The Dark Knight

The London Daily Mirror claimed today (Tuesday) that it was publishing the first major newspaper review of the upcoming Batman movie, The Dark Night. It's a rave. Critic David Edwards remarks that Heath Ledger is "a dead cert" to win the Oscar for his portrayal of The Joker. Edwards says that the late actor "is the brilliant heart of a superhero movie that's like nothing you've ever seen before. ... the finest superhero movie in years." In the U.S., Time Inc.'s Entertainment Weekly is out with a review by Owen Gleiberman that also extols Ledger's performance. "In this, the last performance he completed before his death, Ledger had a maniacal gusto inspired enough to suggest that he might have lived to be as audacious an actor as Marlon Brando, and maybe as great," he writes. Likewise Richard Corliss in Time magazine calls Ledger's performance "magnificent." His Joker, says Corliss, "is simply one of the most twisted and mesmerizing creeps in movie history." In his review for the Associated Press, Christy Lemire writes that The Dark Night is "an epic that will leave you staggering from the theater, stunned by its scope and complexity." And Peter Travers concludes in Rolling Stone: "The haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination."

Love. Stocked for the final chapter later this year...