The Dark Knight

Essential, and the most influential superhero film of the century. It is barely a superhero film: it is a crime picture about a city-wide conspiracy, structured around an escalating investigation, in which the costumed character is one of several parties and not always the most competent.

Heath Ledger's Joker is the reason, and the performance holds up to everything said about it. The character has no origin, tells a different story about his scars each time, and is not interested in money or power. He is a thesis with a knife, arguing that everybody's decency is contingent, and the film gives him three separate experiments to prove it. Ledger died before release and the Academy Award was awarded posthumously.

Structurally the bravest choice is that the Joker's plan is finished with half an hour left. The last act is Harvey Dent, a decent man who has been broken on purpose, and the film's ending is a lie told to a city to protect a symbol, which the third film then has to deal with.

Nolan shot six sequences on IMAX cameras, the first narrative feature to do so, which is why the Hong Kong and Chicago material looks like nothing else from 2008. The interrogation scene is the best two-hander in the genre.