87.7%
Based on 73 Reviews
Movie Info
Released:
July 18, 2008
Runtime:
2hr 32min
Director:
Christopher Nolan
Writer:
Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan
Cast:
Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman
Rating:
PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and some menace.
Plot:
Batman and James Gordon join forces with Gotham's new District Attorney, Harvey Dent, to take on a psychotic bank robber known as The Joker, whilst other forces plot against them, and Joker's crimes grow more and more deadly.
100.0% Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
The Dark Knight succeeds as an action film, character study and metaphor for our own terrorism-obsessed time.
100.0% Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Batman isn’t a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy.
100.0% Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
The most ambitious and sleekly beautiful of all the superhero screen outings.
100.0% Coming Soon Joshua Starnes
The Dark Knight isn't just the best movie of the summer, it's the best movie of the year so far, and everything else is going to have to try very, very hard to top it.
100.0% Commercial Appeal (Memphis) John Beifuss
A drama about hard moral choices, The Dark Knight is The Godfather of superhero movies -- or, at least, The Departed.
100.0% Dayton Daily News John Beifuss
Many reviews have called this the greatest comic book movie ever made, but I'll go even further. The best live action film of this calendar year is one of the greatest crime dramas of any type, with or without capes.
100.0% Denver Post Lisa Kennedy
Nolan and his gifted collaborators, chief among them cinematographer Wally Pfister, have whipped up a perfect storm of performances, moods and teeth-grinding action.
100.0% Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City) Jeff Vice
The performances are terrific and this feels different, more substantive, than any superhero movie that's come before it.
100.0% Fort Worth Star-Telegram Christopher Kelly
It's hard to find much to complain about here -- even the film's 2 1/2-hour running time feels entirely justified. This big, bold, brazen work is the best movie released so far this year.
100.0% Hollywood.com Pete Hammond
The Dark Knight is extraordinary, an amazing piece of filmmaking that rockets the Batman legacy to heights never imagined, fueled by Heath Ledger’s amazing re-invention of The Joker.
100.0% Houston Chronicle Amy Biancolli
Heath Ledger died too young, leaving behind performances as faceted, brilliant and few as a handful of diamonds.
100.0% IGN Patrick Kolan
Heath Ledger's Joker is, in many ways, symbolic of Nolan's overall success with The Dark Knight; subtle and restrained, but always two shakes shy of bloody holocaust and a masterpiece of cinema that time will verify.
100.0% Maxim Eric Alt
Not to put too fine a point on it, but comic book movies finally have their Godfather.
100.0% Metromix Matt Pais
The best superhero movie ever is also the best movie of the year so far.
100.0% New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
Without sacrificing thrills, it finds sober excitement inside the ticking time bombs people can become. It's the Unforgiven of superhero movies.
100.0% The Oklahoman Matthew Price
The Dark Knight is as much, or more, crime epic as comic book adventure, and it reveals how far competent hands can take the Batman character when played straight.
100.0% Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Barbara Vacheri
Stunning. Spectacular. Extraordinary. Pick your adjective. They all apply to The Dark Knight and to the late Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker.
100.0% Salt Lake Tribune Sean P. Means
The impression that burns brightest in The Dark Knight is of Ledger, who should get a posthumous Oscar nomination for this fearless performance.
100.0% San Antonio Express-News Larry Ratliff
Darker than any Batman screen adventure and equal to, if not better than, any comic-book-to-big-screen transformation, The Dark Knight chills and thrills with an added ingredient: the jarring sense of true chaos.
100.0% Star Tribune (Minneapolis) Colin Covert
The ambitiously thrilling Batman sequel is summer's brightest light.
100.0% Toronto Star Peter Howell
This film is not only one of the year's best; it may well end up as the finest of 2008.
100.0% Tulsa World James Vance
Direction, photography, writing and acting all combine here to give us a Batman film that's every bit as much for intelligent adults as its predecessor, and even more so.
100.0% TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Nolan stages some stunning action sequences -- the opening heist is worthy of Michael Mann -- and maintains a convincing atmosphere of apocalyptic paranoia.
100.0% USA Today Claudia Puig
The Dark Knight is a more thrilling, intelligent, morally complex and masterfully crafted film than any summer blockbuster in recent years. It's probably the best superhero movie to date.
92.0% A.V. Club Keith Phipps
The film's capes and cowls suggest one genre, but it's a metropolis-sized tragedy at heart.
92.0% E! Online Alex Markerson
This may be the year's most heartbreaking film. Ledger's performance is so incandescent, it hurts to know he won't ever have the chance at it again.
92.0% Fresno Bee Rick Bentley
In a tour de force performance, Ledger plays The Joker as the ultimate villain. His vile actions are not motivated by greed, politics or fame. He does evil for evil's sake.
92.0% Palm Beach Post Hap Erstein
Nolan may be a thinking man's director as superhero flicks go, but he also knows how to blow stuff up.
92.0% Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
With The Dark Knight, the cinematic superhero spectacle comes closest to becoming modern myth, a pulp tragedy with costumed players and elevated stakes and terrible sacrifices. It's the new gold standard for superhero noir.
92.0% St. Petersburg Times Steve Persall
Declaring Christopher Nolan's Batman movie to be the best-ever comic book adaptation or one of the top action flicks of all time understates what he accomplishes.
90.0% Arizona Republic Bill Goodykoontz
No matter how good you've heard that the late Heath Ledger is as the Joker in The Dark Knight, no matter how brilliant you've heard that his performance is, fear not: It's every bit as good as advertised, if not better.
90.0% Canoe.ca Kevin Williamson
Locked in a struggle for Gotham's soul, this Batman and Joker are mesmerizing, unforgettable and, yes, complete.
90.0% Coming Soon Edward Douglas
Christopher Nolan and his amazing cast haven't redefined the superhero genre as much as created an unforgettable piece of crime fiction within the context of that realm.
90.0% Coming Soon Scott Chitwood
Amazing performances by Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, and an impressive ensemble cast make it not just a great comic book movie, but a great movie -- period.
87.5% Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
The Dark Knight is such a moody, dramatic, dead-serious affair that it feels more like a noirish crime thriller than a superhero movie. Everything in the movie is played straight and aimed at grown-ups (or at least older kids).
87.5% Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Duane Dudek
The Dark Knight is better than you have heard and as good as you had hoped. The late Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is so iconic it will stand the test of time.
87.5% Newsday Rafer Guzmán
The Dark Knight marks the transition from the summer blockbuster season to the serious months of fall. It's a comic-book movie, but it's also a dark and highly complex drama.
87.5% New York Post Kyle Smith
The Dark Knight, unlike its superior predecessor, has some absurdly improbable scheming and sputtering one-liners. It also lacks the chord of ancient evil found in Batman Begins.
87.5% Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Michael Machosky
Even if you can separate Heath Ledger's unexpected death from his character here, Batman still gets upstaged by the giggling, gleefully anarchic madness of his mortal enemy, the Joker.
87.5% Rolling Stone Peter Travers
The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan's absolute stunner of a follow-up to 2005s Batman Begins, is a potent provocation decked out as a comic book movie.
87.5% San Diego Union-Tribune Lee Grant
What's amazing is the lure to jump in and wallow in this down-and-dirty cinematic excursion. There's not a laugh along the way -- maybe a chuckle or two -- and the violence is unnerving.
87.5% Seattle Times Moira Macdonald
Heath Ledger dazzles as the oddball villain the Joker in Christopher Nolan's masterful The Dark Knight.
87.5% Slant Magazine Nick Schager
Thrilling, heady and, as befitting its title, exceedingly dark, it's epic pulp, or perhaps more accurately, it's pulp transformed through auteurist artistry into a piercingly relevant morality play epic.
87.5% Star-Ledger (Newark) Stephen Whitty
If the gleeful Iron Man was a reminder of all the fun comic books can deliver, The Dark Knight is a stirring salute to all the disturbing drama graphic novels can provide.
87.5% St. Paul Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt
Knight feels more like a crime drama focusing on conflicted "cops" than a superhero movie because, with his crisp editing and magical command of pace, Nolan has eliminated almost all the pulpy, comic-book aspects of Batman.
86.0% Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
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.
86.0% Columbus Dispatch Melissa Starker
Ledger deserves singling out. While the Oscar buzz might be a bit much, given the character's total lack of center, his is undoubtedly the most haunting vision of The Joker ever put on screen.
86.0% Dallas Morning News Chris Vognar
It may be the first hybrid of novel and all-out action movie, a dense, fleet, unrelenting charge into the abyss of a Gotham in deep trouble.
86.0% Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
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.
86.0% St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams
Even if Heath Ledger hadn't died so young, his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight would rank first among the movie's many achievements.
80.0% Austin American Statesman Chris Garcia
Succeeds on almost every level, providing startling shocks, ingenious twists and characters so vigorously created that they will haunt you long afterward.
80.0% Contact Music Sean O'Connell
Thrusts ever forward when all I really wanted it to do was stop for a second and soak in the glorious chaos.
80.0% Indianapolis Star Christopher Lloyd
The Dark Knight has the blackest of tones, the busiest of plots and the creepiest supervillain ever to haunt a movie screen.
80.0% Knoxville News Sentinel Betsy Pickle
Some of the twists seem abrupt, and the film has at least three endings, which add up to a slight sense of drag, but the finale earns the audience’s patience.
80.0% Oregonian (Portland) Shawn Levy
The Dark Knight is many things, some of them deliriously fun, some of them deeply impressive, and some of them puzzling and frustrating. But most of all it is dark.
80.0% Orlando Sentinel Roger Moore
This Dark Knight is much more than simply Batman 2.0. It's a re-tooling, a re-load of the franchise Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale revived three summer's ago.
80.0% Plain Dealer (Cleveland) Clint O'Connor
The Dark Knight is a treatise on good versus evil and the darker elements mixing in everyone's DNA. Perhaps a little heavy-heady for a summer action flick, but that was always Christopher Nolan's intention.
80.0% Providence Journal Michael Janusonis
Nolan, and co-writer brother Jonathan Nolan, use their large canvas to ask subtle, delicate questions of self-sacrifice, giving the audience something to ponder afterward beyond the usual exploding scenery.
75.0% Boston Globe Ty Burr
It's not quite fair to say that the late Heath Ledger steals The Dark Knight from Christian Bale and the forces of (problematic) good, but, as the Joker, he is the movie's animating principle and anarchic spark.
75.0% Kansas City Star Robert W. Butler
The Dark Knight is a good -- not great -- superhero movie that crams as many ideas into its 2 1/2 hours as it can and still be considered a summer action picture.
75.0% Omaha World-Herald Bob Fischbach
The Dark Knight is right. The latest Batman movie is disturbingly dark indeed. It's also a violent thrill ride. And probably a half-hour longer than it needs to be.
75.0% Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Shakespearean but overlong, The Dark Knight is two hours of heady, involving action that devolves into a mind-numbing 32-minute epilogue.
75.0% Premiere Eric Kohn
Nolan has crafted a conventional caper, but an elusive one. Whispery understatement allows The Dark Knight to seem like the landmark achievement it never becomes.
75.0% Richmond Times-Dispatch Daniel Neman
To be perfectly honest, the Nolans tend to recycle the same ideas over and over again in this film.
75.0% San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Director 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.
74.0% Boston Herald James Verniere
Nolan was apparently shooting for The Godfather of comic book movies. He ended up with a morality play with too much morality and not enough play.
74.0% Las Vegas Review-Journal Carol Cling
Batman seems like supporting character as Ledger's Joker haunts Dark Knight.
74.0% Orange County Register Timothy Mangan
Led by Heath Ledger's unforgettable portrayal of a menacing Joker, this intense film may inspire nightmares even among adult viewers.
74.0% Philadelphia Daily News Gary Thompson
This ain't a cartoon, folks, and it ain't for kids. Even adults may struggle with its narrative complexity.
68.0% Detroit News Tom Long
All the hype you've heard and likely grown tired of is true: Heath Ledger is on fire in The Dark Knight, and every time he comes on screen, the film lights up madly.
60.0% Eye Weekly (Toronto) Jason Anderson
Director Christopher Nolan heaps gravitas onto Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s creation like so much sauerkraut on a hotdog.
56.0% Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
The Dark Knight is a handsome, accomplished piece of work, but it drove me from absorption to excruciation within 20 minutes, and then it went on for two hours more.
50.0% Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
The only thing here that feels truly, utterly alive is Ledger's maniacal, muttery Joker. The last laugh is his and his alone. It's enough to make you cry.
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