This afternoon, we went and saw The Dark Knight, the latest Batman movie.

It's a pretty good movie, better than I expected. As many people have noted, it is very dark, with lots of fairly realistic and disturbing violence to go with the usual over-the-top comic book scenes. Heath Ledger's performance is a little over-rated, but he does a good job of selling a character through the makeup.

It has lots of very typical superhero movie moments - the battle between romance and the secret identity, the villain dedicated to revealing the hero's identity, the forced choice between rescuing one set of hostages and another, etc, etc, but they are all done with either little twists to make them fresh or with a panache that imbues them with a fresh feeling.