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

4. Inception

As you can tell from my blurbs about Tenet and Interstellar, I’m not a huge fan of Nolan’s uber-ambitious sci-fi fantasies, but there are exceptions to every rule.

Inception, about a group of people who invade the dreams to others to steal information and sell it to the highest bidder, has some of the Nolan-isms that usually make me roll my eyes, namely the wonky explanations of the rules that govern how deep into a dream you go, and how you get out, and who needs to stay behind and for how long, etc. But everything runs a little more smoothly in Inception, and the visuals are worth enduring the jargon. The sight of a city folding in on itself has stuck with me ever since I saw this in theaters.

There’s also more of a personal hook, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s lead dream thief being plagued by unwanted intrusions from his deceased wife Mal, played with vampy conviction by Marion Cotillard. It could still loosen up a bit, but Inception is a good time that toys with the audience in the right ways.

3. Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s newest movie is a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American scientist credited with creating the atomic bomb. Obviously, Nolan doesn’t give us a normal biopic. The movie flits around in time, showing us by turns Oppenheimer’s early days as a student, his time as professor, developing the bomb in Los Alamos, getting grilled by the government years after the war was over, and another hearing years after that where a backstabbing bureaucrat played by Robert Downey Jr. gets his comeuppance.

In the first half of the movie, it’s hard to see where Nolan is going with all of this, but Oppenheimer gains focus and intensity after the sequence where they successfully test the bomb, which is masterfully put together. Nolan effectively gets across the existential terror and triumph of this moment.

It’s a little odd that it’s followed up by a hard-nosed legal drama, but at least it’s a compelling hard-nosed legal drama. And Nolan widens the scope again at the end. So far as historical movies go, Oppenheimer is more moving and less compromised than Dunkirk.