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Most of the actresses under the age of 30 working in movies these days are girly girls like Jessica Alba and Scarlett Johansson — they’re great to look at but don’t have the emotional heft of a woman with real wit and personality. It is a rather sad exercise to compare these Hollywood girls of the ’00s to the young female stars of earlier eras. Can you imagine Jessica Alba going toe to toe with Lauren Bacall or even Veronica Lake? One of the exceptions to this rule is the 29-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal who has the looks and charisma to hold a movie audience’s attention, but also has the acting chops to put some muscle behind her work on the screen. If you missed Gyllenhaal’s Golden Globe-nominated performance in “Sherrybaby” (2006) — as a recovering alcoholic/drug user desperate to regain custody of her child — you missed a remarkable piece of work. Gyllenhaal’s willingness to explore the messiest (and most unsympathetic) aspects of the character reminded me of the raw performances Jane Fonda gave in “Klute” (1971) and “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) Gyllenhaal is, of course, the female lead in “The Dark Knight” which opened today on a wave of hype (you can find my review on the entertainment page of this Web site). For my money, her performance is one of the best things in the movie — she gives an otherwise perversely dark and depressing comic-book movie a jolt of charm and sex appeal. One of my problems with most comic-book movies is that they are aimed squarely at male adolescents so there is never much romance — let alone sex — in these action thrillers. Because the superheroes so often have to hide their “real” identities, Bruce Wayne in the Batman stories and Clark Kent in the Superman adventures lead painfully chaste lives when they are among "real" people. A romantic entanglement might, of course, compromise our comic-book protagonist’s secret identity. Even as a kid, I always preferred the James Bond movies to the comic-book stuff because of those sensational ladies the spy met along the way — Honor Blackman, Ursula Andress, Diana Rigg, etc. Gyllenhaal somehow manages to break through the macho surface of “The Dark Knight” and deliver a full-bodied female character in the midst of all the masculine hubris. In this wonderful actress’ work, there are echoes of the great urban dames who populated movies in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Somewhere around the middle, I wished Gyllenhaal could hijack the picture and turn it into a 2008 version of “His Girl Friday.”