Just for perspective, here is a sampling of recent movies Ms. Zacharek disapproved of:

Batman Begins

The Dark Knight

Wall-E

There Will Be Blood

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

American Gangster

Into The Wild

Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind

and some recent movies Stephanie enjoyed:

Meet Dave

You Don't Mess With The Zohan

I Think I Love My Wife

The Nanny Diaries

Daddy Daycare

Drillbit Taylor

White Noise

Yeah, I think I'm seeing a pattern here. Keep up the good work, Stephanie, I can't wait for your forthcoming companion pieces, "Why Kurosawa Is An Overrated Hack" and "Uwe Boll: The First Great Filmmaker of The 21st Century."

That this "terrible" movie is going to break records at the box office.

Get over yourself.

Is the same stupid decision that ruined Burton's first Batman movie:

Some Moron: Hey guys, since this is the FIRST Batman movie in a potential series, lets take the most iconic and popular comic villain of all time, the Joker, and kill him at the end.

Retarded.

I told myself about half-way through reading this review that I wasn't going to write a comment...

Then, upon reading all of those posted which supported my contempt for the authoress' seemingly pedantically misconstrued opine, I could no longer resist the temptation to lambaste such a fabulist with her own lancinating lexical.

Problems I perceive:

1. What is this article even about? Is it about "The Dark Knight," Batman, the Joker, Christopher Nolan, Alfred Hitchcock, Heath Ledger, the philosophically incredulous and half-witted notion of such an idiom as {Human Nature}... What!???!

2. Being a fan of Batman since my juvenescence sitting in front of the campy TV series com Adam West, it is with earnest sentiment that I conclude (quite simply I might add)... If you're a fan, you "get" it. If you're not, you don't. Zacharek unwittingly manifests as the latter.

3. This complaint works whether the following is taken out of context or no: Zacharek says, "...I wondered if he wasn't just trying to underplay the movie's self-important dialogue. (That dialogue includes choice pseudo-topical sound bites like 'Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. Some men just want to watch the world burn.')"

-First let me ask, is that not a factual axiom? (e.g. Nero, Caligula, Manson, Stalin, etc...)

~"Pseudo-topical" huh???... Should we remind her, in regard to that-quintessentially the most facetiously PSEUDO-intellectual... Pseudo-everything, series/movie of American culture-"Sex and the City," that she stated(and I quote)...

"I loved Parker, and I loved 'Sex and the City,' for most of the show's six-year run. The series' detractors decried it as an insulting and retrograde depiction of modern, single urban women. But viewing the show so narrowly is like applying social-realist standards to Fred Astaire movies. At its best, the show was wonderfully conceived and executed farce; each episode, at under 30 minutes, was a perfectly satisfying petit four. 'Sex and the City' was sophisticated not because of its depiction of New York as a world of expensive handbags and shoes but in spite of it: Looking back on the series, and on the way it could so often be both breezy and sharp, I can see it more clearly as a grandchild of the jazz age, a cocktail laced with the spirit of Anita Loos."

-3.b. Shouldn't Pop-Culture leave philosophy to philosophers in the first place???

4. SOME of us don't get the opportunity to PRE-view the movie... Can we really have open and honest cogitation and dialectic over its poignancy (or lack there of) until the opening?

5. Finally, are we to take Zacharek or anyone else's word for it???

And Zacharek,.. nothing personal :)

Where all the characters, all of them, are weak, evil or insane. One of my favorites is "Monster". Embrace your inner sociopath.

I’m not sure what this says about my taste in film: I occasionally agree with Stephanie Zacharek. But I saw The Dark Knight last night at a special screening, and Stephanie, you couldn’t be more wrong. Were we at the same movie?

This is the best and most entertaining movie of the year, so far. And dare I say it, the best superhero movie ever! Chris Nolan has truly raised the bar for the superhero genre.

It’s exciting, thrilling, funny at times (Heath Ledger and Michael Caine get all the best lines) and genuinely frightening at others. I was hooked from the opening scene and remained so until the end.

It’s not perfect. There are a few too many story lines (did we need to see Scarecrow again?). And without giving much away, the way Nolan ends (or doesn’t end) the “Joker crashing the party” scene, felt incomplete and had me asking “huh”?

But the writing is good. The cinematography is amazing. You are not going to believe the chase scene. Shot in IMAX, the visual detail is stunning. I might go back just to see that part again. The “skyhook” sequence is pretty amazing too.

The casting was bang on. Who broods better than Christian Bale? Who represents the handsome, honorable, All-American-Male better than Aaron Eckhart?

It’s interesting to me that five of the six leads in this slick, big budget, Hollywood blockbuster (Bale, Ledger, Eckhart, Gyllenhaal and Oldman) are actors who built their reputations and cred in Indie. Even Heath Ledger who was on his way to becoming a bonafide, old-school, Hollywood Movie Star couldn’t resist the artistic pull of films that cost less than 10 million dollars. These are all really good actors at the top of their game.

This is the millionth time this has been said, but this movie belongs to Heath Ledger. He steals every scene. TDK is a true ensemble piece. But when Ledger is off camera, you keep wishing for him to come back.

This Joker is evil incarnate. He’s creepy, has no boundaries, and zero empathy. Yet, he makes you laugh, and you even find yourself pulling for him on occasion.

The movie hasn’t even opened yet, and the critics have run out of adjectives to praise his performance: Amazing, brilliant, fearless, thrilling, terrifying, tour-de-force, mind-blowing, shocking, supersonic, etc., etc.

The truth is, he’s so good that words fail.

Oh, the things that guy could do with just a pencil and a nurses uniform. Jack who??

Stephanie wrote “The performance is unsettling and difficult to watch, partly because it's impossible to remove it from the context of Ledger's death”. Again I disagree. Ledger does in TDK what he did better than most of his peers: Get so deep inside a character you forget it’s him.

Only twice does your mind wonder to the sad circumstances of his shocking and untimely death. The first time is in the third act, when The Joker and Batman are duking it out. The Joker says “You and I could do this forever”. And it occurs to you that sadly, that’s not going to happen.

The second time is during credits, when the dedication to Ledger comes up. All I could think is “what an artistic void you’ve left. We’re sure going to miss you”.