From movies that had me questioning reality to my favorite World War II film, these five picks show Christopher Nolan’s incredible range as a director.
My first encounter with Christopher Nolan was Inception. I was still in college, and mind you, I did not sleep well after watching it. The movie put me in my own kind of limbo, thinking about dreams within dreams and whether that spinning top ever actually fell.
Since then, Nolan has taken me into outer space, onto the beaches of World War II, inside the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and now all the way back to Ancient Greece.
The Dark Knight is still one of his most famous movies, of course. I will always applaud Heath Ledger’s unforgettable performance as the Joker. But if someone asked me which Christopher Nolan films best show his range and vision as a director, these are the five I would personally recommend.
Inception put me in limbo
Inception follows Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a thief who enters people’s dreams to steal information. His final assignment requires planting an idea inside another person’s mind.
It sounds complicated because it is. There are dreams inside dreams, different speeds of time yet Nolan makes everything exciting enough that you want to keep up. The rotating hallway fight remains one of my favorite scenes. The filmmakers built a rotating set so Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the stunt team could physically perform the shifting-gravity sequence.
Maybe that is why Inception stayed inside my head for so long. I left the movie entertained, confused, and slightly suspicious of my own dreams. It was quite an introduction to Nolan’s mind.
Interstellar brought back my astronaut dreams
Like many children, I once dreamed of becoming a pilot and eventually an astronaut. I never completely lost that fascination with flying and space, so Interstellar already had my attention.
Having Anne Hathaway, my favorite actress, in the cast gave me another reason to commit to this very long space movie. She plays Dr. Amelia Brand, one of the scientists sent through a wormhole to search for another home for humanity.
I also grew up enjoying The Big Bang Theory, so I have always been curious about science, even if I cannot solve an equation like Sheldon Cooper. Interstellar turns intimidating ideas such as wormholes, black holes, and gravitational time dilation into something exciting and surprisingly emotional. Nolan worked with Caltech physicist Kip Thorne to incorporate real scientific concepts into the story. Their collaboration even contributed to published research about visualizing black holes. Caltech explains Thorne’s involvement in the production.
Underneath all that science, however, Interstellar is about a father leaving his children because he believes it is the only way to give them a future. Time moves differently across the planets he visits, which means every hour in space could cost him years with his family.
Dunkirk is still my number one
Yes, Harry Styles is in it. No, that is not why Dunkirk is my favorite Christopher Nolan movie. (Well, not the only reason.)
The movie recreates the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940, when Allied soldiers became trapped in France during World War II. More than 338,000 British and French troops were rescued according to the Imperial War Museums. Nolan tells the story through three connected timelines: one week on land, one day at sea, and one hour in the air. There is little dialogue and barely any traditional character background. Instead, we experience the fear, waiting, confusion, and desperate need to survive.
The production used real locations, vessels, aircraft, effects, and large-format cameras. Nolan called it his most experimental movie since Memento in an interview with the Cannes Film Festival.
Oppenheimer made me cry
It was not because the movie is conventionally sad. I cried because it was so good, overwhelming, and frightening in what it revealed about human intelligence and ambition.
Cillian Murphy plays J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Los Alamos laboratory during the Manhattan Project. The movie covers the creation of the atomic bomb and the political campaign that later destroyed Oppenheimer’s public standing. (I’m also fascinated by stories about war, science and intelligence, including The Imitation Game, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. And that fascination made Oppenheimer even more interesting to me.)
It is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus. Nolan transforms that enormous history into a psychological thriller, using different timelines and images to place us inside Oppenheimer’s mind.
What affected me was the weight and truth of everything. The movie captures the thrill of scientific discovery before forcing us to confront its consequences. Nolan gives us spectacle, but he never allows that spectacle to feel completely triumphant.
Oppenheimer won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Nolan’s first Best Director Oscar.
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The Odyssey is Nolan going even bigger
Of course The Odyssey belongs on this list. If we are talking about Christopher Nolan’s range and vision, how could we leave out his massive interpretation of one of history’s oldest stories?
The 172-minute production became the first feature filmed entirely with IMAX film cameras. Nolan shot it across six countries and used real ships alongside puppetry, animatronics, and digital effects. It is Nolan working on the biggest possible canvas. After dreams, war, space, and nuclear history, this time, we go back to Ancient Greek mythology.
Yes, I left out The Dark Knight
I know. A Christopher Nolan movie guide without The Dark Knight sounds almost illegal.
It remains an essential Nolan movie and one of the most celebrated superhero films ever made. I will also always applaud Heath Ledger, whose performance as the Joker made the character impossible to forget. Ledger won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor posthumously. Even after all these years, his Joker remains one of the biggest reasons The Dark Knight still feels so powerful.
But this is not a ranking of Nolan’s most popular movies. These are the films that personally showed me his range as a director. Inception introduced me to his mind. Interstellar brought back my space dreams. Oppenheimer overwhelmed me. The Odyssey shows just how large his cinematic vision can become.
And Dunkirk? That one is still number one. Harry Styles or no Harry Styles.
If you want to continue your Christopher Nolan movie marathon, here are the rest of the feature films he has directed:
- Following (1998)
- Memento (2000)
- Insomnia (2002)
- Batman Begins (2005)
- The Prestige (2006)
- The Dark Knight (2008)
- The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
- Tenet (2020)
That leaves plenty of dreams, puzzles, masked vigilantes, dueling magicians, and inverted bullets for your next movie night.
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