by Chris Bodenner
My favorite film critic, Christopher Orr, reviews the latest Batman:
The Dark Knight‘s villain may be a psychopath, but his tools are all too chillingly familiar: the thirsty knife, the patient bomb. (This is not a film for children, and the MPAA should be ashamed of its PG-13 acquiescence.) … Nolan wisely minimizes the use of CGI (even when the semi is flipped), and the difference is palpable.
The director’s most remarkable special effect, however, is Heath Ledger’s Joker. It’s a difficult performance to rate on any conventional scale, a whirlwind of energy and effects, tics and tells, Brando and Hopkins and Nicholson thrown in a blender set to "puree" and then dynamited mid-spin. To call it compelling would be a criminal understatement, and yet it seems less the creation of a living self than the annihilation of one, an exercise in the center not holding. Even without Ledger’s death, this would be a deeply discomfiting performance; as it is, it’s hard not to view it as sign or symptom of the subsequent tragedy.
…
In the end, The Dark Knight is less a film about good versus evil than about order versus chaos, a morality play into which a wild card, the Joker, has been inserted to devastating effect. … But despite the tensions between its form and its function, The Dark Knight succeeds far more than it fails, and lingers provocatively in the mind.
The Dish 