Every Christopher Nolan Movie Ranked Worst To Best
3. The Dark Knight (2008)
Batman Begins kicked Christopher Nolan's superhero trilogy off with a bang, but it wasn't until its trailblazing sequel The Dark Knight that audiences began to grasp just how perfect a director Nolan was for the job.
Dialling up the gritty realism of its predecessor to an almost unbearable degree, the film pits Batman against not just The Joker, but also the very concept of Gotham's hope and innocence. It's a film about choices and fate, about the Caped Crusader's unwavering heroism, about how one man just wants to watch the world burn.
The Dark Knight is a film with too many layers to properly dissect here, but it plays every angle of its story to perfection. Never has Batman's story been told with such power or depth, and rarely has everything in Gotham felt so hopeless. Nolan, writing the script with his brother Jonathan, leaves no stone unturned.
And that, of course, is without getting into the performance of the late Heath Ledger, whose frighteningly entertaining portrayal of the Clown Prince of Crime is the lynchpin holding every twist of The Dark Knight together. 15 years later, and the superhero genre is still lingering in this film's shadow.