The Dark Knight (Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman) — Batman and the Joker return with Christian Bale and the late Heath Ledger replacing Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson (from the 1989 Batman). It’s Bale’s second turn as the darker, haunted Bruce Wayne. Ledger is fantastic as the Joker with no sense of humor. The Batman franchise has been getting darker and darker with each movie, having shed itself of the fun of the TV series or the irony of Keaton’s two versions. It was the second movie Batman, played by Val Kilmer, that turned the hero into an obsessed do-gooder no matter what the collateral damage. The Dark Knight is the first of the series without the Batman title, but it is a natural progression. This is the most elaborate and beautifully directed of the stories with exceptional special effects and sets that make it the best of the super-hero, comic book-based films ever. For the first 100 minutes, I truly believed this film was almost perfect from top to bottom with marvelous portrayals from Bale, Ledger, Gary Oldman as the cop who knows Batman is all good, Michael Caine as a more serious Alfred, Aaron Eckhart as the crusading district attorney, Maggie Gyllenhaal as the love of Wayne’s and the DA’s lives, and Morgan Freeman as the former head of R&D for Wayne Industries and now its president. But the last 45 minutes are both uneven and a little unnecessary even though the story is still compelling, interesting, and well-directed. It’s almost like director/writer Christopher Nolan fell so in love with his own script and his brilliant idea that he forgot to leave the audience wanting more. (Nolan also teamed with Bale and Caine in The Prestige.) But I’m just quibbling. The length and the extra twists merely subtract a half-star or so from what is otherwise an almost perfect example of the comic book genre.