The 12 Best Christopher Nolan Films, Ranked From Ludicrous To Legendary
Graphic: Kotaku
Christopher Nolan is in the rarified air of directors like Steven Spielberg and James Cameron where his name alone is enough to get audiences to theaters.
Since his first feature film Following in 1998, the English-born, Chicago-raised director has successfully cultivated his own brand of cinematic auteurship. Whether itâs new ideas springing from the deep recesses of his dreams (Inception) to his own takes on comic book icons (Batman trilogy) and figures from history, you can expect elite filmmaking. But that doesnât mean the director isnât capable of surprises.
Across his illustrious body of work that includes two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe, and billions at the box office, Nolanâs movies typically deal with damaged and haunted individuals who develop borderline unhealthy obsessions, and his stories encompass ideas like time, memory, perception, and sometimes most of all, guilt. These are often reflected in the meticulously methodical structure of his movies; most of Nolanâs movies are plotted all over the place, breathlessly zig-zagging between past and present. But, like the insides of a Swiss watch, every piece plays a part that contributes to a unified whole.
All of this results in a director who doesnât seem to have a capital-B Bad movie in his career of two and a half decades. You can debate preferences and question his creative choices, but there aretsi few filmmakers alive whose output is as consistent as Nolan. With news of a new Nolan joint now in the works, letâs look back and rank the directorâs movies from âworstâ (a relative term, admittedly) to best.
Excluding his shorts, like the surreal Doodlebug, youâll not find Christopher Nolan in a rawer state than his 1998 film Following. An impressive debut from an artist still finding his voice, Following centers on a nameless writer (Jeremy Theobald) whose habit of following strangers in London gets him dragged into a serial robberâs schemes. It is a lean and mean 70-minute neo-noir, one that ârepresents the peakâ of what he could do âusing [my] own resources,â according to Nolan in a 2014 VICE interview.
Following sees Nolan as his own cinematographer, relying on natural lighting and employing an abundance of close-ups and vĂ©ritĂ© movement â techniques evocative of the French New Wave than the studio formalism heâll come to have. Following may not blow anyone away with the power of a thousand suns, but itâs undeniably the work of a storyteller already assured in themselves to draw in attention.
Inspired by frosty brilliance of the original 1997 thriller Insomnia, Nolan got behind the wheel of the official American remake with Al Pacino. Beyond the finer details getting domestic relocations â Pacinoâs sleepless cop now hails from L.A., and his new surroundings are now rustic Alaska â Insomnia sees Nolan waddle deep into the dadcore genre territory.
Its central story, laced with taboo and marinated in regret, is intriguing but ultimately just functional. If not for its actors like Pacino (who plays âexhaustedâ so well youâre almost convinced heâs really an insomniac), Hillary Swank (as a local cop whose wide-eyed enthusiasm becomes squinting suspicion), and Robin Williams (playing against type as a middle-aged creep), Insomnia would be indistinguishable from other middling HBO prestige dramas. It scratches nearly all the itches for those who devour dog-eared hardboiled paperbacks, and to be clear, itâs very good. But one might expect it would be better than the sum of its parts.
Itâs a fine finale to a seismic trilogy, but The Dark Knight Rises is not without chinks in Batmanâs Nomex suit. The follow-up to 2008’s smash The Dark Knight and conclusion to all that began with 2005’s Batman Begins, The Dark Knight Rises sees Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) come out of self-imposed exile to stand up to Bane (Tom Hardy), a swollen masked warlord who overtakes Gotham City. Woven into the story is Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, a femme fatale thief who initially antagonizes before aiding Batman.
While echoes of DCâs comics lore are more present than ever, namely Frank Millerâs The Dark Knight Returns and the multi-author storylines âKnightfallâ and âNo Manâs Land,â Rises remains a Nolan special, a superhero event film steadfast in its War on Terror and Occupy era verisimilitude. But itâs not invincible. Its poorly-aged finale features cops in a ground war, and Baneâs falsehoods about his populist messaging (plus his fingers on a nuclear trigger) donât make his cause in toppling the elite class any less unsavory. And sure, thereâs endless opportunity for nitpicking. (How does Bruce get back to Gotham from The Pit?)
But The Dark Knight Rises is triumphant in its Pyrrhic victory, a story of legacies made immortal in ideas over people. When Bane scorns to Batman, âPeace has cost you your strengh. Victory has defeated you,â it is perhaps Nolanâs most self-reflective moment yet. After 2010’s Inception, Nolan was a newly-minted auteur. The Dark Knight Rises is Nolan striving to say heâs not a fluke, that victory hasnât defeated him, and his work bends over backwards to the point of breakage to prove it.
When the enemy is unseen, you can be certain theyâre always closing in. Nolanâs 2017 war drama Dunkirk takes after Operation Dynamo where over 330,000 Allied soldiers escaped the beaches of Dunkirk, France â fated to suffer full Nazi occupation â between May and June 1940. Through Nolanâs eyes, however, absent are the sepia-hued heroisms and noble sacrifices of standard-issue World War II dramas. Instead thereâs selfish desperation, the brutality of survival, the urgency of a ticking clock (quite literally underscored by Hans Zimmer), and the ever-dwindling light of hope. All the more interesting that not once are the words âNaziâ or âNazi Germansâ said aloud, an intentional choice.
Opening with a soldier whose name we barely know (played by Fionn Whitehead), Dunkirk takes a disorienting view through several perspectives to bear witness to a wartime miracle. Light on dialogue and character and very heavy on suspense, Dunkirk is a sobering portrait of a war rendered too familiar by countless stories and retrospective fetishizing. Itâs only really questionable that Nolanâs continued love affair for the spectacle-oriented IMAX format is deployed in a movie thatâs not one for spectacle at all.
Itâs hard to remember the eye-opening revelation Batman Begins was in 2005. It is in large part Nolanâs doing. In a time when the superhero genre still had new frontiers and when âgritty origin storiesâ were novel, Nolanâs Batman Begins ventured beyond its contemporaries to redefine its subject IP. Sure, Batman had many movies under his utility belt, and Tim Burton already drenched the Caped Crusader in shadows back in 1989. But Begins was a different beast, essentially Lawrence of Arabia in a cape.
With Bale in the lead role, a new, modernized Batman swooped into post-9/11 theaters like a tactical ninja, driving around a âBatmobileâ that wrecked cop cars with the rolling thunder of army tanks. Yet Nolanâs grounded interpretation of the Worldâs Greatest Detective â a man so traumatized by his familyâs murders he goes to train at a monastery â is hardly embarrassed by its source material. For better or worse, Batman Begins shaped the modern superhero tentpole for the next ten years, maybe more.
Nolanâs sophomore movie Memento officially put him on the map. Even now, it is arguably his definitive treatise on memory, trust, truth, and identity. Conceived over a road trip with brother Jonathan Nolan (himself a successful TV producer whom heâs collaborated with across his work) Memento traces the tense efforts of an insurance investigator (Guy Pearce) to piece together who killed his wife while suffering from a rare form of amnesia.
When all laid out, as others have â like Andy Klein in a memorable 2001 article for Salon â its non-linear plot with alternating color and black-and-white scenes (Oppenheimer says hi!) come across like a comically advanced class in neuropsychology. But past its Byzantine nature is a storyteller afforded far more resources than he had on Following. Nolan takes advantage of his upgraded arsenal, especially a roster of studied Hollywood actors like Pearce, Joe Pantoliano, Stephen Tobolowsky, and The Matrixâs Carrie-Ann Moss, which crucially demonstrate the other puzzle piece thatâs made his career so prolific: getting the best performances out of his actors. Itâs one thing to make a good, cerebral movie like Following your first one. Itâs another to do it again, with even more eyes watching you.
Tenet revolves around John David Washingtonâs âThe Protagonistâ (cue cheers), a CIA agent recruited into a mission to prevent World War III. He is armed with some unique tools, primarily the inverted entropy of objects, but also a friend named Neil (Robert Pattinson). Though Tenetâs inversion motif is hammered at every way (see: the title), it was a balm for anyone fatigued by hegemonic tentpoles. It is opaque, obnoxiously so, and buoyed by the machismo of its exhilarating physics-be-damned set-pieces which come off like Call of Duty by way of Andrei Tarkovsky.
But the movieâs silver bullet rests in the melodrama of Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki), a key character dead set on escaping her abusive marriage to a criminal oligarch (Kenneth Branagh in a Cold War-era Russian accent). Through her, Tenet turns transformative, serving up a story that blurs determinism and free will to posit that whatever we must do, weâre already capable of. Tenet is a James Bond-style summer action thriller, and a good one that comes sharply dressed in arthouse themes.
Filmmakers are like magicians. Both practice deception and illusion entwined with vision. One year after blowing up the box office with Batman Begins, Nolan reunited with Christian Bale and Michael Caine and mused over this parallel with The Prestige. Based on the 1995 novel by Christopher Priest, the movie follows rival magicians (Bale and Hugh Jackman) in an escalating and eventually lethal game of one-upmanship in late Victorian London.
Nolan goes meta with the help of Caine, who narrates in character (as a stage engineer and pseudo-mentor to the main protagonists) and verbally outlines the three-act execution of a magicianâs â and filmmakerâs â âmagic trick.â No spoilers, but even the first five minutes are deceptive, making repeat viewings both rewarding and almost necessary. Years on, out of all of Nolanâs films, The Prestige has mysteriously fallen off most peopleâs memories. But it deserves recognition as one of Nolanâs better offerings, being an overall magnificent production for grown-ups that illuminates the directorâs increasing maturity and refinement of his voice at the studio level. The Prestige may be one big bag of tricks, but donât say you werenât fooled.
Purposefully designed as Nolanâs homage to Michael Mannâs Heat, The Dark Knight synthesizes Nolanâs artistic influences with the seminal Batman graphic novels The Long Halloween and The Killing Joke to become its own sweeping crime epic that wholly defined the late-aughts zeitgeist. This time, the Batman teams with principled district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to stop The Joker (Heath Ledger) who burns down Gothamâs criminal underworld.
Ledgerâs death undoubtedly lent a macabre aura to his mesmerizing performance. But The Dark Knight is a monumental feature from top to bottom. Itâs evidence that 21st century box office juggernauts can still deliver the heat and have a thing or two to say about domestic terrorism, the chaos of vigilantism, and the failures of government institutions to keep order. Amid the uncertainty of the global financial crisis, the world flocked to theaters for safety in Batmanâs shadows. You couldnât make another movie The Dark Knight anymore â not because the people donât want one, but because no one can repeat its magic again. Not even Nolan could.
Interstellar, Nolanâs ninth film, is easily among his best. Matthew McConaughey takes lead as a widowed NASA pilot who, in our desolate future, rediscovers the agencyâs remnants and is tasked with leading a mission to find humanityâs new home.
Between its holy depictions of space and black holes, and an all-time score by Hans Zimmer, Interstellar is an achievement in its marriage of science and art. Itâs a movie brimming with urgency about our climate apocalypse while insisting we take pause and look up at the sky to wonder what else weâre meant to see. It is also his most romantic movie to date, even though thatâs not what it sounds like. As verbalized by Anne Hathaway as Dr. Amelia Brand, who utters the greatest line in any Nolan movie: âLove is the one thing weâre capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we canât understand it.â
Imagine you are Christopher Nolan, pitching Warner Bros. to give you millions to make Inception. How would you describe it? âOceanâs Eleven meets The Matrixâ? Maybe. The point is that Inception is a film where words fail to properly describe its brilliance because we know now what finely-executed masterclass it is. We have the benefit of making sense of Nolanâs otherwise incomprehensible screenplay because weâve literally seen his vision.
Conceived by Nolan over a decade, but possible only after heâd worked on big budget productions, Inception is a heist set in the world of corporate espionage and in the more endless realms of dreams. Leonardo DiCaprio, at this stage matured as an actor whose involvement implies faith in the material, stars as the troubled extractor Cobb who just wants to get back home to his kids. Inception is, in hindsight, Nolanâs true coming-out party. Itâs a cerebral genre-bender â including faint whispers of its original intentions as a horror movie â that rocked audiences en masse without intellectual property branding.
If itâs been awhile since youâve seen Inception, go back to it. You might be taken surprise by clear, concise, and even playful it remains.
All those âBarbenheimerâ memes were good fun. Pastels, hot pinks, and Ryan Goslingâs singing canceled out whatever pitch-black moods were wrought by Oppenheimer. But no movie by Nolan feels as contemplative and introspective yet simultaneously so expansive quite like his biopic of the man who built the atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer casts recurring Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy in the title role of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the real-life physicist who oversaw the making of the atomic bomb that ended World War II â and subsequently spent his life trying in futility to halt the nuclear arms race. In his main character, along with antagonistic Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) whose perceived sleights against him drives the movieâs conflicts, Nolan unspools the United Statesâ aggressive evolution into a global superpower. A whole nation mistaken in its notions that peace is achievable only when it holds the biggest guns towards everyone elseâs heads.
Boasting all of Nolanâs hallmarks, includinnon-linear plotting, expressionism mixed with hyper-realism, anxious concerns for time and timing, and obsessions that breed destruction, Oppenheimer often feels like Nolanâs style perfected at the molecular level and refined to a single shell. I could keep going with bomb metaphors, but the simple truth is that Oppenheimer is a modern masterpiece that shoulders so much more than the life of one complicated man who seeks to reconcile his actions with his intentions. Even if it didnât sweep the Oscars, Oppenheimer is an overwhelming experience that leaves all shocked and awed.
