Back when much of the filmic debate centered around what “Hollywood” was doing (bad) and the work being produced on the margins (good), it was hard to even conceive of a director like Christopher Nolan. The big-name filmmakers of yore—your Scorseses, Spielbergs, Coppolas—seemed consigned to a “one for them, one for me” dichotomy where popular success often worked inversely to quality. We remembered that back in the mists of time, greats like Hitchcock and Kubrick walked the soundstages, making works of timeless art that also packed in crowds and became brands onto themselves (“have you seen the new Kubrick?”).
Since then, few directors seem capable of regularly bridging that art and commerce divide. The A-listers who could sometimes receive critical plaudits and box office—your Finchers, Tarantinos, Nolans—often did so by essentially classing up or remixing genre. That began to change sometime around Nolan’s seventh film, Inception. At that point, he vaulted from edgy experimenter turned comic book renaissance technician to being the director whose new project announcements were treated with the same excitement that greeted the first Phantom Menace trailer reveal.
These days, Christopher Nolan’s films pack in audiences, win awards, and leave people excitedly puzzling out their twists and meaning for years. For mainstream audiences and cinephiles, his work provides a vanishingly rare opportunity to have one’s cake and eat it, too.
With the release of Nolan’s 13th, and by most metrics biggest, film, The Odyssey, it’s a good time to review his full body of work. Here are all of Nolan’s 13 features, ranked worst to best.
13: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
By the time Christopher Nolan finished his Batman trilogy, it seemed he had already moved on. The Dark Knight Rises is not poorly made, no matter how silly the Vader-like mask worn by villain Bane (Tom Hardy). The film shows again Nolan’s skill for making good use of A-list talent (Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman all giving committed work going beyond paycheck laziness) in B-list material. The story, however, both overstuffed and unclear, has none of the flair, heart, or wit Nolan was investing in his non-Intellectual Property work.
As with The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises isn’t just doing a villain of the week; it’s got Themes, man. That leads to pointed commentary on income inequality and class warfare, including slum-living Selina’s (Anne Hathaway) warning, “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne,” and a satiric sequence on misdirected populism where Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) leads a French Revolution-style mob tribunal.
However, most of the thematic material is a hazy retread of the prior film’s debates about the Soul of Gotham. Baggy, baffling, and crashingly boring when revisited, The Dark Knight Rises has more characters than it can manage. Catwoman and a proto-Robin (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are marooned with little to do, while Hardy’s “ha-Ha-HAAA!” vocally unmodulated theatricality is wasted in a dull, inscrutable villain narrative.
Confused and confusing, The Dark Knight Rises is not only the weakest entry in Nolan’s filmography but a dire harbinger of the Zack Snyder DC films grimly looming on the horizon.
12: Following (1998)
It would be wonderful to say that Following represents the “real” Christopher Nolan, the truest distillation of his artistry before getting warped by money, ambition, awards, and all the rest of it. While it is a gem of a debut and worth hunting down, it has clear budgetary limitations. Like indie filmmakers from John Cassavetes to Kevin Smith, Nolan knew that black-and-white film stock, few settings, and a dialogue-heavy script are the cheapest way to get a film made. While aligning those characteristics quite nicely to the story itself, you can feel the film straining to become something more than it is.
Shot with the somewhat self-consciously urban jitteriness as Darren Aronofsky’s Pi from the same year, Following is an elegantly simple story about a young Londoner and self-proclaimed writer on the dole (Jeremy Theobald) who drifts about following people who interest him. The twist occurs when one of his targets, Cobb (Alex Haw), turns the tables, first interrogating and then educating the follower in his life of investigative burglaries which are as much about studying an apartment’s missing inhabitants as about fencing their goods.
Nolan’s pivots are a bit overdetermined, shifting from a Paul Auster-like modernist fable of alienation to Mametian crisscrosses. While less showy than Pi, Nolan’s emphasis on tight scripting over wowee-zowee editing and camera tricks pointed to his ultimately having more worthwhile stories to tell once given access to real budgets.
11: Batman Begins (2005)
While the early-to-mid 2000s were awash with other pre-Marvel superhero trilogies—Bryan Singer’s X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man—which had given comic book films new respectability and box-office clout, Christopher Nolan’s first Batman film augured something new for the genre and the filmmaker. A big-scale attention-grabber, Batman Begins showed the filmmaker importing his talent for sharply written, crisply edited conflict into a true blockbuster format for the first time.
Batman Begins is both a return to form for the character—the impressively patient throat-clearing origin-setting combining Bruce Wayne’s bat phobia, orphan trauma, and bratty rich-kid self-destruction into its own mini-film takes an hour to finally get him in the suit—and an expansion of its possibilities. Other comic-book films were shining up off-the-shelf tentpole templates with better writing and performances. Nolan’s take is a grander and more thrilling construction, bringing in everything from Star Wars-esque pseudo-wisdom, Mission: Impossible-style gadget montages, and Hong Kong-inspired training sequences; after all, everything is better with ninjas, Jedi masters, and pocket batarangs.
More crucially, Christopher Nolan presents the first Batman who barely resembles a human being, even if Christian Bale’s Wayne-as-smarmy-playboy cover story act can feel like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman being dropped into an espionage flick. Though Nolan and David S. Goyer’s script creates a more fragile, self-critical, three-dimensional Wayne than seen in the flashier Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher extravaganzas, that same clarity is not found in his enemies.
As honchos of the “League of Shadows”, Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and Ducard (Liam Neeson) deliver goatee-stroking villainy, but their strangely passionate desire to annihilate Gotham is simultaneously confusing and lacking the personal animus that makes Wayne’s character memorable. Batman Begins is like its dualistic protagonist, filled with both high-flying potential and florid excess.
10: Insomnia (2002)
This was how it used to work: a promising indie director produces an imaginative breakout hit. Hollywood swoops and slots him (always a him) into helming a piece of prestige entertainment that augers blockbusters to come, with maybe a sprinkle of award glitter. The result was often not dissimilar to Insomnia, Christopher Nolan’s first big-budget outing.
Closely based on Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 Norwegian noir, the film is not unlike many major studio debuts by filmmakers like Nolan: too genre for those looking to get their minds scrambled again, like with Memento, and too off-key for mainstream audiences looking for that cool-looking murder mystery starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams.
On the surface, Insomnia is a straight-ahead policer, with hollow-eyed superstar Los Angeles homicide police Dormer (Pacino) arriving at a flyspeck Alaska town hit by the shock murder of a teenage girl. However, Nolan rapidly and quietly subverts things by subtly undercutting our understanding of what happened and who is to blame.
After Dormer fatally shoots his partner (the ever-underused Martin Donovan) while chasing a suspect in fog, hints build that the killing might have been on purpose. Guilt and confusion mount as Dormer, unable to sleep in the near-constant daylight, becomes bleary and ragged; Al Pacino’s aggressive growl dwindling to an affectingly quiet, pained vulnerability. The possible killer is not your typical sadistic mastermind, but personified by an intentionally flat Robin Williams as evil’s banality.
The first of Nolan’s nine Warner Bros. films, Insomnia is modest and yet far-reaching. Wally Pfister’s epic cinematography gives a then-impressive yet now-standard gloss to the mystery we’ve come to expect from prestige streaming murder shows (today, this would be a Netflix eight-parter). Yet at its core, Insomnia has a loneliness and spirit of moral questioning that prefigured many of the bigger entertainments to come.
9: The Prestige (2006)
At the time, this lustrously filmed adaptation of a Christopher Priest novel about rival magicians in 1890s London seemed like a nifty surprise excursion Nolan snuck in during his sometimes-slogging tour in the DC trenches. The Prestige shows a director trying to navigate Hollywood by leveraging his new blockbuster superhero bona fides to make the kind of more thoughtful adult fare that was already becoming rarer. However, like many a magic trick, the film’s ability to awe has worn off with time, revealing the creaky mechanics and useful coincidences needed to juice this deadly back-and-forth between the rough-hewn Borden (Christian Bale, full thuggish Cockney) and the preening showman Angier (Hugh Jackman, self-satirizing his Broadway stage persona).
There’s an interesting story here about competitive fame-hunting’s cost being born by the unfortunate women in these men’s lives (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson, two years before they reteamed in Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona). However, the film spends most of its time spinning increasingly unbelievable and deadly twists while building to a conclusion that is certainly harrowing but doesn’t feel earned.
The Prestige briefly delivers on its promise when Angier hires Nikola Tesla (described as “a man who can actually do the things magicians pretend to do”), played with supernatural authority by David Bowie, to build a device for his show that can transport objects. Thinking Tesla has failed after multiple tries using a top hat, Angier is surprised to find a pile of hats outside the lab, not transported, but duplicated. It’s an eerie, inexplicable image not burdened with the explanations Nolan sometimes struggles to wrench into being.
8: Dunkirk (2017)
Making an ultimately triumphal historical film about a monumental defeat risks losing credibility from the start or worse reading as post-facto propaganda. Yet Christopher Nolan’s sole war film succeeds in weaving a danger-spiked plot about the last-minute 1940 rescue of the shattered British army—stranded on the beaches of France as the Wehrmacht smashes through Allied lines—into a stirring evocation of mundane heroism.
Sticking to historical events while populating the story with fictional characters, Nolan breaks the film into three element-based strands tracking the week-long battle: air, land, and sea. Each features one or more characters skirting the brink of disaster: the soldiers (Fionn Whitehead, a brash Harry Styles) continually jumping from one frying pan into another fire; the scrappy unarmed civilian yachters (Mark Rylance, tragic Barry Keoghan) motoring into a war zone to save as many as they can; and the precious few RAF pilots (Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy, both effortlessly dashing) calculating how many German planes they can take down before their fuel runs out. Clever crosscutting between the three complicates the story, especially when seeing the same scene from multiple perspectives, while also building a greater unity of momentum against a stormy backdrop of watery graves, dive bomber-filled skies, and a ghostly enemy never seen until the last shot.
There’s a gasp of wonder in Dunkirk‘s conclusion, with shell-shocked soldiers at last beholding the green sylvan fields of England and the unforgettable moment of Hardy’s engine-stopped Spitfire gliding silently over the last men on the beach, a sequence unequaled in the grim pantheon of modern war cinema. Believing survival equals a kind of victory is, in this film, not a coping mechanism but an axiomatic reality. The cherished England as not some mystic empire or national polity but very simply “home”, as multiple characters say like some incantation, cannot be saved from invasion if there are no soldiers left to save it.
7: Oppenheimer (2023)
A study in contradictions, Christopher Nolan’s Robert Oppenheimer biopic is in style and spirit closely twinned to its subject. The canvas is wide and jam-packed with incident and meaning for this purposefully self-important film about a very self-important man. Oppenheimer represents a high point of post-COVID serious big-screen cinema with all the shivers and portentousness that cocktail suggests. It’s a richer and more dialogue-driven personality study than Nolan had previously embarked on, with a tragic view of the dangerousness of invention which registers as increasingly prescient in our era of AI.
Oppenheimer begins and ends with nightmares. Early on, the ghostly thin academic (Cillian Murphy, vibratingly intense) is haunted by visions of an unnervingly chaotic subatomic reality that he would distill into his quantum mechanics research. The final scenes are a study in quixotic victory; having created the atomic bomb and remade himself as “the most important man who ever lived”—in the words of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the jealous inquisitor whose McCarthyite hounding of Oppenheimer takes up the film’s JFK-like final third—he can only see a future where nuclear-armed missiles fill the skies in an inescapable apocalypse.
Yet the film is never dull. Nolan keeps things crackling with incident, particularly in the thrilling Los Alamos sequences leading up to the Trinity test where Oppenheimer’s airy pronouncements and aching self-doubt are grounded by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon). The stolid, guarded appreciation Groves delivers of his opposite (“You’re a dilettante, a womanizer, a suspected Communist, unstable, theatrical, egotistical, neurotic”) is not just a neat capsule biography; it signals Nolan’s decision to skip hagiography for a larger tragedy.
Ludwig Göransson’s score helps with the latter, piling up angularly minimal motifs into a skin-tingling symphonic roar that approximates the world-changing discovery which Oppenheimer passionately drives into existence before scrambling to contain it well after the demon has escaped his grasp.
6: The Dark Knight (2008)
A classic middle-trilogy film that deepens the promise hinted at in Oppenheimer, but also creates expectations that film could never live up to, The Dark Knight is a cinematic candy-bag with goodies for everyone. Christopher Nolan delivered for the fans disappointed by the never-made projects that promised a darker post-Schumacher Batman, the non-comic-oriented cineastes looking for high-minded mainstream fare, and even regular audiences just seeking a good night out with both car chases and emotional stakes.
The Dark Knight begins as a run-of-the-mill episode, with new-on-the-scene crime lord the Joker (Heath Ledger, nihilistic clowning incarnate) attracting Batman’s interest. Joker’s guerrilla tactics and postmodern relativistic emptiness are so destabilizing to any sense of moral order that, as one Gotham institution after another crumbles into chaos from the terroristic assault, the question is less will Batman get his man? than Is this the end of civilization?
Both sleeker and more thunderous than Batman Begins, The Dark Knight whips together a nearly irreconcilable mix of styles and themes into an at-times overwhelming mythopoeic symphony. Besides the James Bondian high-tech espionage and jet-setting, there are also Godfather-style simultaneous assassination montages, a love triangle ending in crushing loss, Fincherian stares into the heart of darkness, a pair of heart-hammering action sequences indebted to Michael Mann, debates on democracy versus Caesarism or vigilantism versus due process in times of crises, and for good measure a sly sideways interrogation of torture and surveillance in the War on Terror.
The whole thing should by all rights have been a top-heavy bore. Yet somehow all the sound and fury end up signaling something memorable, even if doing so did create an unfortunate permission structure for the dour and dull Zack Snyder films that followed.
5: The Odyssey (2026)
Just as Odysseus is described throughout Homer’s poem as a great warrior and also a wily trickster, Christopher Nolan treats Western literature’s foundational tale as a grand adventure while subverting its martial aspects with melancholy and reframing key aspects. The Odyssey is the most muscular and yet strangest work in Nolan’s filmography. It’s a star-studded actors’ showcase, war film, pining romance, and revenge bloodbath wrapped up inside the knotty question: Can we ever go home again?
For most of The Odyssey, Nolan sticks close to the text. The plot can be boiled down to the obstacles faced by Odysseus (Matt Damon) in his years-long journey home from the Trojan War. Similar to Nolan’s storytelling style, Homer mixes things up with cross-cutting, meta-narratives, embedding stories within stories, and characters in disguise.
Odysseus pines for his Queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway)—trapped in a dark palace swarmed by oafish suitors who assume the long-gone king is dead and think his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) is a feckless weakling and no threat—but keeps getting in his own way, embarking on misbegotten ideas that lengthen his trip and leave his companions dead. Asked by a crew member what the song of the Sirens sounded like, Odysseus says it shattered him with “all the promises I failed to keep.”
The Odyssey is spectacular in the bits recycled by so many misbegotten films (has any classic had more terrible adaptations?). The Cyclops terrifies, Circe (Samantha Morton) and Calypso (Charlize Theron) captivate with their witchy cool, the massacre of the suitors has a bruising physicality, and the “shades” of Hades horrify not through scares but their aching memory of life. The pieces are deftly assembled, even if the poem’s episodic nature drains momentum at times.
Nolan’s riskiest bet, though, is not to simply run the greatest hits audiences half-remember from English class but to interrogate what it is all for. In his telling, Odysseus’s devising of the Trojan Horse trick—which begins and ends the film—is less a genius strategy for winning a war (which Nolan presents as meaningless slaughter) than an opening to anarchy by undermining the foundations of civilizational trust. Homer’s hero boasted of his exploits. Nolan’s seems ultimately to wish he had none to tell.
4: Tenet (2020)
Watching Tenet can recall the scene in Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012), when Bruce Willis’ character brushes aside a question about the film’s time travel conceit: “If we start talking about it then we’re going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.” A roomful of quantum physics PhDs with a box of straws and infinite whiteboards would be similarly challenged to chart out Tenet’s story and universe. Christopher Nolan’s great insight is to not handwave everything swirling around John David Washington’s protagonist (helpfully named “Protagonist”) but to give the audience just as much information as the character has, creating a delicate balance of bafflement and hunger for more.
A propulsive spy film shot seemingly generated by a postmodernist perspective-hopping and time-shifting warp engine, Tenet sends Protagonist (John David Washington) hurtling through an intergenerational war being waged in the modern day by unknown future forces. A CIA operative recruited to a mysterious coalition defending the present, he sets out on a very Bondian mission: Find out what a thuggish Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh, gnashing the scenery) is doing with deadly doodads that might trigger the apocalypse, and in the process rescue the blonde wife in distress (Elizabeth Debicki) while enjoying the glories of Amalfi and getting up to spy shenanigans with his hyper-capable buddy Neil (Robert Pattinson). This leads to multiple set pieces, including a deftly choreographed opera house shootout that, on their own, would stand as the decade’s most spectacular.
However, Tenet‘s uniqueness does not derive from how Nolan executes the ballet of machines and people. It breaks from most films about time travel or multiple dimensions by weaving everything into the present moment. As an action-film prelude of sorts to the quantum dizziness of Oppenheimer, it places people and objects in the same frame while they travel along different time coordinates. Thus, the bullets and cars run backward while everything around them moves forward. A climactic battle in a deserted Soviet research city features a “temporal pincer movement” where different squads attack from opposite timelines, a concept which compels as much as it confounds.
A tactical puzzle that rewards repeat viewings both for the wonderment of its speed and grace, Tenet never feels dry or overly mathematical, given the kernel of hopefulness at its core. When Neil assures the Protagonist “The bomb that doesn’t go off is more powerful than the one that does,” it stands as a kind of rebuke to the modern nihilism that Nolan’s sub rosa optimism pushes back on.
3: Inception (2010)
It’s hard to know how seriously to take the rumors that Christopher Nolan has a shot at the James Bond franchise. Regardless of the Broccoli family’s openness to his final-cut demands, Inception is where Nolan shows his indebtedness to 007 while cutting free of the comic-film carapace.
A corporate espionage thriller that wears its science fiction elements lightly, it revels in the high-end lifestyle—gleaming residences, smart suits, private planes, bespoke tech and weaponry—of its suave operatives as they jet from Paris to Kyoto and Mombasa. This sleekly appealing package helps transmit the script’s mind-wrenching knottiness about the assignment taken by Leonardo DiCaprio’s operatives of “incepting” into a target’s dreamworld, which not infrequently resembles set-pieces from Bond films.
With its rare marriage of slick mechanics and high-concept abstract plotting—the specifics of the operatives’ dives through layers of the subconscious are painstakingly described and yet still veer into muzzy incomprehension—Inception often doesn’t know where to stop. An extended sequence on a snowy mountaintop fortress where the team battles the target’s mental defense mechanisms (visualized as white-uninformed gunmen) sprawls a good ten minutes past its welcome.
The showoff moments which do work—a dream Paris folding into itself, gravity-free kung fu fighting, paradoxical Escher stairways—more than compensate, particularly the pleasingly heist film-like ensemble surrounding the haunted DiCaprio (Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s stolid nerdiness, Elliot Page’s wide-eyed earnestness, Tom Hardy’s witty suavity). Nolan balances out the story’s fantastical kick with a ghostly heartstopper of a backstory that gives a real-world weight to all the chases and tricky maneuvers, ensuring that the cliffhanger of a last shot leaves even a repeat viewer breathless.
2: Interstellar (2014)
After the drudgery of The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan could have taken the back-to-basics approach and pulled a Soderbergh by knocking out a brainy but no-frills pulp actioner without a single gadget or need for suspension of belief. Instead, he went maximalist with this heartstoppingly gorgeous epic whose sharp Kubrickian transcendence is shot through with light humor and pulsating romanticism. Interstellar marked a turning point for the director as he shifted fully into major event filmmaking, where each new work seemed to be trying to top his previous work.
The gleaming, burnished cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema (who also shot Nolan’s next four films) was leagues beyond Pfister’s sharp but more conventional filming style. The plot about humanity straining to flee an environmentally depleted future Earth to the stars threaded a keening, potent father-daughter bond through its apocalyptic dread, nested inside a quantum physics-mediated ghost story, without losing its bearings.
Though centered around a heroic male engineer-farmer-test pilot Matthew McConaughey (set at near-full McConaughey), Interstellar also features some of Nolan’s first decently written female characters (one played by Nolan ensemble regular Anne Hathaway and another inhabited at different ages by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn) who were able to wrench some of the attention away from the men.
Some aspects are familiar, particularly using a cross-planetary voyage to elevate a broken familial bond—see James Gray’s Ad Astra (2019), or more closely Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997), also co-starring McConaughey. Others may feel dated if viewed uncharitably; the government’s rationing and anti-space exploration propaganda could be read as a strawman for Elon Musk-style tech overlord fantasy. Some may, incredible as it seems, be stoically unmoved by Michael Caine’s orotund delivery of Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night” as heroic astronauts blast out into the cold, dark unknown. Those who go for the ride, however, will never look back.
1: Memento (2000)
Memento could have been Nolan’s Citizen Kane, a rule-breaking head-snapper of a high-concept film that other directors would be ripping off for years to come. Since Nolan was more willing to work in the system than Orson Welles—who, after his boy-wonder phase, spent more of his focus on not paying his tab at Ma Maison than he did finishing scripts—Memento was proof of concept more than the film he would forever be trying to top.
The tightly-knotted psychological noir (based on a short story by Nolan’s brother Jonathan) follows Leonard (Guy Pearce), a man with anterograde amnesia, which keeps him from creating any new memories past the murder of his wife. Launched on a crusade fractalized by a lack of continuity beyond the reminders tattooed across his body and notes scribbled on Polaroids, Leonard blows through the film with a single-minded purpose which Nolan hints early on is shaded by something beyond a quest for justice. “You don’t know who you are … or what you’ve become,” snarks Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), who is either Leonard’s doomed friend or the guy luring him into a trap.
Memento’s dense yet clearly articulated structure received most of the attention, with Nolan working backward to deconstruct every aspect of why Leonard believes what he believes. The lattice of clues and cross-references embedded in Leonard’s stumbling exploration of a criminal underworld he barely understands has the pulpy attraction of a clockwork thriller. However, it’s the psychological and moral questions at the root of his mania that give the film its still-remarkable staying power.