Gone batty

The Dark Knight is a morality tale in which everyone’s a hair crazier than usual | Sam Thielman

The world is in trouble when the guy dressed up as a bat represents order and sanity. But that's pretty much the thesis of The Dark Knight: The world is a bad place and it needs good people—people like Harvey Dent (the underrated Aaron Eckhart), an earnest, cartoonishly handsome district attorney who wants to rid Gotham City of corruption and organized crime.

The problem facing Dent, Batman (Christian Bale, top-notch again), and the city's only clean policeman, Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman, quiet and good), is that corruption is as much a part of Gotham as its skyline or its bus system. Cops rat one another out to the mob, prisons are overflowing and porous, and, like a new species of mold developing in a dank house, there's a saturnine strain of crook who sins not because it's expedient or profitable, but on principle, or for laughs. In a word: Joker.