“Inception” (2010)
Honestly, until we sat down in the theater, we expected “Inception” to be Nolan’s “Heaven’s Gate” — an expensive indulgent folly, the kind of film directors all too often fall to after being given carte blanche to make whatever they like. But we’d forgotten that Nolan had been working on the screenplay for a decade, and had honed his skills to a greater level than ever before, because “Inception” is an absolute triumph, and the culmination of everything the director’s career until then had been building towards. A deeply personal art film disguised — and also working brilliantly as — a giant summer blockbuster, it sees Nolan focus in on a bold science-fiction idea: implanting an idea in someone’s mind by entering their dreams. But while many would use that pitch as an excuse for Lynchian imagery up the wazoo, Nolan gives it his meticulous attention to detail and rules-setting, creating a clear and satisfying universe that, nevertheless, has enough texture that it doesn’t become airless. He engages deeply with big concepts; about where ideas come from, about the function of dreams and consciousness, about love, grief and closure. And yet the film is consistently entertaining, a pacy caper film with cracking action sequences (the director finally nailing that side of filmmaking), that also doubles as a brilliantly thought out metaphor for the movie-making process itself. We can see how some can grate against the exposition, although as far as we’re concerned, it’s about as painless as it could be (although it’s a shame that Ellen Page can never just ask the question “Why don’t you get Michael Caine to bring your kids to you in France?”). And we can see that some might find it hard to identify with Nolan’s rule-bound, organized, sexless dream world, but as we’ve said before, it’s a hugely personal film, and we suspect that this is the way that Nolan’s dreams look. It’s as weird and difficult a film that has ever made $800 million at the box office, and if this is the kind of original filmmaking that Nolan will continue to make, we’re positively pleased that he’s retiring from the Bat-game. [A]
“The Dark Knight Rises” (2012)
“The Dark Knight” is considered by many to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, examples of a cinematic comic book adaptation. With that in mind, the film’s sequel either had to be the Greatest Movie Ever Made, or it was bound to risk disappointing a massive, rather vocal fanbase. And “The Dark Knight Rises” did disappoint quite a few people: its critics claim that Nolan’s third Batman film is convoluted to no real end, that Tom Hardy’s mumbling masked maniac Bane was no substitute for Heath Ledger’s deliciously malevolent Joker, admittedly one of the great movie bad guys of all time, and that Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne only dons the character’s trademark cape and cowl after he, uh, learns that he’s broke. Eight years later and time has been kinder to Nolan’s flawed, albeit mind-bogglingly grand conclusion to his Caped Crusader trilogy. If “The Dark Knight” was a eulogy for our pre-9/11 hopes and dreams, “The Dark Knight Rises” sees the fear and paranoia from that earlier film bubbling up to to the surface, threatening to destroy everything it comes into contact with. “DKR” is Nolan’s study of fanaticism and the politics of terror, featuring some of the director’s most jaw-dropping set pieces (the opening that sees a CIA aircraft disassembled piece by piece, the takeover of Gotham stadium), all of which admittedly distract from some dreary plotting and a regrettable overabundance of Nolan’s trademark expositional dialogue. [B-]
“Interstellar” (2014)
If there was ever a director born to make a sweeping, operatic, swing-for-the-fences outer space epic, it’s Christopher Nolan. This director has always harbored a pronounced authorial interest in the manipulation of physics, and his gift for pure scope is practically unrivaled among his Hollywood contemporaries. It feels safe to say, however, that nobody really expected that “Interstellar” would end up being Nolan’s most emotionally rewarding film. The “Memento” director is often rightfully cited as being a chilly, cerebral filmmaker, but “Interstellar” is a genuine tearjerker, containing at least four or five heartstring-tugging moments where a viewer would be wise to have a box of Kleenex on deck. With “Interstellar,” Nolan utilized cutting-edge modern technology to tell a tale as old as time: the film tells a story of humanity facing the possibility of its own extinction, and how one simple man is looking to the stars for hope (a motif that was also explored in James Gray’s recent, terrific sci-fi odyssey, “Ad Astra”). “Interstellar” also contains one of the warmest and most vulnerable performance yet from the otherwise more cocksure Matthew McConaughey, although the film is capably acted all around by the likes of Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley, Jessica Chastain, and Nolan’s perpetual lucky charm, Michael Caine. [A-]
“Dunkirk” (2017)
Christopher Nolan’s bar-raising modern war classic, which tells the incredible true story of the evacuation of Dunkirk by way of land, sea, and sky during the thick of WWII (frequently referred to in a historical context as Operation Dynamo), is often cited as being the apex of the director’s pure command of technical craft. In almost every respect, this is absolutely true. However, we’re here to argue that “Dunkirk” also sees Nolan operating at his most elemental. In terms of medium, “Dunkirk” could have only been a film, so reliant it is on the critical, fundamental tenets (pun fully intended) of cinematic storytelling. It is a rapturous, David Lean-esque epic comprised mainly of faces, skylines, swaths of ocean, and a booming, rattling orchestral score courtesy of Nolan’s main dude, Hans Zimmer. There is not a wasted moment in the whole film. There’s not even a wasted frame, really. Exposition, which has long been Nolan’s achilles’ heel as a storyteller, is kept to an absolute bare minimum here. Simply put, “Dunkirk” offers no shortage of justification for why many audiences prefer to see films on a big screen (if you haven’t witnessed this baby in IMAX 70mm, then you are missing out). More admirable yet is Nolan’s resistance towards the jingoistic missteps perpetrated by other like-minded depictions of armed combat (looking at you, “1917”). Instead, the director opts for a stirring depiction of endurance at any and all costs. All the poor, bedraggled soldiers of Dunkirk did was survive. In this instance, that turned out to be more than enough. [A]
“Tenet” (2020)
In “Tenet,” Nolan doubles down on all his most divisive qualities as a studio auteur, frequently reminding his audience that they probably aren’t going to understand the tangled particulars of his narrative, which really just ends up being a mega-budgeted, excessively convoluted espionage yarn about a protagonist named The Protagonist who races around the globe, from Mumbai to the Amalfi coast, learning about something called “time inversion” and sifting through “the detritus of a coming war” to prevent Armageddon. The scale of “Tenet” is undeniably more spectacular than anything Nolan has attempted before – the opening, in which an opera house in Kiev dissolves into a violent hostage situation, immediately sets the disorienting tone, which is maintained throughout by the momentous, booming score from “Black Panther’s” Ludwig Göransson – and yet the movie’s philosophical conceits, its “tenets,” if you will, are too easily upended. Few Hollywood directors can match Nolan for sheer velocity, and the set pieces in “Tenet” are among some of the most astonishing he’s ever filmed: a car-chase-in-reverse that unfurls across a winding freeway is a miracle of action-movie engineering, and a climactic military raid on a Soviet closed city is bogged down by a borderline-nonsensical setup… until you see how Nolan pulls the whole thing off, at which point your jaw hits the floor. John David Washington lends his innate charisma to the role of the Protagonist, but his efforts are largely for naught: the character is another one of Nolan’s well-dressed, emotionally closed-off cyphers, a resilient narrative nucleus in a movie that’s ultimately more interested in concepts than human beings. Washington has a breezy rapport with co-star Robert Pattinson, more foppish than usual here, and in their shared scenes, “Tenet” becomes a more enjoyable, less stolid movie (the playfulness of Pattinson’s performance occasionally feels at odds with the forbidding atmosphere of the rest of “Tenet,” which looks at the concept of fun as a necessary evil). Fawning over the awe-inspiring spectacle of “Tenet” is really the only way to appreciate the movie on its own terms, because everything else in the movie is opaque to the point of abstraction. As one of the film’s characters puts it, “don’t try to understand it… feel it.” As impressive as “Tenet” often is, it’s also the type of film that makes you wonder: what is there to feel? [B/B-]