Christopher Nolan

Dunkirk is a big movie for a lot of reasons: it’s Christopher Nolan’s first war epic, it’s told from multiple perspectives featuring all of America’s favorites from across the pond, and it’s the feature film debut of one of the biggest pop stars working today. Harry Styles being in Dunkirk no doubt influenced a lot of the buzz that swirled around this movie early on, and, hey, maybe it’ll get today’s teen girls into Nolan movies. But, apparently Nolan himself had no idea how famous Styles was before he cast him in the movie.

If you’re going to see Dunkirk in a few weeks, I hope it’s for Christopher Nolan’s taut visceral direction and not to hear Tom Hardy say a lot of stuff.

See what the first wave of critics have to say about Christopher Nolan’s newest blockbuster.

Hans Zimmer has become kind of the rockstar of movie soundtracks (I mean, he did literally play a set at Coachella this year). Zimmer’s been scoring Christopher Nolan’s movies ever since Batman Begins, so it’s no surprise that he’s back for Nolan’s World War II thriller Dunkirk, and man, is he back. WaterTower Music just released the fourth track off the score, titled “Supermarine,” and it’s intense.

Are Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino rivals? The answer is “no,” and yet that’s still how I prefer to imagine them, and what’s more, it helps makes sense out of a recent news item. In 2015, Tarantino mounted his Hateful Eight “70mm road show” to great fanfare (much of it self-generated), offering audiences around the country an opportunity to see his Western thriller in all its splendor and glory. It was a massive undertaking: corralling the necessary equipment, shipping it to the participating theaters, installation costs, training multiplex projectionists unfamiliar with the 70mm format, the whole deal. And in what I can only assume is a diss aimed directly at Q.T., Nolan has now announced a 70mm engagement for Dunkirk dwarfing anything attempted in recent memory.

Christopher Nolan doesn’t do small movies — if he’s going to mount a war picture, you can bet it’s gonna be one of the biggest (and priciest!) to date. He’s seemingly spared no expense for his new film Dunkirk, reportedly corralling thousands of extras, destroying vintage planes, and dominating the land, sea, and air all for a grand new vision of combat. And in order to fully convey the enormity of his ambitions, Nolan went all-in and mounted his production on 70 millimeter film. For laymen, that means he used a larger film strip while shooting to capture more brilliant colors, richer sound, and a greater sharpness of detail. For those who don’t give a hoot, it means this film will rattle your bones.

Christopher Nolan is one of the few directors in Hollywood who gets to make original epic movies. He served with great distinction in the Batman franchise and now he basically writes his own ticket. Audiences love his sprawling sci-fi films like Inception and Interstellar; their bigness is part of the reason audiences love them. Very few directors get to paint on that large of a canvas.

If you’re a Christopher Nolan fan, you’ve seen Interstellar. (You’ve possibly seen it 100 times.) But did you know that before Nolan signed on to make the movie, Interstellar was almost a Steven Spielberg movie? It’s true; Spielberg was attached to direct it in 2006. He brought in Nolan’s brother Jonathan to develop the script, and after Spielberg left the project, Jonathan suggested his brother replace him. That’s just one of the stellar facts featured in the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies!

It doesn’t take much to imagine what a Christopher Nolan war film might be like — epic, visually stunning, and supremely intense. Dunkirk seemingly checks off all of those boxes and then some in the first full-length trailer for Nolan’s highly-anticipated new film, a historical period drama that looks surprisingly claustrophobic given the open setting. Featuring an excellent ensemble of stars (including Tom Hardy and Mark Rylance), Dunkirk doesn’t feel like your average summer film, which has us all the more excited to see it in July.

The game of extremely handsome musical chairs that is staffing up for the next James Bond film continued apace today. The two biggest question marks — who will star as the secret agent extraordinaire, and who will direct him in the new picture — remain unresolved, but a new development may hold a clue as to the future of the franchise. A great ruckus was raised over the fact that the Bond property has entered the marketplace for a new studio overseer, and while the new management has not yet been decided, it’s starting to look like Warner Bros. has the upper hand. And it all has to do with Christopher Nolan.