https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/movies/best-movies-21st-century.html

28. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

Indifference to superheroes isn’t a prerequisite for making a great film about them. But Christopher Nolan’s allergy to comic-book logic and his infatuation with the grown-up crime movie canon (especially “Heat” and “The Godfather”) revitalized a character still laboring to emerge from the miasma of “Batman & Robin.” The second entry and high-water mark of Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy poses fruitful questions about the naïveté of its protagonist’s moral code. But the film’s greatest asset is Heath Ledger, whose staggering performance as the Joker set the bar for subsequent supervillains forever.