Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker with a gigantic talent and an even larger mystique. He can be a visionary storyteller — to see that, look no further than Oppenheimer. But if you’re a Nolan cultist-believer, the sort of Nolan-is-God devotee who thinks you’re only starting to get The Prestige when you’ve seen it four times, then his movies, with their spectacular convolutions and plots that loop around themselves, may exist for you in a realm that’s almost beyond story, a kind of rarefied Nolan Land of spellbinding cinematic purity. Me, I’m a Nolan fan who has often found his films to be haunting and hermetic, resplendent and trying at the same time. (Be warned: I think “Inception” makes no sense.) I don’t think Nolan’s films necessarily get better with repeat viewings (though I always go back). I just think you learn more about their minutiae, which would be perfect if they were video games, which is what I sometimes think, deep down, a lot of them want to be. Here’s my ranking of the known Nolan universe.
Following (1998)
Image Credit: ©Zeitgeist Films/Courtesy Everett Collection Just because I’ve placed Nolan’s debut feature last on this list doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. To me, there isn’t a Nolan film — not one — that isn’t totally worth seeing, and his talent, in embryonic form, suffuses every jagged frame of this shoestring, existential, black-and-white London crime noir, which employs a semi-non-chronological storytelling style that’s so casual you don’t even notice it for a while. The actors are superb. Alex Haw, as a posh, high-haired burglar who’s the master of his domain, has so much cutthroat charisma that it’s startling he never went on to screen fame (he’s now a New York architect), and Jeremy Theobald, as the ambulatory voyeur who’s drawn into Haw’s web and becomes his protégé in petty apartment thievery, has such a mercurial presence that, depending on his haircut and beard, he literally seems to shift identities. Lucy Russell, as the femme fatale between them, suggests an indie Marilyn Monroe with her demons exposed. The film is made with captivating skill, but it’s transparently a calling-card exercise, one of those movies where the build-up of mystery is far more satisfying than the resolution of it.
Tenet (2020)
Image Credit: Warner Bros/YouTube It may be the only movie ever made in which its hard to follow a fistfight. John David Washington, as an unnamed CIA agent, is facing off against an enemy combatant who is dressed in what looks like riot gear. As they pummel each other, we’re supposed to hone in on the fact that Washington’s character is moving forward in time while his antagonist is moving backward in time. But like so much else in this dazzlingly semi-illogical and cold-eyed poetic action thriller, it all plays out according to the Nolan head-scratching aesthetic: intriguing in theory, abstract and often baffling in execution. The film is reasonably intoxicating for the first 45 minutes, when Washington, exuding a brainy aura of danger, toys with Kenneth Branagh’s icepick-hearted Russian gangster baron by arranging things like a 747 smashing into an airport building that houses an airlocked vault full of priceless paintings. But by the last act of “Tenet,” a grandiose action battle full of explosions that run backward, you can see that the effects are cool, and the idea is cool, but how the logistics all actually fit together remains barely coherent. Which sort of limits the fun.
Interstellar (2014)
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Nolan’s most spectacular failure — which is to say, it’s a true failure, and also genuinely spectacular. It’s also the weirdest of contradictions: a heart-warming head-scratcher. Matthew McConaughey plays a pilot-turned-farmer who is called upon to lead a mission through a wormhole in the solar system. He’s searching for a new planet so that the residents of Earth, ravaged by dystopian dust storms, might have a future. “Interstellar” is ominously captivating as a sensual parable of The Coming Environmental Apocalypse, yet by the time that McConaughey circles back through the cosmic continuum to reconnect with his grown daughter, now played by Jessica Chastain, it has turned into the world’s most metaphysical father-daughter Hallmark card. Nolan strains to make some sort of reach-for-the-stars “statement” about how love will save us, but the real obsession at the film’s heart is the director’s desire to rekindle the time-tripping majesty of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The attempt leaves Nolan looking less like Kubrick than M. Night Shyamalan, though there are moments — isolated, but they’re there — when the film’s drive to turn Einsteinian physics into the ultimate poetic light show can sweep you away.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Image Credit: Warner Bros. The definition of how a movie can be grand and impressive on its own but still, in the end, far from good enough. The key mistake is basic: Nolan forgot — or simply didn’t realize — how much he’d raised the bar with “The Dark Knight,” and with Heath Ledger’s Method maniac performance as the Joker. The supervillain Bane, who made his first appearance in the comics in 1993, was always a derivative character — can you say the Lord Humungus meets Doc Savage? — and while a bulked-up Tom Hardy does his best to breathe a bit of menace into him, an effort enhanced but also hampered by his word-obfuscating voice-box mask, the bottom line is this: Bane is simply no Joker! Nolan needed to up the ante, to shock us with the audacity of villainy. Bane just seems like a bully lost in his bad dreams. And minus that threat of primitive scary excitement, the final adventure of Christian Bale’s Batman, while wholly watchable, gets buried in dour darkness, with Anne Hathaway’s salaciously nasty Catwoman providing the closest the film has to a spark of — dare we say it? — fun.
Insomnia (2002)
Image Credit: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection Nolan’s first foray into big-star, major-budget studio filmmaking seemed, at the time, the most natural — and accomplished — of evolutions. Remaking the acclaimed 1997 Norwegian thriller, a film that featured the up-and-coming Stellan Skarsgård and that anticipated the pitch-black Scandinavian kinkiness of the “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” novels, Nolan stuck close to the original but also made it his own thing. He coaxes an arrestingly “sleepy” performance out of Al Pacino, cast as an L.A. detective who is called to an Alaskan fishing village to investigate a sex murder, as well as a spooky and restrained one from Robin Williams as the conniving suspect. Yet “Insomnia,” in hindsight, looms as a Nolan anomaly – the only film in his canon that isn’t a true “Christopher Nolan movie” — and it has often been derided for that reason. I personally wish that Nolan had made a few more films like this, but “Insomnia,” while an absorbing procedural, is more calculated than inspired. It’s not, in the end, as good as the original. What it dramatizes now is the stalwart conventional career that Nolan could have had but clearly never wanted.
Inception (2010)
Image Credit: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection So, at last, we arrive: at the moment of truth, the film that separates the believers from the skeptics, and the gallery capsule that will make a lot of you hate me. I’ve seen “Inception” three times, and each time I’ve gawked, mesmerized, at any number of sequences, like the streets of Paris literally folding in on themselves. Yet I persist in feeling that the impact of that moment, along with too many others, has no real meaning within the interior scheme of the movie. I persist in feeling that if “Inception” lived up to its premise — Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb and his team enter other people’s dreams, at different “levels” of dreaming — it might be one of the greatest films ever made, but that it doesn’t live up to the premise (not really), because what we’re watching fuses the hypnotic and the arbitrary, leaving me, at least, with a WTF-I-kind-of-get-it-but-not-really feeling. A few of the questions I’ve always had: How does what’s happening in one dream level influence the next? Since different people are occupying the same dream, which of them is determining, at any given moment, what happens? And why does everything, on every level, look like it all came out of the same lofty balletic action movie? Yet to even raise those questions is to reveal yourself as one of the uncool, the un-anointed, the un-Nolan. “Inception,” the defining 21st-century brainiac video-game thrill ride, demands that you give it up and go with its flow, but I’d say that anyone who thinks this movie adds up to a coherent vision is dreaming.
Batman Begins (2005)
Image Credit: Everett Collection The film that launched the latter-day Nolan aesthetic: stylized yet grounded, gritty yet operatic in its imagery, alive with a menace that emerges from within and without. In one of the most elegant and dramatic of all superhero movies, Nolan tells the origin story of Batman, a.k.a. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), who after watching his parents get murdered moves from a Bhutan prison camp to being trained in the League of Shadows under the tutelage of a Zen-badass Liam Neeson to launching his own identity as an urban vigilante with a heart of darkness. Nolan doesn’t rewrite the comic-book playbook, yet the movie is charged with his filmmaking joy. After 15 years of mediocre “Batman” movies, “Batman Begins” came along at just the right moment to raise the bar not only for the Caped Crusader but for the entire superhero genre — i.e., Hollywood cinema as we now know it.
The Prestige (2006)
Image Credit: ©Touchstone Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection This was the first time that Nolan just about tied a mainstream movie in knots with its own convolutions, and he had such a good time doing it that he gave the audience a buzz. The movie is a Victorian-era thriller about two rival magicians, one (Hugh Jackman) an airy showman, the other (Christian Bale) a brooding high priest of illusion, who keep trying to top each other’s secrets in a magical fake-off to the death. There’s nothing genteel about the magic in this movie, which plays off violence, electricity, and the hidden art of tearing holes in reality, and Nolan reveals just enough trickery to make the flimflam that stays hidden seem all the more tantalizing in its mischief. “The Prestige” has the heart of a thriller — it wants to leave you wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and does — but the reason some think it’s Nolan’s finest film is that it’s structured like the ultimate magic show: a series of illusions that interlock like nesting dolls, so that you have to keep going back to see where reality leaves off and sleight-of-hand begins.
Dunkirk (2017)
Image Credit: Warner Bros. It’s truly an epic vision — at times nearly an abstraction of war, like a graphic silent film with (awesome) sound. The vast, panoramic frames lend an immersive quality to almost every image and event: dive-bombing planes, British soldiers amassed in endless rows on the beaches of France, men scrambling out of boats like rats as they try not to drown, a civilian in a wooden yacht heading into the fray to save a handful of his countrymen, a fighter pilot shooting Luftwaffe bombers out of the sky. The effect is surely Nolanesque, though this is a new kind of Nolan picture: gargantuan and minimal at the same time, like a nearly wordless documentary shot by God in IMAX. The images are momentous, the flow of terrified humanity indelible, yet “Dunkirk,” powerful as it often is, is more of a transporting experiment than a masterpiece. It’s a little too depersonalized, and for a film that seeks to plunge us into the cataclysm of war, it is, to a nearly shocking degree, a stiff-upper-lip rouser, with Edward Elgar on the soundtrack and the film practically pinning medals on the brave hearts of its heroes. In “Dunkirk,” very few people die, and when it happens, the film is too restrained to let you taste the sting of death the way that “Saving Private Ryan” or “Full Metal Jacket” did. What Nolan, for all his virtuosity, offers is an English gentleman’s view of World War II.
Oppenheimer (2023)
Image Credit: Universal Pictures The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, becomes a riveting three-hour psychodrama that’s breathtaking in its historical authenticity. Yet it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way he slices and dices chronology, turning Oppenheimer’s life into an act of cinematic fission. Cillian Murphy, in a phenomenal performance, plays “Oppie” as an elegant mandarin who’s also a bit snakelike — at once a cold prodigy and an ardent humanist, an aristocrat and a womanizer, and a man who oversees the invention of nuclear weapons without a shred of doubt or compunction, only to confront the world he created from behind a defensive shield of guilt that’s a lot less self-aware. “Oppenheimer” has a mesmerizing first half, and the buildup to the creation of the first atomic bomb just about ticks with cosmic suspense. But the big bang itself, as the bomb is tested in the wee hours of that fateful day code-named Trinity, is something of a letdown (the terrifying awesome bigness of it all does not come across). And once the movie shoots past that nuclear climax, a certain humming intensity leaks out of it. Nevertheless, the film’s colliding narrative gives off enough heat and light to sear itself into your imagination.
Memento (2000)
Image Credit: Courtesy of Newmarket Still the quintessential Nolan film: a head trip that seems to be taking place inside the main character’s head, if only because he’s working so hard to keep anything stored there. Guy Pearce, in a performance that’s like one long spasm of grungy noir intensity, is Leonard, an insurance investigator who suffers from anterograde amnesia, which makes it impossible for him to remember recent events. So he provides clues for himself: recording his experiences on Polaroids, tattooing key life events onto his body. He’s trying to track down the man who raped and killed his wife, and the way that Nolan has structured “Memento,” in something like reverse order, Leonard is running toward his past and away from it at the same time. The movie itself lives — tingles — on the knife edge of the present tense. It’s the cinema’s ultimate existential thriller, and it might all be a little too Rubik’s Cube crazy if it weren’t a human drama of such depraved fervor.
The Dark Knight (2008)
It’s more than just the greatest comic-book movie ever made. In the second installment of his “Batman” trilogy, Nolan transcended the genre — he made a movie whose spirit was rooted in the mesmerizing crime cinema of the ’70s, a time when corruption was so pervasive that it came to seem a perverse kind of shadow morality. And so it is here. The Joker, played by Heath Ledger as a slavering psycho high on his own freakishness, is a force of chaos who wants to turn the world upside down… because he can! He’s like every other villain with the practical motive stripped away, and that blows the stakes of the movie sky-high. For once, a superhero in a cape and a mask — Christian Bale’s furtively sinister Batman — matters in the way that Hollywood’s antiheroes used to matter: truly, madly, fiercely. The movie is a violent, tangled conspiracy thriller about a semi-nutjob outlaw-saint who is out to save the world — our world — and discovers that he may need to sacrifice his honor to do it. Though it’s getting hard to remember, “The Dark Knight,” when it came out, wasn’t just a mega-smash. It was huge like “Jaws” and “Titanic” and the “Godfather” films: It defined, and owned, a moment and mood in the culture. As moviegoers, we haven’t dared to look into the mirror of our corruption in the same way since.