Arguably the most influential film director of the 21st century, Christopher Nolan is a British-American filmmaker, known for his complex Hollywood blockbusters. Constantly delivering unparalleled cerebral thrills and often taking risks with bold sci-fi ideas, his films have grossed over $5 billion worldwide. The recipient of many accolades, he has been nominated for five Academy Awards, five British Academy Film Awards and six Golden Globe Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time, and in 2019, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to film.
Cast List:
Christian Bale as Batman
Heath Ledger as Joker
Gary Oldman as James Gordon
Aaron Eckhart as Two-Face
Michael Caine as Alfred Pennyworth
Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox
Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes
Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow
Date Released:
July 18, 2008
“Batman” isn’t a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about. That’s because of the performances, because of the direction, because of the writing, and because of the superlative technical quality of the entire production. This film, and to a lesser degree “Iron Man,” redefine the possibilities of the “comic-book movie.”
“The Dark Knight” is not a simplistic tale of good and evil. Batman is good, yes, The Joker is evil, yes. But Batman poses a more complex puzzle than usual: The citizens of Gotham City are in an uproar, calling him a vigilante and blaming him for the deaths of policemen and others. And the Joker is more than a villain. He’s a Mephistopheles whose actions are fiendishly designed to pose moral dilemmas for his enemies.
The key performance in the movie is by the late Heath Ledger, as the Joker. Will he become the first posthumous Oscar winner since Peter Finch? His Joker draws power from the actual inspiration of the character in the silent classic “The Man Who Laughs” (1928). His clown's makeup more sloppy than before, his cackle betraying deep wounds, he seeks revenge, he claims, for the horrible punishment his father exacted on him when he was a child. In one diabolical scheme near the end of the film, he invites two ferry-loads of passengers to blow up the other before they are blown up themselves. Throughout the film, he devises ingenious situations that force Batman (Christian Bale), Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to make impossible ethical decisions. By the end, the whole moral foundation of the Batman legend is threatened.
Cast List:
Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur
Tom Hardy as Eames
Elliot Page as Ariadne
Ken Watanabe as Saito
Michael Caine as Prof. Stephen Miles
Marion Cotillard as Mal
Cillian Murphy as Fischer
Date Released:
July 13, 2010
It's said that Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing his screenplay for "Inception." That must have involved prodigious concentration, like playing blindfold chess while walking a tight-wire. The film's hero tests a young architect by challenging her to create a maze, and Nolan tests us with his own dazzling maze. We have to trust him that he can lead us through, because much of the time we're lost and disoriented. Nolan must have rewritten this story time and again, finding that every change had a ripple effect down through the whole fabric.
The story can either be told in a few sentences, or not told at all. Here is a movie immune to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew how it got there. And telling you how it got there would produce bafflement. The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It's a breathtaking juggling act, and Nolan may have considered his "Memento" (2000) a warm-up; he apparently started this screenplay while filming that one. It was the story of a man with short-term memory loss, and the story was told backwards.
Like the hero of that film, the viewer of "Inception" is adrift in time and experience. We can never even be quite sure what the relationship between dream time and real time is. The hero explains that you can never remember the beginning of a dream, and that dreams that seem to cover hours may only last a short time. Yes, but you don't know that when you're dreaming. And what if you're inside another man's dream? How does your dream time synch with his? What do you really know?
Cast List:
Elizabeth Bebicki as Kat
John David Washington as Protagonist
Robert Pattinson as Neil
Clemence Poesy as Laura
Kenneth Branagh as Andrei Sator
Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Ives
Himesh Patel as Mahir
Michael Caine as Michael Crosby
Date Released:
August 12, 2020
No one could possibly mistake “Tenet” as being by anyone but Christopher Nolan. First, it has the kind of budget that only Nolan could get for an original screenplay. There’s so much money in every bursting frame of this opulent film that a scene in which gold bars are literally dumped on a runway feels almost like a self-referential wink. Second, it contains one of those time-twisting narratives that have defined the Nolan brand, one that blends robust action sequences with high-concept stories that viewers have to legitimately strain to follow. Finally, at times, it even seems to echo previous Nolan projects like an album of remastered greatest hits.
“Tenet” wastes no time, dropping viewers into an attack on a symphony performance in Kiev and barely allowing anyone to get oriented. One of the agents sent in to retrieve a high-profile asset during the assault is a man known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington, proving more than capable of carrying a blockbuster film with his charismatic performance). Our hero is captured by the enemy, tortured, and takes a cyanide capsule, as he was ordered to do in training. He survives, and his allegiance to the system and his orders leads to a promotion of sorts, a top-secret assignment that involves a new technology that has the potential to literally rewrite human history.
The Protagonist is taken to a remote facility and introduced to the concept of inverted objects. We look at an object and it is traveling forward through time along with us. That’s obvious from elementary school science class. But what if an object could go in the other direction through history instead? Apparently, objects have been doing exactly this, and the Powers That Be need to control it because if a bullet could be sent back through time, what happens if a nuclear weapon takes the same trip?
Cast List:
Matthew McConaughey as Cooper
Jessica Chastain as Murph
Anne Hathaway as Brand
Mackenzie Foy as Murph
Timothee Chalamet as Tom
Matt Damon as Mann
John Lithgow as Donald
Michael Caine as Professor Brand
Date Released:
October 26, 2014
Christopher Nolan’s "Interstellar," about astronauts traveling to the other end of the galaxy to find a new home to replace humanity’s despoiled home-world, is frantically busy and earsplittingly loud. It uses booming music to jack up the excitement level of scenes that might not otherwise excite. It features characters shoveling exposition at each other for almost three hours, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they’re mouthpieces for techno-babble and philosophical debate. And for all of the director’s activism on behalf of shooting on film, the tactile beauty of the movie’s 35mm and 65mm textures isn’t matched by a sense of composition. The camera rarely tells the story in Nolan’s movies. More often it illustrates the screenplay, and there are points in this one where I felt as if I was watching the most expensive NBC pilot ever made.
While "Interstellar" never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that's unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant. There's a ghost in this film, writing out messages to the living in dust. Characters strain to interpret distant radio messages as if they were ancient texts written in a dead language, and stare through red-rimmed eyes at video messages sent years ago, by people on the other side of the cosmos. "Interstellar" features a family haunted by the memory of a dead mother and then an absent father; a woman haunted by the memory of a missing father, and another woman who's separated from her own dad (and mentor), and driven to reunite with a lover separated from her by so many millions of miles that he might as well be dead.
The movie's storytelling masterstroke comes from adherence to principles of relativity: the astronauts perceive time differently depending on where Endurance is, which means that when they go down onto a prospective habitable world, a few minutes there equal weeks or months back on the ship. Meanwhile, on Earth, everyone is aging and losing hope. Under such circumstances, even tedious housekeeping-type exchanges become momentous: one has to think twice before arguing about what to do next, because while the argument is happening, people elsewhere are going grey, or suffering depression from being alone, or withering and dying. Here, more so than in any other Nolan film (and that's saying a lot), time is everything. "I'm an old physicist," Brand tells Cooper early in the film. "I'm afraid of time." Time is something we all fear. There's a ticking clock governing every aspect of existence, from the global to the familial. Every act by every character is an act of defiance, born of a wish to not go gently.