After all the rumors surrounding its making, after all the hyperbole and advance buzz, only one thing matters.

"The Dark Knight" is the best film of the year. 

With this movie, writer/director Christopher Nolan and his crew have done something remarkable; they've crafted a deeply challenging and disturbing movie that also wholly succeeds as a richly thrilling and satisfying piece of pop art.  I'd begun to think it couldn't be done, that movies like "Hancock" and "Meet Dave" were the new way, that thrills and spectacle came at the expense of moral conflict and honest human emotion. 

But this movie reaffirmed my belief in the power of mainstream cinema.  "Blockbuster" does not have to equal "stupid."  "Expensive" does not always scan "shallow."  A flick like this makes you wonder why all big-budget entertainments can't be this good.  This may sound like pretentious exaggeration, but I don't care.  "The Dark Knight" is just that good, plain and simple.

Following not too long after the events in "Batman Begins," the flick follows Batman (Christian Bale), Police Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman), and new D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) as they struggle to stop the psychotic Joker (Heath Ledger).  This is a classic Batman setup, and for fans of the comics it's as engaging as one could hope for. 

Like the first movie, it's beautifully done.  Nolan and brother Jonathan's script is dense and literate without being confusing, editor Lee Smith keeps the 152 minute movie clipping at a relentless pace, and Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard contribute an unsettling, propulsive score.  Best of all might be Wally Pfister's beautifully gritty, textured camerawork—the guy's been with Nolan since "Memento," and his work here is career-best, effortlessly mixing handheld intimacy with grand spectacle.  Speaking of spectacle, if you can see this movie in IMAX, do so.  Twenty minutes of it were shot with an IMAX camera (three major action sequences and most establishing shots), and seeing Pfister and Nolan's images fill a four-story screen is genuinely awe-inspiring.  

But this time around, the thrills are more grounded, more realistic.  Gone are the entertainingly silly gimmicks of the first movie (like the monorail chase and fear toxin).  Batman has always been, first and foremost, a detective, and so Nolan fashions his sequel as a grand-scale police procedural.  People have been comparing this flick to classic crime thrillers like "Heat" or "The Departed," and the comparison is incredibly apt; all these movies deal seriously with the struggle/symbiosis between cop and criminal, and the effect that relationship has on the world surrounding them.

I loved "Batman Begins," but the increase in quality here is staggering.  That was a great comic book movie; this is just a great movie, no qualifiers necessary.  Everything that one did wrong, this one rights.  The fight scenes are far clearer to follow and more impactful in their brutality, and Katie Holmes' grating Rachel Dawes has been happily upgraded to Maggie Gyllenhaal's brighter, more empathetic version.

And everything that one did right (and it did quite a bit right), this one does better.  I took "Hancock" to task for squandering a great premise with cliché and trite internal consistency, but here the psychological and moral concerns behind having a superhero like Batman are explored with utter conviction and honesty.

Chief among those concerns is Gordon's warning of escalation to Batman.  The Caped Crusader's presence in Gotham has arguably caused more harm than good, and this movie looks at the ripples caused by someone like Batman, the effect on citizens, criminals, and the heroes themselves. The aspirations of "The Dark Knight" are far-reaching, and that's evident in its cast.  This is a true ensemble piece.  Bale's Batman is still the main focal point (and the best iteration of the character yet—Bale nails Batman's tortured gravitas and Bruce Wayne's haughty entitlement), but Nolan's more interested in Batman's impact on those around him. 

Across the board the large cast gets ample time to shine; all the main stars are terrific, but even actors in smaller parts, like Nicky Katt, Monique Curnen, and the great Eric Roberts, do great work.  Not even Batman gets to hog the spotlight.  It's "The Wire" of caped avenger movies.

The idea of escalation is just the jumping point for this movie's aims.  We're so used to blockbusters fleeing reality that it's a shock when something like "The Dark Knight" faces it head-on—it's fully informed by all the post-9/11 tensions this country has seen.  Make no mistake about it, the Joker is a terrorist, and what makes him so terrifying is the savagery with which he strikes out at our established "American Way."  As he tells Batman late in the movie, "People love a plan," and he takes it upon himself to undue our well-laid plans with pure chaos.

Let's talk about Ledger for a minute.  A lot has been said about Heath Ledger's Joker, how his death has elevated a good performance into something more. 

That's crap. 

Had Ledger lived, we'd be singing his praises just as strongly, mentioning him in the same breath as legendary screen psychos like Hannibal Lector or Anton Chigurh or Reverend Harry Powell or Harry Lime.  Ledger's Joker is equal parts funny and scary, and what unsettles the most isn't his voice or his makeup or his predilection for sudden violence (his "magic trick" is one of the movie's high points). 

It's the motives behind his actions.  However sick they are, his madness comes from a completely and totally understandable place—like Batman, he too is saddened by all the petty and rampant ways people destroy one another, but he copes by choosing life in its most extreme form: anarchy.  Ledger almost gets you to sympathize with this monster, and in his own way, he's just as much a liberator of the people as Batman is.  This is the best work yet from a brilliant actor gone too soon, yet the results are triumphant rather than sad.

But good is also complicit in Nolan's dark view of our world—Batman's coolest toy this time around is a sonar system that uses all working cell phones to monitor the whole city, a device that, as Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox tells him, is not the least bit removed from illegal wiretapping devices.  Its usage negatively colors our view of Batman, and his limited screentime makes perfect sense—this is a man so damaged by his compulsion to do good that not much else exists anymore.  It's a surprise: a superhero movie intensely concerned with justice violating individual liberties of good people.

Chief among those good people?  Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon.  It's a bit of a shame, actually, that Heath Ledger is so good and so showy because he threatens to overshadow the sterling work of Aaron Eckhart and Gary Oldman.  These guys are so subtle and real you don't quickly realize they're easily Ledger's equal.  Eckhart's Dent is, in many ways, the real star of the movie.  He's called Gotham's "White Knight," a deeply compassionate civil servant courageous enough to fight crime without a mask, and Eckhart makes his goodness palpable.  Dent's arc is heartbreaking, and it's what elevates the flick into great tragedy.

And Oldman, who's carved a career out of playing psychos like the Joker (he was the world's most corrupt cop in "The Professional" and Sid Vicious in "Sid and Nancy," among many others), does his best work ever as the quietly decent and noble Jim Gordon, Gotham's last good cop.  Dent and Gordon's final scene together is riveting to watch, bringing all the various moral and thematic issues together with nary a Bat in sight.

This is a movie about preserving your humanity, about the conflict between doing the right thing and trying to save your own soul in the face of unspeakable chaos, and what happens when that fails.  If the thematic backbone of "Batman Begins" was, "It's not who I am, but what I do that defines me," then "The Dark Knight" main theme could be "How do my actions, regardless of intent, affect others?"

And this question isn't just played out through Batman, through the "Will he or won't he remain a superhero" angle that powers so many of these movies.  Each character is forced to make face this concept at some point in the movie, and it's a credit to Nolan's skill that this moral conundrum is always exciting and uncompromising and never preachy or didactic.

Forget the "superhero movie" moniker.  In this case, that's an insult.  "The Dark Knight" is simply great, no matter how you look at it.  This is a near-perfect marriage of commercial thrills and profound moral insight.  It strives for more than any other motion picture released this year, big or small, and you know what?

It succeeds brilliantly.

Josh Katz is a freelance movie reviewer. He's been a movie fan since birth (much to the chagrin of his friends and family), and his top three favorite flicks are "Goodfellas," "Do the Right Thing," and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."