The Dark Knight
Tim Burton rescued Batman from the clutches of camp with his 1989 outing but when the reins were handed over to Joel Schumacher for Batman Forever, he flirted with the cartoon before embracing it wholesale with Batman & Robin. Enter Christopher Nolan in 2005, whose Batman Begins reinvented the franchise and goes one further by reinventing the superhero movie, hopefully forever, with The Dark Knight. Opening with an extended sequence in downtown Gotham in the midday sun when we're used to dark, rain-soaked alley nights, we know we're in for something a bit different from the off: A bank heist is in progress, headed up by a sadistic Joker (Ledger) who has hopes of filing the crime vacuum left by the Gotham mob, squeezed out by new DA Harvey Dent (Eckhart). Together with Lt. Gordon (Oldman) and Dent, who has wooed Rachel Dawes (Gyllenhaal taking over from Katie Holmes) away from him, Batman (Bale) goes up against is deadliest foe yet.
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