark Knight." Of the three male lookers who dominate it, who would have guessed that the one with his face hidden behind twisted clown makeup, whose perfect features and fair brow are not glimpsed even once, would prove the most memorable?

This is not because Heath Ledger died in January, though that event does perhaps add some otherwise unearned melancholy to the film. It's because Ledger's performance is so intense and so lasting; it's because despite the insane mask, it's a subtle, nuanced piece of acting so powerful it banishes all memories of the handsome Aussie behind it. The makeup seems to have liberated him: He's supple of body, expressive with only his eyes, and his voice has undulations of irony and mockery and psychopathology to it. He's an essay -- in a way he's never before been, playing straight-faced characters -- in pure charisma.

The performance is also the most interesting thing in the film, and when the Joker is absent, "The Dark Knight" loses most of its energy and dynamism and becomes nothing but a pretty-boy face-off between Christian Bale and Aaron Eckhart.

It's too bad, because the movie begins and plays for a long time with a great deal of intensity, particularly as it pits the bat guy against the smiler. It begins with bangs, lots of them. A bank job, very violent (you think you're in a remake of "Heat") transpires, in which a squad of clown-masked pros takes down what is quickly revealed to be a Mafia operation, overloaded with unreported cash.

But even as the bank robbers are bringing off their meticulous plans, they are being hunted: That's because one of them, under his clown mask, is wearing clown makeup. The Joker is not merely robbing the bank but shedding excess colleagues, all while keeping up a kinky patter that becomes his signature. It's kind of a Molly Bloom soliloquy from a demented jester in a sort of self-consciously ironic mode. He seems aware that his spoken narration is itself a higher kind of performance art, even if it's for an audience of one, himself.

And where is Batman while all of this mayhem is being committed? Off somewhere brooding, because nobody broods better than Christian Bale. As Batman, Bale's not bad. He's got the dreary role of being the unmovable baseline against which all others contrast themselves, a hopeless situation. By doing next to nothing, he does a lot.

He's surprisingly passive in the early going, though what's really going on is that Christopher Nolan, the director, franchise-holder (he did "Batman Begins") and writer (along with brother Jonathan Nolan), is giving the Joker plenty of time to establish his bona fides. It's worth the ticket price to watch the Joker explain to the mob bosses that he's the new big guy in town, even while he's giving them a brief autobiography to explain his particular brand of psychopathic malfeasance. He makes a pencil disappear in a most unusual manner, and then explains to them all why his dad once said to him, "Son, why so serious?," thus setting him off on a lifetime of smiles.

Again, it can't be said too often that even against such a charisma blaster as Eric Roberts (as crime lord Sal Maroni), Ledger rules. He's mesmerizing, yet a little sad, for Ledger has the skill to show us the monster and at the same time the terrified child who grew to be a monster because he had no choice.

I was pretty much just settling in at this point to watching Bale's morose elegance go charisma-to-charisma against Ledger's loony radiance. What fun. But the Nolan brothers McComplicate things up all Mcfusingly when they introduce the third element.

This is the Nordic-looking Eckhart, who's not only new D.A. Harvey Dent and a super-villain in the making, but also the beau of Batman's chum and lost heart, Rachel Dawes, who was played in "Batman Begins" by Katie Holmes and here by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal is perhaps too ironic for the Batman world. With those perpetually knowing eyes, she doesn't really fit. She has too many dimensions, is too real-worldy -- her Rachel Dawes seems like the kind of girl who got straight A's but also had the lead in the musical, went to Radcliffe and ended up in New York, doing something "interesting." Holmes, much more limited and perhaps a bit more beautiful, was better cast.

In any event, what follows is a series of triangular competitions: There's the one between friendly rivals Batman and Dent for the heart of Dawes; meanwhile the Joker is playing the crime lords against the police. In a deeper sense, the real three-way is between the law, the criminals and the anarchy that the Joker represents -- that is, the general destruction of the artificial edifice known as civilization, leaving man to his most savage impulses.

You keep waiting for the movie to clarify, to settle down to its archetypal purity: icon of psychotic evil against icon of neurotic good. Music by Wagner in his "Götterdämmerung" mood, screenplay by Nietzsche, with additional lines by Babaloo Mandel. Oh, what a great big movie wallow, what a transformational blast of cine-pleasure.

It never quite arrives. Toward the end, the Dent subplot takes over, primarily as a vehicle to show off some incredible makeup on Harv and explain who he'll be in further installments, whether Eckhart plays him or not (Tommy Lee Jones played him in an earlier Batman sequence).

Yes, Batty and Laugher do go at it, against a situation engineered by the Joker: two ferries, one full of criminals, the other of normal citizens, are rigged to explode, each with a detonator to light off the other -- the question being, who among us, the worst or the best, will commit multiple murder in order to survive? But the big fight is not nearly as mythic as it should have been, giving the movie an ending that felt more anti- than climactic.

The film's mistake is Eckhart as Dent. This is a role that calls for more gift than Eckhart, in other circumstances an honest journeyman, possesses. He's got to show a love and an idealism so stout they can stand against the vilest villainy yet so fragile they can shatter into evil at a single catastrophic loss. It's not in him to show a range of contradictions like this, and the character -- as written by the Nolans -- is beyond demonstrating as much, either. So the whole subplot about Dent is mostly just fury and sound, signifying nothing except someone's idea that a summer blockbuster has to be 2 1/2 hours long and therefore must be chock-full of not very compelling subplots to swell it up to epic length if not quality.

The effects and stunts are first-rate, though for big bangs, the opening bank robbery was probably the most powerfully done. Batman's ability to ride the thermal columns between Gotham shafts downward to safety is very cool. So is the magical way the Batcar becomes a motorcycle with the purring of some electric gizmos, and a lot of the time this Batman seems more like Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" than anyone named Keaton, Kilmer or Clooney who came before.

The Dark Knight (152 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for mayhem, menace and intense sequences of violence.