Ledger won a much-deserved posthumous Oscar for his chilling, haunted turn as the Joker, the clearest indication that he was up to much more than “comic book movie” slumming. Under the sure hand of the director Christopher Nolan, Ledger creates one of the scariest villains in all of cinema — and one that’s frighteningly real, an honest-to-goodness sociopath whose nihilistic philosophy (as Michael Caine’s Alfred memorably puts it, “some men just want to watch the world burn”) invests the character, and the film, with a terrifying feeling that all bets are off, and that good may not prevail. Though widely acclaimed at the time, Ledger’s performance seems to only expand in our popular imagination with the passing years — and the growth of our increasingly shared sense of hopelessness and dismay. This was, truly, a Joker for our time.