Every Christopher Nolan Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best

As is so often the case in the films of Christopher Nolan, the clock is ticking in his latest release. This time it’s Oppenheimer, a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Starring Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, the film considers why brilliant scientists made a weapon of mass destruction — and why many of them, Oppenheimer included, later came to speak out against further nuclear escalation. Arranged in a complex non-linear structure, the movie is also about the passage of time and the slippery nature of good and evil.

Nolan has returned to the same ideas time and again; few directors have as thematically or formally consistent filmographies. That makes his career — 12 features to date including Oppenheimer — particularly rewarding to revisit. All of his movies speak to one another; repeating their visual motifs and reexamining their core beliefs. It’s never a bad time to look at Nolan’s work, but with a new project on the horizon it’s the perfect moment to reacquaint oneself with one of our most reliably adventurous big-budget filmmakers.

My own Nolan rewatch yielded this ranking of his movies — keeping in mind that the “worst” movie on this list is still better than the vast majority of films released by Hollywood in any given year, and the top two or three are among the very best movies of my life. They are...