12. Following (1998)
Baby steps of course, but Nolan’s cheap-as-chips feature debut showed undeniable promise. Shot on weekends on black-and-white stock, with Nolan operating the camera himself, it’s an interestingly loopy yarn with hairpin narrative bends; a bit studenty, perhaps, but the kind of thing Nolan would refine in his later, more polished outings.
11. Insomnia (2002)
Nolan got his Hollywood entrée with this Alaska-set cop yarn about a sleep-deprived detective; he was in the room with studio royalty, having been supplied with Al Pacino and Robin Williams (going very much against his normally chummy persona). A remake of a cult Norwegian thriller from five years earlier, in some ways it’s Nolan’s least distinctive film – though he coped well with the labyrinthine, morally compromised plot line, and pulled off some excellent set-pieces.
10. The Prestige (2006)
Sandwiched between his first two Batman films, this always seemed like a bit of an outlier in the Nolanverse. Time hasn’t really altered things. The tale of 19th-century stage magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, who start a feud over an elaborate teleportation trick (which ends up involving early electricity’s magic man, Nikola Tesla, as impersonated by David Bowie), The Prestige has a distinctly steampunk vibe. Despite Nolan’s customary commitment to his material, in retrospect, he’s not in his comfort zone.
9. Tenet (2020)
Nolan earned thousands of brownie points by releasing Tenet at the height of the Covid pandemic, when the shutdown of cinemas seemed to threaten the entire Hollywood ecosystem. But, of his three grandly realised, enormous-scale sci-fi spectacles, this is probably the least satisfying. A brain-battering time-travel yarn about a terror attack from the future and the secret organisation trying to thwart it, Nolan (as ever) puts his all into the plate-spinning, timeline-juggling concept, but there’s something laboured about the narrative pacing. Though an accomplished dramatic actor, John David Washington is bit of a blank space in the central role, too.
8. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Nolan put plenty of welly back into the Batman series – a relief to a forehead-mopping DC and Warner Bros, given the fan reaction to Joel Schumacher’s quips-and-gadgets efforts in the 1990s – and finished off his Christian Bale trilogy with this walloping final section. Tom Hardy’s somewhat unintelligible rasping – the result of his supervillain character Bane’s Darth Vader-style respirator – caused Nolan some critical grief, but this was an otherwise reasonable wrap-up. By bringing Batman out of the self-imposed exile in which the previous instalment had stuck him, it left the franchise in a decent place.
7. Memento (2000)
The film with which Nolan truly announced his arrival, Memento is a fiendishly plotted noir that managed to find new life in the old memory-loss plotline, a dogeared thriller standby since the 1940s. Nolan showed he could handle top-notch performers: Guy Pearce (fresh from LA Confidential, looking like a cross of Brad Pitt and Don Johnson) is the revenger with “anterograde amnesia”; cue piles of Polaroids, myriad tattoos and hoards of notes to his future self. Using colour and black-and-white visuals to distinguish countervailing timelines (a technique he would return to), Nolan might notionally be examining themes of identity and self, but it’s really all about the totally gripping presentation.
6. Batman Begins (2005)
It might be hard for young ’uns to understand just how nervous Warner Bros was about reviving Batman after its 90s implosion; it just had to get it right. Nolan’s vision was a handbrake turn from Schumacher’s second effort, Batman & Robin. He put up a furrowed-brow Bruce Wayne – incarnated by Christian Bale, the scowliest actor of the era – who goes on a Wagnerian journey across the globe to find himself, before returning to Gotham, the Batsuit and Batmobile. Gloomy and self-involved, this was a Batman who gave the film a seriousness the fans seemed to demand. It paid off handsomely.
5. Interstellar (2014)
This galactically conceived space travel saga was the closest Nolan came to ripping off his spiritual mentor Stanley Kubrick; such was his devotion to 2001: A Space Odyssey, he even engineered an “unrestored” rerelease a few years later. Interstellar is not dissimilar: a big-ticket sci-fi that uses elaborate VFX to delve into some unvarnished human emotions. Nolan’s film doesn’t reach the same epic dimensions as Kubrick’s, but the exhaustively fleshed-out visions of alien landscapes and cosmic star fields are genuinely awe-inspiring.
4. The Dark Knight (2008)
The monumental cinematic architecture of Nolan’s films can often overshadow and, occasionally, intimidate its human participants – but this was definitively not the case with the second chunk of his Batman series. In a line stretching from César Romero to Jack Nicholson to Joaquin Phoenix, the Joker has been a tremendous showcase for some very good performers, but Heath Ledger outdid them all with his paint-smeared, watch-the-world-burn acting fireworks, earning a posthumous best supporting actor Oscar in the process. Almost incidentally, with this – and its sequel – Nolan pushed the superhero film closer to a conventional big-budget thriller, helping it break out of comics-nerd territory and reach mass audiences.
3. Inception (2010)
Sometimes, however silly a film gets, you just have to hold your hands up and accept it’s blown your mind. When all else has disintegrated into dust, humankind will still have a genetic memory of Inception’s amazing, vertiginous shot of the Paris street folding back over the horizon, like an Ozymandias for the digital age. Leonardo DiCaprio (in his unreliable-narrator phase; see also Shutter Island) is the investigator/manipulator called in to act like he knows what’s going on in Nolan’s dizzying dreamscape. It’s a work of berserk gloriousness: Nolan throws in every special effect known to humankind, conjuring up an entirely convincing cod-psych science with which to pummel the audience into submission. And boy, does it work.
2. Dunkirk (2017)
Nolan’s first foray into more realist history brought some unexpected colours to his creative palette: finely judged, almost experimental shot-making, a decentred narrative path that doesn’t prize any of the identifiable protagonists, and a relaxed appreciation of broader social forces at play in momentous historic events. Released in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, its timing and themes meant it played into the hands of the anti-EU faction. Even so, this is a masterly film from an expert film-maker; a human (and humane) interpretation of the battlefield movie, equally interested in the boredom and terror of the ordinary soldier. There are brilliantly conceived combat scenes, of course, with thunderous artillery barrages and horrible deaths; but this is by no means a glorification of war, or even a love-letter to the plucky British spirit. Dunkirk shows simply the hell that people were put through, and how they responded.
1. Oppenheimer (2023)
Nolan’s second bite at the second world war takes on a subject we can all relate to: the threat of imminent nuclear destruction. Amazingly, for a film about atom bombs, the actual explosion are sparing – although when the big one arrives, it’s pretty major. Instead, Nolan has created a beautifully machine-tooled talking-shop, fusing together timelines that take in J Robert Oppenheimer’s scientific career, his political and personal loyalties (and disloyalties), his interventions in the corridors of power, and his attempts to defend himself from a political ambush. With fewer colossal set-pieces to deploy, Nolan instead provides room for two exceptional performers. Cillian Murphy is a revelation as Oppenheimer, his glitter-eyed, thousand-yard-stare prominently on display But he is outdone by Robert Downey Jr’s wonderfully crafted turn as Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s ally turned nemesis. It’s almost shocking, in the age of Trump, to see how seriously the American political process is taken here – and drawing Americans’ attention to the abuse of their institutions may prove to be Oppenheimer’s most durable achievement.
