Every Christopher Nolan film, ranked

When Christopher Nolan won the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for 2023's Oppenheimer, it was only a formality of his canonization. Among cinephiles, he's already been entrenched in the upper echelon of Greatest Living Filmmakers, and is by many metrics the most accomplished and successful director of his generation. (James Cameron is 15 years older, so if you want to quibble about qualifiers, feel free. Nolan is likely still well ahead as far as critical and academic adoration goes, however.)

Nolan has been cultivating a devoted fanbase for over 20 years now, and his films are becoming events for cinephiles and the unwashed masses alike, straddling a strange line of Format Freaks and Movie Knowers while churning out boffo B.O. because your parents and the drunk guy with the Joker tattoo all want to see his movies when they're released. The Odyssey came out less than three weeks ago and despite weird freaks like Elon Musk getting all bent out of shape about it for reasons I can't even begin to decipher, it's already made over $900 million. This is a three-hour movie of one of the most-retold stories in recorded history, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, and it's going to end up being one of the highest-grossing movies ever.

So with Nolan on the brain, it's time to rank all of his 13 feature films to date. For science.

13 – Following (1998)

Nolan's debut feature was very much of its time, as he is in the ranks of 1990s directors who bowed with a micro-budget black and white down-and-dirty dark tale. As with many of those others, it's not very good, but as a proof of concept, you sort of get what he was going for, and similarly to many of those others, you understand why it turned heads when it came out. Competence counts for a lot, and Nolan may very well be the most competent director of the modern era.

12 – Memento (2000)

We all love Memento, don't we folks? Memento is in the ranks with Fight Club as one of the indispensable college movies of the 1990s-2000s, but unlike Fight Club it doesn't hold up nearly as well either on a surface level or on a reappraisal/subtextual level. While Guy Pearce and Joe Pantoliano are both dazzling in the film, it really hinges on the gimmick of its disjointed narrative, and despite being one of the most must-have DVDs of all time (the Easter eggs that let you watch the movie in chronological order! Which makes it bad!), it's never as good as you remember and will never hit as hard as it did that first time. This is the movie that made Nolan absolutely obsessed (nearly to a fault) of making movies that refuse to move forward with one linear story, but luckily for everyone, they keep getting better.

11 – Batman Begins (2005)

Christopher Nolan remains the only person to get a pass for making superhero films, despite them being among the worst movies he's made. Which still makes them pretty good, given that they're Christopher Nolan films. Christian Bale was a good Batman, and they're perfectly fine Batman movies. They're not nearly my favorite superhero movies, not by a long shot, but they're so comprehensively in the zeitgeist that I know I'm in the severe minority there. Batman Begins is a very slight story with a couple cool action pieces, and for me it's by far the weakest of the bunch.

10 – The Dark Knight (2008)

If you take Heath Ledger out of this movie, it's pretty bad. Of course, you can't take him out of it, and you wouldn't. Any time the Joker is onscreen, it's dynamite. But there's another half of the movie there, unfortunately. Overall, I don't have a good time watching this movie. Again, I know I'm in the minority.

9 – The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

An even more minority opinion from me: I think the third film in Nolan's Batman trilogy is the best of the bunch. I've always loved the Knightfall storyline from the comics, so it was neat for me to see Bane given such a spotlight as a true villain for Batman in a movie, as well as ... you know ... seeing him get the "Magneto was right" treatment. I also like that Nolan tried to give Batman an ending to his story – and a happy ending, to boot. A lot of great big bold swings here, which are to be admired. Even if the Joseph Gordon Levitt epilogue was ... well, I think the word is "woof."

8 – The Prestige (2006)

Vacillated quite a bit on whether I put this above or below the Batman trilogy (at the very least, I wouldn't place it lower than Begins), as like Memento it hinges a lot on One Weird Trick. But I really love this one, especially how unrelentingly weird it is. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale (all of both of them) are tremendous, and I appreciate that a movie about magicians just keeps getting weirder and darker until you're looking at a bunch of drowned clones. Gotta love it.

7 – Insomnia (2002)

If Nolan has an underrated film in his oeuvre, this is it. A serial killer two-hander that's a loving remake without being a rehash, and the two leads have rarely been better. This is one to revisit, especially if you haven't in a while.

6 – Interstellar (2014)

At the end of the day, too clever for its own good. (And probably doesn't even make sense, ultimately.) But the sequences on the tsunami planet and Matt Damon's planet, as well as TARS, who we all love, really elevate this into a worthwhile spectacular. Gets better each time I see it.

5 – Inception (2010)

Another movie that you could poke a million holes in, and another movie that isn't as cool as it and everyone in 2010 thought that it was, it's still undeniable as a work of cinematic spectacle. It's one of a few movies where Nolan and his co-writer brother started at the Gordian knot in the middle and wrote outward from there, and it shows. But it's still pretty much a masterpiece, warts and all.

4 – Tenet (2020)

Possibly the most maligned of the Nolan movies that people have seen, it's so exemplary of the problems people (including myself) have with Nolan's tics and foibles that it at times reads as self-parody. But man alive, if you just watch it without trying to think about it, it's one of his most nonstop thrilling films, and an unabashed ode to friendship. I love Tenet, even if I'm either too stupid or too smart to really understand it the whole time.

3 – Dunkirk (2017)

One of the greatest war films of all time, and also probably the one movie that would be better if Nolan could have brought himself to tell the story chronologically. It might be his best film if it were just structured correctly! But it's pretty perfect as is, with an honest appraisal of a very undersung angle of the most-depicted war of all time.

2 – The Odyssey (2026)

God bless Nolan for sparing me having to look at Benny Safdie's big wet face, which is the least you can do if you insist on continuing to cast him in your movies. The Odyssey is a glorious and wondrous spectacle, demanding you watch it in the biggest, loudest theater you possibly can. Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, John Leguizamo, Elliott Page, Himesh Patel et al have never been better, and it's simply a cinematic experience unlike most others. To say it's a must-watch is doing it a disservice, because you've probably already seen it anyway. For any other filmmaker, this would be their crowning achievement. But Nolan already made his crowning achievement.

1 – Oppenheimer (2023)

Whew, buddy. There's really nothing left to say about Oppenheimer, the movie that finally allowed Robert Downey Jr. to go back to making Marvel movies. Winner of seven Academy Awards (and would have won Best Sound in a walk if Zone of Interest hadn't come out the same year), it's a towering achievement of filmmaking and storytelling, weaving so many threads about one of the most consequential creations in the history of mankind that in the hands of anyone else, it would have collapse in on itself. One of the best movies ever made. Good job, Chris.