Christopher Nolan’s films ranked from worst to best
Where should we place The Odyssey in the filmography of today’s greatest filmmaker? And which films by the British director have disappointed us the most? Our ranking.
13. TENET (2020)
Everything is there: the inversion of entropy, Robert Pattinson as a fatal dandy, stunning pieces of bravery (the Opera, the reverse battle…). However, it is the only one Nolan where the machine is running on empty. The hero is credited as “the Protagonist” as an admission that at this point, Christopher Nolan no longer writes characters, but functions. The mixing drowns out the dialogues, the concept devours the emotions, and all that remains is a two and a half hour user manual. We console ourselves by telling ourselves that we have to be big to fail in these widths.
12. FOLLOWING (1998)
$6,000, a weekend shoot with friends and 70 minutes on the clock. Christopher Nolan’s first film lays the foundations for a crazy film with a puzzle-style story, a man who creates an identity for himself and another who is called Cobb (yes, yes, as in Inception). But all this remains a sketch and, ahead of Followingwe see more of the future of the filmmaker than a real film.
11. THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)
The film from a director who wants to end things. The mid-air opening with the disemboweled plane remains a high point, and Tom Hardy composes a massive Bane. But The Dark Knight had already said everything about Batman, and Rises spends 165 minutes (165!!!) looking for an exit that doesn’t exist. Gotham dissolves into smoky abstraction and the film’s politics are lost in a thick fog. There remains a beautiful (involuntary) melancholy: that of an author prisoner of his own masterpiece.
10. INSOMNIA (2002)
His ticket to Hollywood. The studio gave him an order (the remake of a Norwegian thriller released five years earlier) and two monsters: Al Pacino as a cop who no longer sleeps and Robin Williams against the job. No twisted temporality, no mourning to repair: this is the least Nolanian of the Nolans. He still comes out very well from a labyrinthine and morally rotten plot, signing three or four impressive pieces.
9. BATMAN BEGINS (2005)
We know the story: after the sinking of Batman & Robinthe franchise seemed dead. Warner then suggests that Nolan take on the Dark Knight. The filmmaker operates a total reset: no more Joel Schumacher camp (Batman Forever) ! Bruce Wayne becomes a man who creates a myth from his childhood fear. The film first takes on the air of a Wagnerian journey before following the return of the hero (played by an uber-frowning Christian Bale) who will put on his costume. Dark, serious, powerful: if the excessive action of the second part weighs down the project, the superhero remains seen as a clinical case. All the superheroic cinema of the following twenty years comes from there.
8. INTERSTELLAR (2014)
The nexus of his film. Interstellar is the moment when he finally grasps his true subject (time as a form of loss), confronts himself with his model (2001) and where it brings out emotions. McConaughey is fully in the role of this father who abandons his daughter to find an alternative planet. Problem: the scenario often takes on water and is based on improbable twists (the Lazarus mission which does not hold up, Matt Damon as Dr Mann and Anne Hathaway’s monologue on love which crosses dimensions remain indefensible…). Despite everything, it is the Christopher Nolan that we see the most, and his rating has continued to rise since 2014.
7. MEMENTO (2000)
Guy Pearce’s torso covered in evidence, a Polaroid that is shaken and which fades instead of appearing: Christopher Nolan had his cinematic feel from the first image. A man without memory, a story in reverse, and the invention of his grammar for the twenty-five years to come. Nothing has gotten old, especially not the idea that telling stories remains the last way to stand up. If it is not higher, it is a question of scale: everything that follows will be larger, bigger, more ambitious.
6. OPPENHEIMER (2023)
Three hours of men talking in rooms, for a tense film. For a feature film about the atomic bomb, explosions are rare. Christopher Nolan films a talkative camera, regulated to the millimeter, with three interlocking temporalities until the final ambush. Cillian Murphy (intense) has the blank stare of the ghosts, but it is Robert Downey Jr., as Strauss consumed by vanity, who wins the piece. And in the current context (Donald Trump and war everywhere), the seriousness with which he films American institutions and his paralyzing final shot has something astonishing.
5. THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)
We know the film by heart and yet we rediscover it with each viewing. Because everything happens through actor’s gestures rather than effects: the head sticking out of the door, the tongue searching for the scar, the nurse’s gait in a burning street. Heath Ledger takes the film to crazy incandescence. If TDK is not higher in this top, it is because he never completely recovers from it.
4. INCEPTION (2010)
The most influential original blockbuster since Matrixand the most generous of Nolans. A Michael Mann-style heist film that blends into a surrealist intimate drama… The architecture with drawers, the heartbreaking subject (remorse) and Marion Cotillard who haunts the film like a fault that nothing can absolve… Splendid. When the van tilts in slow motion while the hotel rotates, we have one of the most beautiful ideas of contemporary montage. Everything is not perfect (the snow segment is a little flat), but Inception proves that a film can be both a big machine and remain a silky dream.
3. THE ODYSSEY (2026)
He has been dreaming of it for twenty years and the result is exciting. Christopher Nolan dismisses the gods, keeps the monsters, and makes Ulysses a veteran who is prevented from returning home by the fall of Troy: the return becomes both a nightmare and the path to redemption. Shot entirely in IMAX, the film achieves a beauty and density that no one had achieved before. Matt Damon is imperial, Tom Holland impetuous and Anne Hathaway supreme, but Samantha Morton wins all as Circe, who shifts the narrative into frank horror.
2. THE PRESTIGE (2006)
Twenty years and not a wrinkle. A row of abandoned top hats in a snowy field, and you have the whole movie. It is a singular, strange work, the only one in his film where the structure is not an effect but the subject. Michael Caine states from the first minute the three stages of a magic trick (the promise, the trick, the prestige), and the film follows them to the letter. And beneath the sleight of hand and the visual splendor, Christopher Nolan draws the self-portrait of the most lucid filmmaker, as well as a beautiful speech on cinema and the pitfalls of storytelling.
1. DUNKIRK (2017)
Almost no dialogue, no really identifiable hero, and just three durations that converge: a week, a day, an hour. Beneath this outline, the ticking of Hans Zimmer which will never stop. The concept filmmaker finally finds the form where abstraction becomes pure sensation. Dunkirk does not tell fear, he creates it. With this film, Christopher Nolan had stopped explaining: he had become big.
