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All 12 Christopher Nolan Movies, Ranked

There’s an engimatic quality to the role of Nolan in the current filmmaking landscape.

Christopher Nolan's Films Ranked
Photo: Universal Pictures

There’s an enigmatic quality to the role of Christopher Nolan in the current filmmaking landscape, and one that stands apart from the fact that his films so often court ambiguity with explicit intent. From the Russian-nesting-doll antics of Inception to the magicians-as-filmmakers commentary of The Prestige, Nolan’s ambition within the realm of big-budget, broad audience spectacle is comparable to the likes of few. Looking back at his work thus far, what emerges—apart from his obsession with identity, reality, community, and obsession itself—is an artist who, heedless of his own shortcomings, is intent on challenging himself, a quality that salvages and even inverts a great many of his otherwise pedestrian choices. Rob Humanick

Editor’s Note: This updated list was originally published on November 5, 2014.

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Inception

12. Inception (2010)

The purported originality of Inception says infinitely more about the cinematic vocabulary of those describing it as such than it does about the film itself. Alas, a promising premise and some impressive zero-gravity imagery does not a mind-bending sci-fi spectacle make, and heaps of graceless exposition makes this experience akin to what Nick Schager described upon the film’s release as “instruction manual cinema.” Here, Nolan’s better instincts are strangled by his apparent fear that audiences wouldn’t “get it,” and the result is a minor tragedy of wasted opportunities and verbose bombast that frequently collapses into self-parody. Humanick


Tenet

11. Tenet (2020)

In keeping with Tenet’s allegiance to the world of James Bond, Kenneth Branagh’s villain, Sator, almost itches to prove how bad he is. Sator constantly checks his pulse, which never rises above 130. “Each generation looks out for its own survival,” the Protagonist (John David Washington) says, and it seems like Nolan is trying to acquit himself of not taking his 007 riff further. Bond has been pilfered, reworked, and parodied, but Nolan’s self-seriousness is such that he’s loath to subvert the tropes of Ian Fleming’s spy universe. Yes, Tenet knows how to go full throttle. There’s fun to those explosions, and Ludwig Göransson’s throbbing score, which gets the blood pumping higher than Branagh’s pulse counter will allow. But every time it stops to speak, it only emphasizes a hollowness within: how enamored it is of its own cleverness. Ben Flanagan

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Following

10. Following (1998)

Christopher Nolan’s debut feature, Following, is an intriguing mix of narrative trickery, ponderous psychology, and borderline-hallucinatory chiaroscuro imagery. Jeremy Theobald, credited as “the young man,” is a struggling writer who likes to follow people for creative inspiration, yet this mostly harmless behavior turns into something darker when he starts to break his own self-imposed rules. Nolan’s trademarks are all present here, from hidden identities to the shuffled chronology, while even his limitations—thematically on-the-nose dialogue and too much implied connective tissue from scene to scene, or even shot to shot—speak implicitly to the untrustworthiness of the material at hand. Humanick


Batman Begins

9. Batman Begins (2005)

Nearly a decade out, Nolan’s first chapter in his Dark Knight trilogy, Batman Begins, remains a passionate love letter to the caped crusader, albeit one severely undercut by a visual palette that only intermittently captures the brooding qualities of its illustrated source material. Hans Zimmer’s score is so triumphant, and the ensemble work and use of practical effects so sturdy, that it’s sometimes easy to overlook the film’s stultifying reliance on pedestrian compositions and manifesto-like exposition. Nolan’s deliberately adult approach to the material was a refreshing reprieve from Joel Schumacher’s camp spectacles, even as it retreated from the visual exuberance established by Tim Burton’s underrated Batman Returns. Humanick

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Dunkirk

8. Dunkirk (2017)

The metronomic precision of Nolan’s cinema is foregrounded in Dunkirk, with the sound of a ticking stopwatch embedded deeply into Hans Zimmer’s score. The editing is meant to heighten the sense of bewilderment facing the Allies, but in the end the film’s structure ensures that the any bewilderment is our own. In devoting so much time to the dull, counterproductive mechanics of the action assembly, Dunkirk dispenses with nearly all other elements of drama. At first, this is to the film’s credit: The characters don’t waste time offering backstory or blaring their personality quirks, as they’re too focused on simply surviving. After a time, though, the blurred lines between characters only exacerbate the editing’s cold, distancing effect. Jake Cole


Insomnia

7. Insomnia (2002)

While lacking the sublime existentialism of Erik Skjoldbjærg’s original of the same name, Insomnia marked Chistopher Nolan as a reliable dramatic filmmaker, divorced from the mindfuckery that typically defined his work. The relationship between Al Pacino’s Detective Dormer and Robin Williams’s Walter Finch is a potent one despite existing mostly off screen, and while it’s disappointing that the film ends in predictable fashion with guns blazing, it’s a small comedown from an otherwise incisive look at the nature of personal will, brilliantly repurposed here in a small Alaskan fishing town where the sun shines even at night. Humanick

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The Dark Knight Rises

6. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

The arguably cynical, borderline-nihilistic qualities of the second and third entries in Nolan’s Batman films have always felt like an appropriate reflection of the times in which they were made—a quality that makes the dark events surrounding this film’s release all the more devastating. There’s a messiness to The Dark Knight Rises that befits the social tumult of Gotham, and the film is less of an action epic than it is a character melodrama, broadly invoking everything from the crimes of the state to the Occupy movement to nuclear annihilation and the responsibilities of a rising generation. But for Nolan’s continued ineptitude with many of his intended grace notes, this might have seen his Batman trilogy end on a high-water mark. Such as it is, it’s the film we needed, if hardly the one we deserved. Humanick


The Dark Knight

5. The Dark Knight (2008)

A dreamlike dive into darkness marks the opening of The Dark Knight’s exploration of our culture of fear, with light eclipsing said darkness at the end. The death of Heath Ledger inevitably overshadows but also enriches the proceedings, but Nolan’s ability to tap into the cultural zeitgeist is also chief among this stirring, if flawed, superhero crime saga. For every moment of mythic frisson, there’s one where the characters themselves seem to be play-acting, with the bit parts especially threating, with unsettling frequency, to break the spell. Humanick

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The Prestige

4. The Prestige (2006)

If any of Christopher Nolan’s films constitute a personal thesis statement, it’s The Prestige. Propelled by the ongoing rivalry between two magicians following the tragic conclusion of a failed trick, the film speaks to the intangible nature of the self well before introducing a period sci-fi element courtesy one Nicholas Tesla, but it’s the implicit scrutiny of the recipe for creating magic—a thinly veiled stand-in for Nolan’s own cinematic ambitions—that gives this quicksilver film its lifeblood. It remains Nolan’s most effective sleight of hand to date, even if the way he avoids his big reveals (not unlike film critics hopping around plot points in fear of spoiler police) makes it obvious what they are to us, if not the characters. Humanick


Memento

3. Memento (2000)

In hindsight, Memento isn’t quite the mind-blower that it was once billed as. The film is many things, though, among them the most playful and purposeful of Nolan’s stylistic exercises, and a heartbreaking portrait of a man psychologically impaired to the point of being literally unable to move on from a tragedy that would haunt any of us: In short, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is unable to make new short-term memories, and requires a bit of a refresher roughly every three to five minutes, all while hunting for who he believes is his wife’s killer. In a film of dazzling technique, a staggering blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cut is enough to speak to the demons we’re only intermittently able to recognize, let alone expel, and a landmark moment in popular film culture achieved fleeting yet profound insight into the human condition. Humanick

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Interstellar

2. Interstellar (2014)

Interstellar knowingly follows in the footsteps of greatness, namley 2001: A Space Odyssey, evident in everything from a sidekick robot that suggests a wisecracking monolith to the galactic light show glimpsed beyond the gateway of a conveniently placed wormhole. Set in the not-too-distant future, in which a global crisis has resulted in a perpetual dustbowl, limited food supplies, and a dwindling population, the film is almost impossibly earnest in its suggestion that the greed and rising world population of the 20th century may have already sown the seeds of our extinction. For all of its gargantuan ambitions and cinematic throwbacks, it’s even more compelling for ultimately boiling down to some basic archetypes about mortality, love, and sacrifice. Hans Zimmer’s funereal score heightens the notion that we’re accompanying these travelers on a great pilgrimage. Interstellar doesn’t match the greatness of its key influences, but it earns more than the right to be mentioned in the same breath. Humanick


Oppenheimer

1. Oppenheimer (2023)

Nolan has often turned to practical and scientific means to demystify his films’ subjects, be it dreams, magic, or the impossible antics of one traumatized billionaire orphan. His best work ultimately resists the comedown that can accompany such explication as the material retains some fundamental sense of wonder. Oppenheimer joins their ranks for preserving the apparent inexplicability of nuclear physics, but by undermining the idea of science’s objectivity. Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) research and development may obey fundamental laws of the universe, but science has been and likely shall remain forever subject to manipulation by those who usually don’t even understand it. But that, too, is an indication of Oppenheimer’s failures as much as the predations of power brokers. Throughout his trial by kangaroo court in the 1950s, his friends and loved ones ask him why he keeps subjecting himself to this abuse instead of admitting defeat. Only by film’s end does the man’s reasoning become clear, and it recasts the drama as an act of willful atonement as much as external persecution. Cole

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