After thirteen films, writer and director Christopher Nolan has become the prolific director of our time. It’s extraordinary to think he’s long escaped the bat-shaped shadow of his “The Dark Knight” Trilogy, making him the rare director to embark on a major superhero franchise only to, in retrospect, have it feel like a relatively minor phase of a varied and wildly successful career.
His films have voyaged from the further corners of our minds to the reaches of space, with each project igniting surprise as much as anticipation. People doubted “Dunkirk” could be a straightforward World War II movie just as they later were puzzled by the announcement of “Oppenheimer,” only for the latter to finally win him Best Director and Best Picture at the Oscars. As is often said, he’s the rare director who has become a genre unto himself, bringing his favorite themes (time, guilt, and control) and sense of visual style (impressionistic editing, booming scores, and an agile, on-the-move camera) along with him.
With his latest, “The Odyssey,” Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem, he’s done it again, making it the perfect time to re-rank his movies and see how they stack up. Spoiler: I love all these movies.
13. “Insomnia” (2002)
The exact kind of moody neo-noir that would get stuck as a streaming miniseries if it were made today, Nolan’s studio debut “Insomnia” saw him working with movie stars on a lavish production for the first time. A remake of the eerie 1997 Swedish film that launched the Scandinavian crime wave, there are already signs of Nolan’s favorite tendencies: impressionistic editing, a steely protagonist haunted by guilt, and another recreation of the coffee scene from Michael Mann’s “Heat.” It’s less of a statement than his later work, and it’s clear Nolan is trying to blend his idiosyncratic style with a Hollywood approach, but it still plays as a gripping crime thriller that rarely gets made anymore.
12. “Following” (1998)
It’s always thrilling to watch a filmmaker’s early work and see them so fully formed, their voice already as clear. There’s Wong Kar-wai’s “As Tears Go By,” Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket,” and Christopher Nolan’s “Following.” It’s not just the non-linear structure that’s assembled like a noir jigsaw puzzle, nor the brooding protagonist, but how he assembles his films in montages of fragments and texture. He returns to objects, faces, and locations in repeating loops that form new associations, slowly building toward a twist that speaks to themes he’ll revisit again and again.
11. “The Prestige” (2006)
A movie as a magic trick, “The Prestige” is the Nolan that has gone from highest to lowest in my ranking over the years. That’s largely due to a trapdoor plot that hinges on testing your suspension of disbelief. No, I don’t mean the “are you watching closely?” twist involving (spoilers!) science fiction, but the smaller, more human touches, like the questionable mechanics of certain relationships, or the melodrama of each rival magician always being chosen in a crowd only to hurt the other. But even those issues can’t stop it from being a master class in narrative structure, and the final speech about magic is as personal a thesis on the nature of Nolan’s art as anything he’s done.
10. “Batman Begins” (2005)
Still one of the very best superhero origin stories, the first 45 minutes of “Batman Begins,” which intercuts Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) disenfranchised abroad with the death of his parents and college years, is among the best in any Nolan film – global and swashbuckling but still anchored in real emotion and gravitas. Once he returns to a grimy, crime-ridden Gotham, the film becomes a little more formulaic, but only just; Nolan’s choice to have Bruce fight a broken city by creating a bat-shaped myth to inspire change is a savvy one, turning his fears against those who prey on the fearful.
9. “Memento” (2000)
Adapted from a story idea from his brother Jonathan Nolan (who would then go on to be a frequent collaborator) about a quasi-amnesiac played by Guy Pearce, “Memento” utterly transcends what could have felt like a gimmick: it’s told backward. It’s one of the best films to ever grapple with the slipperiness of memory, a neo-noir about hunting for a killer where the facts, the case, and the protagonist are all layers of unreliable, turning the world of “Memento” into a mind palace that questions what “you” are when memory is so plastic. Even after seeing it half a dozen times, I still can’t place exactly what scene happens where, jumbling your memory along the way.
8. “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012)
The conclusion to Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” Trilogy gets a bad rap these days, but “The Dark Knight Rises” is the director at his most recklessly maximalist, making his Batman climax a riveting oddity that exists somewhere between Charles Dickens, Fritz Lang, and David Lean. Tom Hardy’s fun-to-do Bane voice is the perfect blend of silly and theatrically menacing. Still, the film’s power comes from showing a society on the brink of collapse, where a demagogue weaponizes a populace’s urgent social struggles against themselves. It may be his most misunderstood movie.
7. “The Odyssey” (2026)
As dreamily elusive as it is powerful, “The Odyssey” finds Nolan cashing his blank check after “Oppenheimer” to fully embrace an epic fantasy on a grand scale Hollywood hasn’t seen in years. It’s also a film of enormous risk. There are massive sets, armies of extras, and practical effects unlike any put on film. Still, Nolan renders Odysseus’ (Matt Damon) saga into lotus-drugged flashbacks of horror and consequence, expanding on themes not just in “Oppenheimer” but spanning his career. “The Odyssey” sometimes lurches in the stormy seas of adaptation, but a stunning third act brings it home. The cyclops sequence is as terrifying a scene as he’s ever constructed.
6. “Tenet” (2020)
Oppressive, confusing, and completely awesome, “Tenet” was exactly the wrong movie to reopen theaters in 2020 for exactly the same reason it’s thrilling to revisit now; repeat viewings let you dive further into its mazed, migraine plotting, deepening the emotion of the bromance (or love story?) between Neil (Robert Pattinson) and The Protagonist (John David Washington) with each new loop. The action is unlike anything you’ve ever seen, the bass-dropping score gets you moving in your seat, and the surreal spy movie visuals are like an inverted car crash between Hideo Kojima and John le Carré. It’s the most “dude’s rock” movie of his career.
5. “Interstellar” (2014)
In retrospect, hyping up “Interstellar” as Nolan’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” was a mistake; it was always a film more about the heart than the head. No movie in Nolan’s filmography has undergone such a massive reappraisal since release, ascending from “good but flawed” to widely seen as a masterpiece. The space epic broke the (always incorrect) label that Nolan’s work is cold and clinical, staging a sweeping yet intimate family melodrama across the stars. It’s his most richly emotional film, tangling with the human potential to reach for the impossible in opposition to the biological imperative to survive. There’s poetry at work in “Interstellar” that transcends its flaws, and I’ll never be able to watch it without crying.
4. “The Dark Knight” (2008)
As towering an achievement as the skyscrapers in Chicago’s Gotham City are tall, ”The Dark Knight” is one of the greatest action blockbusters of all time. Sometimes criticized as a grimly realistic “literal” take on the caped crusader, Nolan’s Batman exists in a world closer to Sean Connery’s James Bond than our own, full of impossible escapes and set pieces that gladly flaunt their defiance of physics. It’s one reason why “The Dark Knight” so effectively doubles as one of the great pop art mediations on post-9/11 America, working out fears around terrorism, surveillance, and heroes renegotiating their ethical lines in a safe, wildly entertaining way. Powering it all is Heath Ledger’s Joker – chaos personified, pushing the heroes and the audience to their limit.
3. “Oppenheimer” (2023)
“Oppenheimer” is a postmodern monument to Nolan’s hold over the popular culture. Only he could have turned a pointillist epic of fragmented time, memory, and guilt into a ripping blockbuster with security clearance hearings instead of shootouts or truck chases. “Oppenheimer” is haunting and bleak but also a pure entertainment, full of sharp, ear-worm dialogue and satisfying comeuppances. Its cathartic resonance extends beyond not just the creation of the atom bomb but all universal fears around technology today, from A.I. to microplastics, to the industry-caused climate change, showing that man’s very desire to invent, discover, and create are the very same traits that will doom us all.
2. “Inception” (2010)
The phenomenon of the “art house blockbuster” may well have begun with “Inception,” a dream heist on five levels of the mind that lets a runaway train barrel down streets of the subconscious. It still plays as an ingenious caper, but the soul of “Inception” is closer to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” two films about psychologically troubled men stuck in self-delusions of irreconcilable yearning. Even during the torrents of exposition, the language always hints at the fraught inner life of its protagonist, Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a narrator so unreliable that by the film’s end, each of its realities has been cast in doubt.
1. “Dunkirk” (2017)
Despite the steady rumble of explosions, “Dunkirk” is the closest thing Nolan has ever made to a silent film – a gorgeously shot and perfectly controlled exercise in escalating suspense, with Nolan forcing us into the boots of men at sea, air, and land. With barely a line of dialogue, this is Nolan reduced to his purest essence, somehow combining aspects of nearly all his films into one: it’s as mythically heroic as “The Dark Knight,” as dreamy as “Inception,” and its three time signatures make it as much a Borgesian labyrinth as “Interstellar.” Each image is a survey of behavior that shows the cause-and-effect of individuals in a warzone. By the end, they form a powerful collective in the mind, making “Dunkirk” the most epic and intimate of his films all at once.
What do you think of our list? What’s your film directed by Christopher Nolan? Have you seen “The Odyssey” yet? If so, what did you think? Please let us know in the comments section below or on Next Best Picture’s X account.
