All 12 Christopher Nolan movies ranked by someone who finds many of them pretty dull

Oppenheimer, the latest film by Christopher Nolan, is out now in theaters. Many of his passionate fans are out there celebrating his extensive filmography. But how about an alternate perspective?

I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider looking in at the Nolan fandom. I’ve watched most of his movies and I can see how much care and craft go into them. He dabbles in franchises but often brings new ideas to the screen, which I appreciate.

And I’ve really enjoyed some of his films! But others I fins sort of dreary and boring. So while I’m happy that so many people seem to adore them, I’m not a super-fan. I’m barely a normal fan.

And that’s the perspective I bring to this list: a guy who thinks Nolan is a nifty director who made several movies that were still kinda dull. Let’s ride that wave into the rankings:

12. Following

Released in 1998, Following is a modern noir thriller about a young writer who starts following around a thief in the hope that he will inspire a novel. This is Nolan’s first movie and it shows. The photography is evocative but on the cheap side, the acting is solid but not fantastic, etc.

I’m gonna pick on Following that much; it’s Nolan’s first film and it was made for very little money, so of course it’s a little rough around the edges. Nolan does demonstrate good instincts for working with actors and for building suspense, instincts that will serve him well later in his career.

11. Tenet

Of Nolan’s more recent films, this is one that even many fans agree doesn’t quite measure up. Tenet is an example of a kind of film Nolan returns to again and again: the puzzle box, the movie that is less a piece of entertainment to be enjoyed than a puzzle to be solved. You could also slot Memento and Inception into this category. But while those films are fun enough that we want to solve the puzzle, Tenet gets lost under the weight of its own mythology.

Nolan indulges in a lot of bad habits here. There’s a ton of esoteric terminology, and we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the characters mean when they discuss inversions and turnstiles and entropy. And it’s not always easy to hear them, because Nolan has a habit of mixing dialogue in a way that makes it sound muffled and indistinct. I understand that he wants it to sound realistic, but if I’m to have any hope of understanding all the arcane rules that govern time travel in this movie, I need to hear what the characters are saying about them.

As usual, the photography is gorgeous and the actors committed. And the movie is still watchable. I don’t think any Christopher Nolan movies are so bad as to not be worth your time, but not all of them rise to the occasion. Tenet feels like a cinematic exercise that never becomes a movie.