TV & Beyond on 2025-06-11 11:10:00

by | Jun 11, 2025 | TV & Beyond Articles | 0 comments

TV & Beyond on 2025-06-11 11:10:00

may be one of the more ambitious superhero movies ever made. The hugely anticipated follow-up to the zeitgeist (and box office) shattering “The Dark Knight” had impossible shoes to fill, and it was not only missing the perfect cultural magnitude of its predecessor’s release but also had a striking Heath Ledger-sized gap to overcome.

The result is a film that plays as a perfunctory obligation, with Nolan and co-writers Jonathan Nolan and David S. Goyer cramming disparate Batman lore and weighty, elusive themes into a hodgepodge that’s difficult to parse. This is especially true watching the film at home years down the line and away from where Nolan’s films really shine: on a towering IMAX screen with a booming in-theater sound system. That setting affords this film’s action set pieces some admirable gravitas, and Nolan’s ability to assemble a marvel of an immense sensory experience is undeniable. But it’s all in service of a film that gets in over its head trying to find a meaningful way to wrap this up as an overarching franchise, as opposed to the conclusive lightning-in-a-bottle that was achieved with the film that came prior.

11. Following

Alex Haw as Cobb in Following, looking off out of frame.

Momentum Pictures

Nolan’s first film is one of the great directorial calling cards, not just in terms of technical proficiency but in establishing thematic preoccupations and hallmarks that he would continue to elaborate on throughout his career. This nano-budget, twisty 70-minute neo-noir marks Nolan’s interests right from the jump: tortured professionals that live by strict codes and the fallout that occurs when they break them, non-linear storytelling structure, and a femme fatale that serves as a tragic emotional impediment to the protagonist. Nolan would only truly revisit the neo-noir genre once more after this movie with “Memento,” but many of his tormented protagonists are marked by the same sense of fatalism that guides “Following” along its satisfying, familiar path of genre tropes.

As an amateur production with a budget of just $6000, you can identify the seams in the filmmaking, and the plot revelations aren’t the most staggering you’ll ever find in a noir. But it’s fascinating watching the man who would later become known as one of our most intricate blockbuster technicians operating within such a similar mindframe on something this scrappy.

10. Insomnia

Robin Williams as Walter Finch and Al Pacino as Will Dormer sitting side by side in the interior of a boat out on the water in Insomnia.

Warner Bros.

“Insomnia” is the antithesis of “Following,” in that it’s perhaps the one film in the Nolan canon that doesn’t necessarily feel like it belongs to him to any meaningful degree, besides being proficiently made. The source material definitely didn’t belong to him, as  this is a remake of the 1997 Norwegian thriller of the same name, directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg. Working off a screenplay by Hillary Seitz, “Insomnia” represents a period when studios knew Nolan was seasoned enough to take on a mid-budget Al Pacino and Robin Williams-starring procedural, and he was early enough in his career to take it on.

To that end, “Insomnia” feels like the culmination of others’ work more than Nolan’s, but this is still a handsomely mounted crime programmer all the same, with characteristically great work put in from Pacino and a terrific against-type role for Williams. The two make for unexpected but effective foils to one another, as Pacino attempts to unravel a local murder case set against the perennial daylight of a small Alaskan town, a nifty concept to layer onto a tense cat-and-mouse thriller that never quite coalesces into anything revelatory. Still, there’s plenty of surface-level pleasures to mine from this modestly-scoped potboiler, and a nice reminder of a time when studios would reliably finance this sort of dependable prestige thriller for adults. For what it’s worth, Nolan himself believes its his most underrated movie.

9. Batman Begins

A side-profile of Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman, staring down out of frame with a smoky city populating the background.

Warner Bros.

Following “Insomnia,” Nolan continued what would become a longstanding relationship with Warner Bros. when they tapped him to rehabilitate perhaps their biggest comic-book character, who had been retired since the abysmal public response to “Batman & Robin.” Nolan’s interpretation of Batman brings the character into a more serious post-9/11 world, situating the Caped Crusader in a particularly gothic-influenced Gotham, pitting him against a frightening iteration of The Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy, who would become a frequent Nolan collaborator) and assigning the role of Bruce Wayne to Christian Bale, who imbues a moody solemnity into the tortured billionaire/freelance bat-dressed enforcer.

Although he would drill down the grittiness that became a trademark of Nolan’s influence on the Batman character with “The Dark Knight,” “Batman Begins” notably retains a heightened, comic-like perspective, despite its darker tone, having been inspired by a very different DC film. It attempts an occasionally lopsided balance between what the world understood superhero movies to be and Nolan’s vision of an earnest crime thriller. It works more often than it doesn’t, even if this is one of the few occasions where Nolan stumbles when it comes to staging engaging action set pieces. Still, this movie’s depiction of Wayne’s training and his adoption of the Batman persona is one of the more memorable depictions of the character we’ve seen put to film.

8. Dunkirk

Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton, in uniform standing by the sea with another officer behind him as he looks off into the distance behind the camera.

Warner Bros.

“Dunkirk” feels like Nolan at his most elemental, as our foremost commander of a colossal sense of cinematic immersion takes on his own war epic, a natural prospect for a director whose interest in history and proclivity toward films of a massive scale make him a prime candidate for a World War II picture. “Dunkirk” sees his regular sense of grandeur and analog splendor repurposed to fit a film that prioritizes the pure, organic terror of human bodies trying to survive a war zone, as opposed to any intricate plot mechanics that may typically define a Nolan feature.

Even with an extended ensemble of Nolan regulars (Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy) and new players (Kenneth Branagh, Barry Keoghan and Fionn Whitehead) alike, it’s Hoyte van Hoytema’s camera and Hans Zimmer’s typically huge score that take center stage here, documenting and soundtracking the struggle of the historic Dunkirk evacuation from cross-cutting perspectives that are all able to sing thanks to the marriage of physical performance and striking compositions that are assembled. Nolan strips away his more convoluted complications to craft an overwhelming sensory experience that’s as staggering as it is succinct. The film is uncharacteristically short at under 2 hours, but Nolan packs it with magnificent craft in the employment of harrowing material that focuses on understated heroism.

7. Tenet

John David Washington as The Protagonist in Tenet, wearing an oxygen mask and looking off behind the camera.

Warner Bros.

Most audiences likely have a strange relationship with “Tenet,” as it was the first major studio tentpole to open after global lockdown orders were abandoned in 2020, while Covid rates were still regularly spiking to dangerous degrees. That’s to say, a bunch of people didn’t actually go to the movie theater to see “Tenet,” which is famously how Nolan would prefer you to watch his movies. This is relevant because the film has divided audiences since release, with detractors regularly criticizing the film’s oblique plot mechanics that seem to have amounted to Nolan getting a little high on his own supply, which is not an ideal outcome for the film that carries the highest production budget for any of Nolan’s original films.

However, “Tenet” has developed a passionate cult fanbase, or as “cult” of a fanbase that a Nolan movie could possibly have. It’s something of an inverse to “Dunkirk” yet ironically achieves the same effect: Whereas “Dunkirk” eliminated any involved plotting, “Tenet” intentionally over-complicates its time-inversion narrative, crafting a sci-fi-crime-thriller-buddy movie between stars John David Washington and Robert Pattinson that encourages you to “just feel it,” as explained to Washington in the film. Once you give yourself over to it, you’re treated to some of Nolan’s most satisfying, bravura set-pieces that have to do with characters moving forward and backward in time, with a surprisingly touching friendship narrative tucked into the margins. It’s Nolan at his most bewildering and his most purely propulsive, accomplishing primal cinematic thrills through the lens of brainy conceptualizing. Nolan asserts that if you’re overthinking it, you’re missing the point.

6. Memento

Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby in Memento, observing his tattooed body in a mirror.

Newmarket

Nolan’s “Following” successor finds him making another neo-noir, but this time it’s a movie with an actual budget, stars, and the type of twisting, high-concept structure that represents some of the mind-bending ideas that would define works to come later down the line. 

Guy Pearce plays a man suffering from a form of amnesia that prevents him from forming short-term memories, something particularly inconvenient as he’s in the midst of a journey to track down the man who murdered his wife. The film communicates his headspace by playing events in reverse, while cutting back to a key chronological sequence in black-and-white, fully delineating Nolan’s fascination with time manipulation and separating varying parts of a narrative via color.

Similar to “Following,” “Memento” is rather quaint compared to later Nolan projects, but it’s still defined by now-longstanding hallmarks of his filmography, including being centered around a tortured male protagonist trapped by his own psyche. While the overarching conceit can occasionally play as a bit too caught up in its own cleverness, it is pretty dang clever, and there’s a ton of implicit appeal wrapped up in how the film can press its plot forward while telling its story backwards with its unique structure. Made before Nolan would go full prestige, the underbelly of the world Pearce explores here makes this feel more adjacent to a Fincher-type grimy procedural like “Se7en,” giving the film a refreshing edge that would later be excised from the director’s preferred vision.

5. Interstellar

Matthew McConaughey as Joseph "Coop" Cooper in Interstellar, suited up in his astronaut gear, looking intently out of frame.

Warner Bros.

No matter your thoughts about the sentimental perspective of “Interstellar” on love as an all-powerful force that can transcend space and time, since its release, it has established a certifiable standing as one of sci-fi’s greatest modern spectacles, with some of the most astonishing outer space photography ever blasted onto IMAX screens. Nolan synthesizes his prominence as one of our leading cinematic technicians with his role as a father to deliver his most heart-wrenching pageantry to date.

It’s a different mode for a filmmaker whose meticulous engineering of his work can often lead to a frigid distance from his nonetheless anguished protagonists. But here, it’s hard not to watch Matthew McConaughey welling up into tears seeing his suddenly grown-up daughter on the monitor of his space vessel without feeling a corresponding lump in your own throat. Comparisons are easily thrown around between “Interstellar” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” not just because of the outer space setting but because of how Nolan’s fastidious handling of his craft matches the scrupulous endeavors of Stanley Kubrick, but “Interstellar” locates a tender compassion for the human condition within all that detail, in a way that he’s never again communicated with such a level of grace. “Interstellar” may just be his emotional masterpiece.

4. Inception

Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb talking to Elliot Page as Ariadne in Inception at an outdoor cafe.

Warner Bros.

There may be no greater example of Nolan’s ability to deliver event, blockbuster cinema rooted in intellectual cerebrality than “Inception,” his “The Dark Knight” follow-up that cemented him as one of the few mainstream working directors that studios could sell to a general audience based purely on name alone. In his biggest original work to date, Nolan reached all the way back to his “Following” roots, borrowing the name Cobb from that film for Leonardo DiCaprio’s dream-infiltrating espionage agent, heightening the voyeuristic compulsions that underline “Following” by having his character now literally enter his targets’ subconscious.

It’s a fairly heady concept to throw behind a $160 million blockbuster, with “Inception” based on Nolan’s lifelong fascination with the link between dreams and movies, which is why it’s all the more impressive just how damn thrilling it is to this day, despite the excess of table-setting exposition to make sure the audience understands the mechanics of the dream-delving conceit. Perhaps that’s a necessary evil, as by the time the film reaches its intricate climax of our dream agents diving through numerous subsensory layers of their targets to plant an idea in the mind of their objective, Nolan has educated you to such a degree that you can happily sit back and take in the thrill of remarkable tactile set-piece design. The legacy of “Inception” is etched in the general consciousness — to this day, people use the term to describe events or ideas layered on top of each other — and that speaks to a film whose enthralling nature persists in the dreams of audiences.

3. The Dark Knight

Heath Ledger as The Joker, looking menacingly off behind the camera while in a jail cell.

Warner Bros.

It’s hard to think of a time before “The Dark Knight,” Nolan’s comic-book opus that would redefine the very notion of the genre. It’s an understatement to say that general audiences had never really seen a live-action blockbuster superhero movie as depicted here, indebted less to the light-hearted or campy wonderment that previously defined these films and instead more so defined by a darker reckoning with a post-9/11 America. Plus, familiar to Nolan action movies, it’s stylistically analogous to the street-level tactical grit of Michael Mann. Its prominence in pop culture would be easy to write off as oversaturated if it didn’t still feel like an incredible anomaly to this day, despite the immediate copycats that would follow in its wake. Its sobering tone and visceral nature are a far cry from increasingly artificial-feeling comic-book fare.

Of course, much of that has to do with the late Heath Ledger as The Joker, one of the most famously, endlessly referenced and recognizable film performances of all time. Ledger’s unwavering commitment to his role is laid bare in an immortalized screen performance that’s typically seen as the de facto greatest on-screen version of the Joker. Ledger’s villain is a timeless, towering figure, the greatest encapsulation of Batman’s most famous foe, amplified by the Nolan brothers’ understanding of the interdependent relationship between this hero and villain, and the blurry boundary where they stop looking like enemies and more like inverses of the same person. How the film handles its broad political signifiers about a world overrun with a fascist response to crime and terror is a worthy discussion, but as an object of pure, filmic dynamism, there aren’t a lot of experiences like “The Dark Knight.”

2. The Prestige

Hugh Jackman as Robert "The Great Danton" Angier, softly smiling while looking out of frame in The Prestige.

Warner Bros.

Of all of the Nolan features that feel like they belong distinctly to him, “The Prestige” seems to be the one that gets the most neglected. At release, it was only a modest box office hit, even though it’s up there as one of his absolute best. The director re-teamed with some of his “Batman Begins” cast in Christian Bale and Michael Caine to tell a story about Bale and Hugh Jackman as two rival magicians, separated by class and temperament, who enter into a hostile rivalry as they each vie for the attention of the public via increasingly escalating, mystifying magic tricks.

A story about competing Victorian-era magicians has its roots in something a bit more wacky, and the Nolan brothers’ screenplay is happy to give in to some of the more ridiculous nature of dueling illusionists with story elements involving elaborate disguises and secret identities. But the reason “The Prestige” works so well is the somber, raging core at the center of it, as Nolan is no doubt documenting elements of his own psyche in a film about obsessive showmen who, at their core, want nothing more than to dazzle an audience. In style, it now feels like a proto-“Oppenheimer,” documenting a masculine obsession with world-renowned achievement at the expense of ethics, via a propulsive, time-hopping structure. Nolan wouldn’t truly announce himself as a craftsman of huge spectacle until his following films, but “The Prestige” may be his most perceptive admission as an artist.

1. Oppenheimer

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, giving a university lesson in Oppenheimer.

Universal

With an excess of trust from studios and audiences as someone who has made some of the most impressive and consistently profitable, hugely budgeted movies of all time, Nolan took all his goodwill and made a three-hour biopic about the man who created the atomic bomb. It speaks to his artistry that not only did general audiences eat up this pressure-cooker political thriller that mostly features men talking in rooms, but that out of all the accomplishments of his career, this is the best movie that Nolan has made.

“Oppenheimer” catches Nolan at his most existentially terrified, adapting Kai Bird’s and Martin J. Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus” into a kinetic sensory rush documenting the most tortured man he could think to put to screen: J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), whose deadly obsession with the scientific potential of creating a successful atomic bomb instills a myopic perspective in which a theoretical scientist forgets the tangible horrors that such an invention would engender. It’s at once a thrilling and sullen film, eulogizing a world that has lost its innocence and is perpetually on the brink of destruction through the lens of Nolan’s recognizable preoccupations: psychological wounds, single-minded fixation, and the anguish of professionals told on the largest canvas possible. 

“Oppenheimer” isn’t just Nolan’s greatest feat, it serves as the greatest distillation of his entire ethos, the most Christopher Nolan movie that Christopher Nolan has ever made.

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