The Dark Knight, dir. Christopher Nolan

"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain," says Harvey Dent, summarising the moral centre of Christopher Nolan's thrilling new Batman film, The Dark Knight. The film surpasses the normal boundaries of any story about a hero, going even deeper than an anti-hero story to tell the tale of an aspiring world about to demise into decadent anarchy.

The Dark Knight makes Tim Burton's Batman films look like The Sound of Music, and could even be seen as an analogy to al-Qaida and the situation in Iraq (Batman and the Joker = Bush and al-Qaida respectively), a theme which is used to subconsciously enhance the film's relentless tension, forcing you into the back of the seat, as opposed to on the edge of it.

However, a lot of the film's effect comes from the presence of Heath Ledger's Joker, who has to go down as one of the greatest villains of all time. He is brilliant. With every gesture and line he does something incredible. In Burton's Batman, Jack Nicholson did a good job of being Jack Nicholson. Here Ledger completely destroys everything of Nicholson's clown.

But you have to applaud the script for putting the icing on Ledger's cake. He gets the best lines, prophesies about the end of civilisation, has no real identity and burns all the money that he gets, despite saying: "If you're good at something, never do it for free." He's the purest evil cinema has ever seen.

Ledger aside, Christian Bale is solid as a doubting Batman, as are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart, while Gary Oldman provides the best non-virtuoso performance. The subtle ensemble acting highlights the Joker's evil and creates a sense of realism that makes the action sequences all the more credible.

But altogether, The Dark Knight is about apocalypse, but also about ongoing good, and ongoing evil. The protagonists believe in ongoing conflict and the antagonist believes in apocalypse. Though this only becomes fully clear in the final scenes, it is the main, and unanswered, thought that the film slowly builds around.