BitterSweetLife

We're hoping to see the Dark Knight in the next few days, sans kids, obviously. I thought this review from WORLD was eye-opening. Excerpt:

The film's early reviews have been gently quizzical about the late, lamented Heath Ledger's magnetic performance as the Joker. It's obvious that he's doing a superb job, but nobody seems to know what he's doing. Let me clear things up: He's playing Satan. Ledger flicks his tongue like a snake, tempts people to kill one another, and is gleefully sloppy with bullets, bombs, and knives. Everyone else plays gangland archetypes; Ledger's Joker has escaped to the movies from Milton, or C.S. Lewis' Perelandra.

It's hard to know what this character did to someone like Ledger, who flung himself into every role. What it does to the film, though, is create a character entirely opposite to Batman. He's a terrorist in the most basic sense of the word: Terror is not his means, it's his end. "Everything burns," he observes happily.

The performance turns the grim movie into something more than a thriller—The Dark Knight ends up being a morality play on a titanic level.