The Dark Knight Reviews
Top CriticAn exceptionally smart, brooding picture with some terrific performances.
Christopher Nolan is much, much smarter than your average filmmaker.
Full Review
| Original Score: A+
Christopher Nolan's latest exploration of the Batman mythology steeps its muddled plot in so much murk that the Joker's maniacal nihilism comes to seem like a recurrent grace note.
The film is so relentlessly bleak that, paradoxically, its blackness is not given its full due. But this comic-book movie is more disturbing, and has more freakish power, than anything else I've seen all year.
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| Original Score: A-
Watching The Dark Knight is like gazing into a mirror on a waning moon night: chilling and mesmerizing.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Despite the tensions between its form and its function, The Dark Knight succeeds far more than it fails, and lingers provocatively in the mind.
There is an exquisite order in the chaos, a fascist formality and video game surrealism that resists the forces of disintegration with a sort of superhuman determination.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/6
Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, The Dark Knight goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind.
| Original Score: 4.5/5
An explosively provocative [film]. ... Exhilaratingly straightforward action sequences matched by moral complexity of a sort not usually associated with comic-book movie franchises.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9.5/10
For all The Dark Knight's occasionally bombastic excess, it sort of does top them all, and not only in star power and sheer number of things blown up.
[Ledger's] 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.
This film is not only one of the year's best; it may well end up as the finest of 2008. At the very least, it deserves consideration for Best Picture and Best Director, along with the expected Oscar kudos for Ledger.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
See this one on the biggest screen you can (IMAX, ideally), and experience both the magic of top-notch technical filmmaking and the bittersweet pleasure of watching a young actor, gone too soon, giving a performance that won't be forgotten.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Dark Knight is easily the most entertaining bummer of the summer.
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| Original Score: A-
Let's face it: If you're any sort of pop-culture or movie freak, you're going to see this flick. And you should, just for Ledger.
Christopher Nolan's second Batman adventure is the rare blockbuster that left me engaged and thoughtful instead of bored and bummed out.
You come away impressed, oppressed, provoked, and beaten down, holding on to Ledger's squirrelly incandescence as a beacon in the darkness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Mixing bravura filmmaking with flat clichés in about equal amounts, The Dark Knight is all about dualism. Appropriately, the movie's half-inspired, half-frustrating.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Shakespearean but overlong, The Dark Knight is two hours of heady, involving action that devolves into a mind-numbing 32-minute epilogue.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's still too long, especially for a comic-book movie. But with Ledger's last performance director Nolan was blessed with the gift of light.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Whatever trepidations Ledger may have had about taking on such an iconic role, he blows past them brilliantly, carrying The Dark Knight along with him.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
[Ledger gives] a fine performance regardless, and I wish the movie around it were more deserving.
As much as this is Ledger's movie, that should not diminish the notable accomplishments of other key cast members.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Christopher Nolan wanted to make an action movie that was different from other action movies -- darker, more twisted, more despairing, more bleak -- and he has mostly succeeded in this latest Batman installment. He can thank Ledger for a lot of that.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This is not merely a Batman movie. It is not merely a comic-book movie. It is not merely gripping summer entertainment. It is, with Wall-E, one of the two best mainstream films to be released all year and far and away the most hypnotic chiller.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It's a comic-book movie, but it's also a dark and highly complex drama.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Nolan hasn't simply made a popcorn movie for brainiacs. He's an increasingly self-assured director of action sequences.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
To see it is to understand that Nolan and his co-writer brother Jonathan saw a chance to go deeper into familiar characters and mythology, a chance to meditate on darker-than-usual themes that have implications for the way we live now.
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| Original Score: 5/5
The Dark Knight is insurmountable fun.
I previously have had my own auteurist doubts about Mr. Nolan's work, but after The Dark Knight, I may have to rethink my past reservations about Mr. Nolan's place in the 21st-century cinema.
The Dark Knight [sounds] like heavy stuff -- and it is. But I should add that Nolan also delivers the kick-ass goods, from an opening bank heist a la Michael Mann to a climactic episode of vehicular mayhem a la William Friedkin.
Nolan paints an inky portrait of a city falling apart, and in a movie rife with two-faced masquerading freaks, the Joker is merely the least conflicted of the bunch. Ledger's work is improbably droll, impossibly creepy, meticulously detailed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Iron Man and even more so The Dark Knight move the genre into deeper waters. They realize, as some comic-book readers instinctively do, that these stories touch on deep fears, traumas, fantasies and hopes.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Batman takes a fierce stance in favor of untruth, surveillance and (but?) the American way. Bruce Wayne says, 'Batman has no limits,' and there are two sides to that coin.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Visually impressive, but any hack can do a halfway decent job with trailer-ready tangents. Not everyone can push the genre forward, and the fact that Nolan's padded popcorn flick isn't the streamlined masterpiece it could have been is a real buzzkill.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
It's proof that popcorn entertainments don't have to talk down to their audiences in order to satisfy them. The bar for comic-book film adaptations has been permanently raised.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Nolan has provided movie-goers with the best superhero movie to-date, outclassing previous titles both mediocre and excellent, and giving this franchise its Empire Strikes Back.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
In this, the last performance he completed before his death, Ledger had a maniacal gusto inspired enough to suggest that he might have lived to be as audacious an actor as Marlon Brando, and maybe as great.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic.
This is a rich, complex, visually thrilling piece of pop entertainment, as strong as any superhero epic we've ever seen.
This movie is grim and jammed together. The narrative isn't shaped coherently to bring out contrasts and build toward a satisfying climax. The Dark Knight is constant climax; it's always in a frenzy, and it goes on forever.
Nolan wants to prove that a superhero movie needn't be disposable, effects-ridden junk food, and you have to admire his ambition.
An epic that will leave you staggering from the theater, stunned by its scope and complexity. It's also, thankfully, a vast improvement over his self-serious origin story, 2005's Batman Begins.
The Dark Knight is bound to haunt you long after you've told yourself, Aah, it's only a comic-book movie.
Pure adrenaline. [Nolan], having dispensed with his introspective, moody origin story, now puts the Caped Crusader through a decathlon of explosions, vehicle flips, hand-to-hand combat, midair rescues and pulse-pounding suspense.
An ambitious, full-bodied crime epic of gratifying scope and moral complexity, this is seriously brainy pop entertainment that satisfies every expectation raised by its hit predecessor and then some.
The haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
