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

8. The Dark Knight Rises

Ah, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. The Dark Knight Rises is the least of these movies, but I still like it. It’s fun almost despite Nolan’s efforts to grim it up.

This movie may be the genesis of Nolan’s habit of recording dialogue that’s hard to make out, with Bane as Patient Zero. But his garbled voice become iconic pretty quickly. To this day it’s still fun to mutter “Oh, you think darkness is your ally” to myself, so I can’t be mad at it.

Nolan overreaches with The Dark Knight Rises; the Batman universe might not be the best forum for a modernization of A Tale of Two Cities. But we still get plenty of memorable moments, including Batman’s battle with Bane, an ending that effectively wraps up a trilogy, and all those scenes in that great big hole in the desert.

I also really enjoyed Anne Hathaways take on Catwoman. Nolan has a knack for choosing actors. Just look at…

7. Insomnia

Insomnia is the only film that Nolan directed but didn’t write or co-write, and honestly, I wish it’s something he’d try more often, not because he’s a bad writer, but because working off someone else’s script — provided it’s good — keeps him focused on telling the story.

Insomnia is a remake of a Norwegian film of the same name, about a detective and killer playing a cat-and-mouse game in a place where the sun never sets. Nolan changes the location from Norway to Alaska, but the low hum of dread remains.

Nolan creates a memorably oppressive atmosphere here, but his best decision is casting Al Pacino as the detective and Robin Williams as the killer. Williams in particular is unsettling, since he’s mainly known for comic roles.

Nolan always assembles great casts for his movies. They’re a big part of the reason why they’re worth watching even if not all of them are to my taste.