Every Christopher Nolan Movie, Ranked
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Christopher Nolan has made 12 movies in 25 years, an impressive feat considering the scope of his pictures—they're often sprawling spectacles, built around innovative set pieces and impressive ensemble casts. The director who reinvigorated the superhero genre (Christian Bale's Batman, we miss you!) wasn't always a big Hollywood player, of course—his first two films were critically acclaimed indie thrillers.
While Nolan is now best known for making vast, ambitious popcorn thrillers for the multiplex crowd, he's maintained a throughline in his impressive filmography: he tells smart, challenging stories about time, memory and power, and the ways in which all three can impact a person’s soul. These are themes he loves to examine, no matter how impossibly large the film's scale. To celebrate the release of his groundbreaking historical drama Oppenheimer, here's a ranking of the films he's made so far.
12. The Dark Knight Rises
The final film in his Dark Knight trilogy (and its weakest link), Nolan brings out his nearly broken-down Batman for one last battle—this time going head-to-head against the imposing Bane, who seeks to destroy Gotham by breaking it down into chaos.
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11. Following
Nolan's debut film follows (literally) a man who wanders around London, tracking strangers in an effort to learn about their lives—but keeping his distance as a voyeur. But he breaks his own rules when he gets too close to a serial burglar whose petty crimes disguise a much darker secret.
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9. Tenet
Nolan’s much anticipated eleventh movie is the kind of ambitious intellectual blockbuster that has become his trademark. Tenet stars John David Washington as a CIA agent tasked with stopping an impending apocalypse, which is imminent because a supervillain has discovered a way to “invert” the entropy of weapons, meaning they can travel backwards through time and wreak unthinkable chaos. It’s a mind-boggling, smartly written puzzle of a movie that’s hampered by its thinly written characters.
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8. Interstellar
Nolan examines the philosophical concepts of space and time in this sci-fi epic, set in a dystopian future in which a team of astronauts (including Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway) travel through a wormhole to find a habitable planet that can save humanity from a dying Earth.
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8. Insomnia
Another film about a protagonist's descent into madness thanks to the unsettling conditions of his surroundings, this time starring Al Pacino as a cop hunting a serial killer (Robin Williams) in a small Alaskan town where the sun never fully sets.
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7. Oppenheimer
Real life can resemble a Chistopher Nolan movie too! In Nolan’s first biopic, he finds a subject–in J. Robert Oppenheimer–who is all the things he loves in a protagonist: brilliant, dashingly handsome, haunted, and undone by his own obsessions. Naturally, Nolan twists time and space to make Oppenheimer’s life move like a Christopher Nolan movie, too. The result is an endlessly propulsive, awesomely explosive spectacle that places nuclear concerns back in the Zeitgeist, and interrogates one of history’s most nuanced figures.—Max Cea
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6. Dunkirk
Incorporating an ensemble cast to tell the story of the evacuation of British soldiers from a seaside French town in the middle of WWII, Dunkirk proves that Nolan is a master when it comes to tension. His taut version of a war epic comes in under two hours, with the auteur putting a tight focus on the thrilling fight for survival.
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5. The Prestige
Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale play two feuding stage magicians obsessed with their craft—and with one-upping each other—in this lush thriller that also features David Bowie as inventor Nikola Tesla.
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4. Inception
A mind-blowing movie experience, Inception sees Nolan returning to his more cerebral plot-driven work while also upping his game when it comes to dazzling filmmaking techniques. It's also one of his stronger ensembles, featuring a large cast of characters that all feel fully formed and integral to the narrative.
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3. Batman Begins
The first in his Dark Knight Trilogy, Nolan not only relaunched the Batman film franchise—he also single-handedly changed the superhero genre forever, bringing a gritty realism to the Gotham's shadowy defender (who, you know, is still just a dude who's running around in tights and a cape).
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2. The Dark Knight
Undisputedly the best superhero movie ever made (and the best comic book adaptation), Nolan's supercharged film feels more like a crime epic—elevated by the late Heath Ledger's tour-de-force (and Oscar-winning) performance as the maniacal Joker.
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1. Memento
Nolan's breakthrough film is a dizzyingly narrative feat—a noir told in reverse, as its main character (Guy Pearce) attempts to track down his wife's murderer despite his inability to form new memories. Nolan and his brother (Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan) earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay.
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