The Dark Knight by James Ellaby

No matter who you are, when you direct a film based upon a character as iconic as Batman, it's understandable that your first attempt might not entirely reflect your skills as a director. When Tim Burton made Batman, the pressure to make it commercially successful seemed to make him curb his natural creative instincts, leaving a film that didn't really feel like he'd made it, so it wasn't until Batman Returns that he was able to make the dark, gothic fantasy that you would expect. Similarly, for Joel Schumacher, the garish and OTT Batman Forever was just a tentative step towards the full-scale cinematic abomination that was Batman And Robin.

And now we have Christopher Nolan and his second attempt in the franchise. The first, Batman Begins, was critically acclaimed and rightly so, because it successfully brought the series back from where Schumacher had left it (ie, in a camp, technicolour hell), but when you compare it to The Dark Knight, it's just like a baby first learning to walk. This is the cinema equivalent of that baby learning to sprint and leaving every other comic book adaptation eating its dust. Yes, for once, you really should believe the hype, because The Dark Knight is an immense film and a quantum leap forward from Batman Begins.

The death of Heath Ledger and the more recent arrest of Christian Bale have threatened to overshadow the release of this film in the same way that the horrific courtship of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise did when the last one came out, but that would be very unfair on Nolan, who is the real star of The Dark Knight. His script and his direction are worlds apart from all of the generic comic book films that have been released before it, with so much depth to the story and plenty of incredible action sequences to keep it flying along at a heck of a pace.

One important thing to point out about The Dark Knight is that it isn't about The Joker, he's just an anarchic catalyst. It's about the salvation of Gotham City and whether it lies in new district attorney Harvey Dent or the controversial vigilante actions of Batman. Anyone with some knowledge of these characters' histories will have some idea of how that will turn out, but Nolan takes this theme of hope and salvation and plays it against the pointless destructiveness of The Joker, not even giving that character a back-story, because it's not important what made him a murderous terrorist, it's what impact he has on Gotham and its people that is important here.

It's very easy to call for a recently deceased actor to get a posthumous Oscar for their final big role, and it's very difficult to criticise their performance in that role, so all of the slavering adulation that Heath Ledger's Joker has received has been tough to really believe without a little cynicism. At least until you see the film, that is, because he is incredible in it and is completely unrecognisible from anything other character he has ever played. Up on screen, he isn't poor dead Heath Ledger, he's The Joker and he's funny, he's terrifying, he's charismatic and he is, like Michael Caine recently said, one of the best movie villains you'll ever see.

Like Jack Nicholson before him (though that's about the only thing their Jokers have in common) Ledger completely steals the film from Batman, though this isn't the fault of Bale at all, and his character does have plenty to do. Torn between his desire to be what Gotham City needs him to be and his love for the girl he can't have until he leaves Batman behind (Maggie Gyllenhaal, making you forget that Katie Holmes played the character in the first film), Bruce Wayne has a lot of tough decisions to make, and not just in the manner of the trademark comic book plot. He's not the only one, too, with The Joker's plan to bring down society presenting the people of Gotham with a few big choices too.

The Dark Knight is a long film, but it needs to be long to fit everything in that Nolan wants to portray, and there is barely a second wasted. It's a very dark film too, both in tone and mood, and it's certainly not a family film that very young children should be watching, because there are some genuinely scary and horrific moments. We're lucky enough in Manchester to have an IMAX screen, and The Dark Knight really comes to life on it, with the scenes that were filmed with an IMAX camera looking absolutely breathtaking, so you owe it to yourself to try and see it in that format while you can, but it'll shine through on whatever size screen it's on. Nolan may have done very well with Batman Begins, but this film shows that he was only just getting warmed up...