The Beginning is the End is the Beginning: Ranking the Films of Christopher Nolan From ‘Following’ to ‘Oppenheimer’
Few filmmakers in the modern era have so successfully navigated the delicate balance between art and commerce as Christopher Nolan. Working his way up from micro budget indies to big blockbusters at near-record speed, Nolan has displayed a talent for crafting heady, intelligent action spectacles that appeal to a broad audience. The financial success of films like The Dark Knight and Inception have allowed him to paint on an increasingly larger canvas, with exponentially growing budgets. Even as Hollywood has become increasingly wary of financing anything that isn’t based on pre-existing IP, his name alone is enough to get a risky, ambitious project off the ground.
Like his filmmaking heroes Stanley Kubrick, Michael Mann, and Ridley Scott, Nolan is a famously meticulous craftsman, which can often be confused as him being cold and calculating. His visuals are precise, and the worlds of his films are moody and atmospheric. That attention to detail extends to the special effects and stunts, which remain largely practical in an age of overabundant CGI and green screen.
He’s also known for his labyrinthine plots, which often jump back-and-forth between the past and the present. Whether it’s the backwards chronology of Memento or the multiple timelines of Dunkirk, Nolan’s intricate screenplays often play with our perceptions of time, keeping audiences guessing as to how they’ll ultimately turn out. While some would call his plots overly confusing, others find endless enjoyment returning to his films to uncover their vast mysteries.
Nolan’s fans worship him with an almost cult-like fervor, endlessly picking apart every detail of his films to find their deeper meaning. His stature has grown critically as well, and he’s earned five Oscar nominations across the writing, directing, and producing categories.
He’s back in theaters with Oppenheimer (review here), an immersive biopic about the complicated legacy of atomic bomb creator J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). Let’s mark the occasion by taking a look back at every Christopher Nolan movie, ranked worst to best.
12. Following (1998)
For a film shot on the weekends on a shoestring budget, Following does a good job of showing off Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking talents, and establishes many of the narrative and stylistic traits that would define his work. It centers on an aspiring writer (Jeremy Theobald) who starts stalking strangers through London looking for inspiration. Instead he finds Cobb (Alex Haw), a professional thief who takes him along as he breaks into people’s flats. Working with the same kind of fractured, flashback-heavy structure he would employ in his subsequent movies, Nolan reveals that Cobb is up to more than just training a new protegee. While one can only imagine what the first-time director could have achieved with more time and money, this 70 minute debut nevertheless ushered in the arrival of a major filmmaking talent.
11. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
You can sense a real blank check syndrome with The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan’s trilogy capper to his genre-defining Batman revamp. Here is a film bursting at the seams with ideas, characters, and set pieces, so much so that you wish the director had split it into two separate movies instead of rushing just one to completion. Christian Bale returns as Bruce Wayne, broken, bruised, and exiled in his castle after his fight with the Joker. He comes out of hiding when the masked mercenary Bane (Tom Hardy) begins terrorizing Gotham City. But when Bane breaks his back and throws him into an underground prison, Bruce will have to rebuild more than just his body to defeat him. You’ve also got Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman), Joseph Gordon Levitt as pseudo-Robin Josh Blake, and Marion Cotillard as Bruce’s shady love interest, Miranda Tate. Though it buckles under the weight of its own ambitions, Nolan’s auteurist superhero epic is still leagues above the more impersonal comic book fare of late.
10. Insomnia (2002)
Even Nolan’s most for-hire gig has his fingerprints all over it. Hot off the success of Memento, he was brought on to helm the American remake of Insomnia, a 1997 Norwegian thriller about a police detective struggling against sleep deprivation to solve a murder. Nolan transfers the action from Norway to Alaska, casting Al Pacino as Detective Will Dormer, who’s brought from LA with his partner, Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan), to investigate the brutal killing of a teenage girl. Embroiled in an internal affairs scandal and unable to sleep from the never-setting sun, Dormer accidentally shoots his partner and tries to cover it up. The one witness is the murder suspect, Walter Finch (Robin Williams), a mystery writer who agrees to keep Dormer’s guilt a secret if he agrees to shift his investigation elsewhere. Hilary Swank rounds out the cast as Ellie Burr, a plucky local cop who starts off working alongside Dormer, only to end up investigating him instead.
9. Batman Begins (2005)
Having established himself as the premiere director of neo-noirs, Nolan turned his attention towards a more ambitious – and financially lucrative – kind of filmmaking. Resurrecting the Caped Crusader from the ashes of Batman and Robin, Batman Begins traces Bruce Wayne’s (Christian Bale) journey from a rich orphan intent on avenging his parent’s murder to Gotham’s masked avenger. In between, he’s trained in martial arts and black magic by Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), who works on behalf of League of Shadows leader Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). Eventually, Bruce learns that justice cannot be served through vengeance, and he makes an enemy of Ducard when he refuses to execute a petty thief. When he returns to Gotham City, he goes up against Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), aka Scarecrow, who plans to poison the water supply with a deadly hallucinogen. Batman will need the help of his loyal butler, Alfred (Michael Caine), weapons designer Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), love interest Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), and Detective Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) to save Gotham.
8. Inception (2010)
Nolan followed up The Dark Knight with a near impossible feat: turning a wholly original idea into a colossal blockbuster. (You’d think studios would’ve learned from its success that audiences are hungry for more than just IP, but alas.) Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Dom Cobb, a professional thief who steals secrets from the minds of unsuspecting dreamers. He and his partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), are hired by Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe) to implant an idea into the mind of his business rival’s son, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Cobb recruits a crack team of dream thieves and designers (including Elliott Page and Tom Hardy), but they run into problems when Cobb’s dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), keeps popping up in his subconscious. Although the movie’s first half is the most exposition heavy of Nolan’s career, it’s all to set up the action-packed second half, which features dazzling set pieces underscored by Hans Zimmer’s droning compositions.
7. Tenet (2020)
By the time it finally made its way to theaters after numerous delays, it was difficult to separate Tenet the film from Tenet the savior of cinema. All eyes were on Nolan’s twisty sci-fi thriller to bring audiences back to theaters at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is a pretty tall order for what turned out to be the most esoteric blockbuster of the 21st century. To explain the plot would be an exercise in futility, as its effect comes mostly from pure vibes and spectacle. It centers on a CIA agent known only as the Protagonist (John David Washington), who must save the world from nuclear annihilation by manipulating time. Working with his handler, Neil (Robert Pattinson), the Protagonist moves from the past and present and back again to stop Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) from getting his hands on some lethal plutonium. Elizabeth Debicki plays Sator’s wife, Kat, an art dealer who joins up with the Protagonist and Neil to defeat her husband.
6. The Prestige (2006)
It feels almost apt to say that most Nolan films are like a magic trick, yet they often mimic the sensation of watching a magician pull off an illusion: you’re astonished that they did it, and curious to figure out how. Made in between his first two Batman movies, The Prestige functions both as a behind-the-curtain glimpse at the art of illusion and a cinematic magic act (quite the hat trick). It’s also a moody, tautly-made thriller, centering on a deadly rivalry between Victorian-era illusionists Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman). The former colleagues become enemies when Alfred inadvertently causes Robert’s wife, Julia (Piper Perabo), to drown during a water tank act. The two engage in a dangerous game of one-upmanship when they begin their solo careers, with each trying to discover the secrets behind the others’ best illusions. Yet Angier can’t figure out how Borden pulls off “The Transported Man,” a teleportation act that almost seems real. He hires an assistant, Olivia Wenscombe (Scarlett Johansson), to get to the bottom of it, but there’s more to it than meets the eye.
5. Memento (2001)
Nolan’s breakthrough feature became a rorschach test for everyone who watched it, inspiring endless conversations about its plot, structure, and deeper meanings. What’s most remarkable about Memento more than 20 years after its release is how endlessly rewatchable it is, even when the secrets of its labyrinthine plot are revealed. Moving backwards and forwards through time, it stars Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator suffering from short-term memory loss after a blow to the head. Ever since Leonard’s wife was killed, he’s been unable to form new memories, which makes solving her murder all the more difficult. He tattoos important information across his body so as not to forget it, and takes polaroids of every new person he meets with notes written on the back. His search for his wife’s killer leads him to Natalie (Carrie Anne-Moss) and Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), who may or may not be trying to help him. As Nolan jumps back-and-forth between the film’s backwards and forwards timelines, we feel just as lost as Leonard is, right up to the shocking final twist.
4. The Dark Knight (2008)
It seems almost quaint to remember a time when a superhero movie could both be a massive commercial hit and a near-universally praised artistic achievement, yet such was the reaction that greeted The Dark Knight in the summer of 2008. Since its legacy is somewhat marred by the deluge of comic book movies that followed its success (as well as that of Iron Man the same year), it’s important to look back on its merits as a film as opposed to a cultural phenomenon. And as a film, it’s a pretty fantastic one, a crime epic masquerading as a Batman adventure. Christian Bale reprises his role as Bruce Wayne, aka Batman, who must face off against a dangerous new foe in the Joker (Heath Ledger). Ledger, who died shortly after filming was complete, walks a knife’s edge between cackling mania and snarling menace, creating the definitive movie villain of the 21st century (he went on to win a posthumous Oscar as Best Supporting Actor). Nolan orchestrates his action set pieces with panache, but it’s the story’s greater themes of loss, vengeance, and redemption that makes this one an all-timer.
3. Dunkirk (2017)
Leave it to Nolan to craft the most audacious and daring dad movie of the century. Dunkirk is a World War II epic like no other, weaving together multiple fractured timelines and constructed for maximum visceral impact. The film details the intense battle and subsequent rescue mission on the beaches of Dunkirk. On land, British soldier Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) fights for survival while the German army rains down bombs for a week straight; on sea, Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) sets out with his son, Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), and teenager George Mills (Barry Keoghan) to rescue soldiers on their civilian boat; and in the air, British pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy) tries to shoot down a Nazi plane with just an hour’s worth of fuel in his tank. Nolan uses as little dialogue as possible, relying on sound, imagery, and music to place audiences in the heat of battle. Yet he never sacrifices the humanity of the men in uniform, making the experience all the more powerful. It’s the first war movie since Saving Private Ryan to so thoroughly revive the war movie genre, in ways that haven’t been equaled since.
2. Interstellar (2014)
Perhaps no other title has polarized Nolan fans as thoroughly as Interstellar, his unwieldy sci-fi epic about love’s ability to transcend space and time. Any movie this ambitious is rarely without flaws, and this one’s many naysayers will gladly pick those apart. Yet you’d be hard pressed to find a more personal film in Nolan’s career, and one that flies in the face of the criticism that he’s too cold and analytical. Set in a future that looks eerily like our present, it stars Matthew McConaughey as Cooper, an engineer and former NASA pilot forced to become a farmer to address the world’s food shortage. With Earth becoming increasingly uninhabitable, Cooper is recruited to search for a new planet for humans to repopulate. He leaves behind his daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy as a child, Jessica Chastain as an adult), and son, Tom (Timothée Chalamet as a teen, Casey Affleck as an adult), to travel into interstellar space, and spends the rest of his journey desperately trying to get back to them.
1. Oppenheimer (2023)
Oppenheimer opens by recounting the legend of Prometheus, the Greek God who brought fire to humanity and was condemned to eternal torment because of it. The rest of the film – adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s appropriately titled nonfiction book American Prometheus – shows how J. Robert Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) obsession to construct the perfect bomb condemned not just its maker to a lifetime of suffering, but the rest of humanity as well. Oppenheimer displays not just the culmination of Nolan’s various filmmaking talents – his precision, his immersiveness, his visual style – but also a thematic maturation. As the film jumps back-and-forth through time to show the famed scientist developing the atomic bomb during WWII and his subsequent moral quandary over its dropping, Nolan grapples with the ways in which our hubris can be our death sentence. The most terrifying scenes in Oppenheimer aren’t of a bomb going off, but of men in rooms discussing where it should go off, and how many casualties are acceptable to win the war. That, Nolan says, is what should worry us the most.
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