Director Christopher Nolan has done it again. He managed for the sequel The Dark Knight to pin against another two great actors: Christian Bale and Heath Ledger. The latter had an immense challenge: whatever he did, his performance as The Joker would have been compared with Jack Nicholson's master rendition of the original Batman movie.

Heath Ledger managed to render an even grimmer character, awkward, fearless, disturbing. I can't say that Ledger's last performance surpasses Nicholson, but it matches it and is certainly the actor's best one. Nicholson had dark humor, Ledger is downright terrifying. Oscar talk has already started about an Academy Award for his supporting role.

Everyone is talking about possibility of becoming the movie with the largest opening weekend in movie history. The title is currently held by Spiderman 3, with a $151 million opening weekend but the forecast puts The Dark Knight way ahead of Spiderman’s figures.

The movie's cinematic quality is near-flawless, benefiting from the reported $180-million budget. Furthermore, six of the film's action sequences, including a remarkable flipping of an 18-wheel, 40-foot tractor-trailer, were shot with a 65-millimeter Imax camera for extra sharpness.

The movie also introduces District Attorney Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart, who starts off as a day-time crime fighter, heating things up with the wrong-doers of Gotham City. He will later accidentally transform into the revenge-minded Two-Face. Besides him, there are also present the knight’s police force contact Jim Gordon, played by Gary Oldman, Wayne’s faithful servant Alfred played by Michael Cane, Wayne Industries technical manager Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) and Maggie Gyllenhaal taking Katie Holmes’s place as Rachel Dawes.