#Christopher Nolan’s 10 Best Movies

Christopher Nolan gets the same note from every one of his actors in interviews: he never sits down for a single second on set. He comes to filming in a three-piece suit, demands that elaborate practical effects be emphasized over CGI, and ensures that his films not only stun visually but mentally. In many ways, Nolan’s ingenuity and painstaking work ethic helped the thinking movie become a commercial darling.

Whether it’s the dreamscapes of Inception, the chaotic planning of The Dark Knight, or the mental gymnastics of Memento, Nolan’s films are blockbuster Trojan Horses hiding puzzles for their plentiful viewers. Where many filmmakers can try and fail to copy the impact of a Nolan-esque plot twist, Nolan’s fluency in how difficult and tedious a twist is to actually execute shows his understanding that a twist can’t come from what can throw the audience, but rather what can ground them. To celebrate the uniqueness and prestige Nolan brings to the screen, here are his top ten films.

10 Insomnia

A remake of the 1997 Norwegian film, Insomnia follows a corrupt, sleepless detective who tries to solve a murder while being investigated for repeatedly falsifying evidence. As the only Nolan film that he himself didn’t have any hand in writing, one can spot similarities in style but vast differences in plot from other Nolan flicks. The acting is fantastic and the story is layered, but it does lack a certain magical quality of shock and awe Nolan is known for.

9 Batman Begins

The introduction to the Nolanverse provides all the best hits of a Bruce Wayne origin story: parents are loaded, parents are loaded with bullets, child becomes a bat. Like the other Nolan Batman movies, Batman Begins gives us two villains — Scarecrow and Ra’s al Ghul — both giving Wayne a run for his billions and ego in being Gotham’s supercop. Unlike the other Nolan Batman movies, however, the movie carries a bit too much comic and not enough Nolan. It’s clear the director is dealing with his first-ever blockbuster and does not yet know how to fully incorporate his own style into the actual philosophies that the movie contends.

8 Tenet

Tenet isn’t as so-so of a movie as many have made it out to be, but its legacy remains playfully plagued as the time everyone felt Warner Brothers was trying to kill everyone. In fact, Tenet’s great, a puzzling and convoluted mismatch of time travel and entropy adding up to a sprint down Nolan lane; and eventually, it may be recognized as such. But for popular culture today, given the memorial and viral persistence of COVID-19, the controversy of WB demanding the film be released in theaters before the pandemic was at all under control has become the only commercial recognition of this mostly unseen Nolan treat. As a result, this film has to be judged according to not just its merits but its lack of positive cultural impact.

7 The Dark Knight Rises

From its start, The Dark Knight Rises had to deal with two titanic issues: 1) The Joker could no longer exist, and 2) The Joker existed. Trying to recapture the world-stopping impact that Heath Ledger’s Joker had on society wasn’t just impossible; it was a theatrically demanded suicide mission. For the film to still somewhat succeed in its conclusion, offering Batman and Catwoman against Bane and a surprise villain, was like landing on the moon. While it didn’t and likely couldn’t impact viewers in the way The Dark Knight did, and, like Begins, has now but vanished into The Dark Knight’s shadow, its exploration of Batman’s aging, abstinence, and legacy made for a solid superhero story.

Related: Every Christopher Nolan Movie Ranked by IMDb Score

6 Memento

A Tenet before Tenet, Memento follows a man trying to find who killed his wife, with one major setback —he’s unable to create short-term memories. As a result, we can only decipher his perspective in disjointed directions, one starting at the beginning of the story and moving forward, the other starting at the end and moving backward, and the final minutes of the film having these timelines intersect at the middle. Memento’s unlike anything else you’ll ever see, launching Nolan into the forefront of puzzle-based filmmaking and setting the tone for a Nolan film requiring some level of pretending to understand it the first or fifth time around.

5 Inception

Nolan’s second-most impactful pop culture footprint, Inception took the world by storm in its 2010 release. Cobb is an information thief, using a military experiment to enter victims’ dreams and steal secrets for a fee. When given the opportunity to clear his name for allegedly killing his wife, Cobb has to agree to the impossible: “inception,” or the act of inserting an idea into a victim’s mind via their dreams — like say, dissolving one’s father’s company. Where Inception earns a myriad of brownie points for taking complex ideas and turning them into tangible and accessible beats, it does have to pay penance for its laundry list of plotholes. If you’re willing to overlook them, the film contains some of the most original action sequences ever, a brilliant story about loss and grief, and one of the best 2010s scores you’ll find outside of Reznor & Ross.

4 The Prestige

Nolan films will have a great twist at the end, but The Prestige has a handful. Two 1890s magicians are in a cutthroat competition for London’s recognition as being the best, willing to not just sabotage one another but sabotage themselves, their relationships, and their tickets to the Pearly Gates. As the two duke it out for the ultimate trick — transporting from one end of the stage to the other in a flash — they realize real magic requires a blood sacrifice. For its lack of popular recognition, The Prestige is one of Nolan’s absolute finest, showcasing exceptional performances, brilliant surprises, and philosophical devastations.

3 Dunkirk

Nominated alongside Darkest Hour for Best 2017 Movie About Britain’s War Strategy at Dunkirk, Dunkirk had the crucial advantage of being a good movie. Initially disregarded as Nolan’s most uninspired premise, Dunkirk celebrates those that fought to save Britain’s chances in World War II, and what it lacks in time travel or totems for Nolan fans it makes up in intensity and quality. Looking at the battle from land, sea, and air, we see time running out — with the literal sound of a clock ticking — leaving audiences with no room to breathe or to undo the knots in their stomachs. If you like Tom Hardy, he’s in this. If you like Harry Styles, he’s surprisingly also in this. If you like Nolan movies, as unexpectedly as it may seem given the realism, he’s absolutely and 100% also in this.

2 Interstellar

This film is sometimes regarded as a controversial contender in Nolan’s filmography given that some aspects of its ending go far off the deep end, but if those can be overlooked or for a lucky few even enjoyed, Interstellar is a knockout. In the near future, as Earth is dying, a pilot-turned-farmer has to return to the skies for NASA, the mission being to scope out three potentially hospitable worlds in other solar systems. The music scrapes at Hans Zimmer’s zenith, Matthew McConaughey gives arguably an even better performance than Dallas Buyers Club, the visuals are beyond anything put onscreen before — literally generating two scientific papers about the insights that these 100 hours per frame render times gave about the visual interiors of black holes — and the story will emotionally devastate and uplift you in ways no other Nolan film ever has.

1 The Dark Knight

Since the genesis of Batman, there’s been debate over his validity as the ultimate good samaritan or as someone who could have stopped crime by investing in his community but chose instead to beat up the mentally ill and sleep with Catwoman. While The Dark Knight has been heralded for over a decade for giving pop culture Ledger’s Joker, what makes the Joker such an incredible villain isn’t bastardized philosophy, an unpredictable appetite, and a beautiful performance, but that entity was in harmonious conflict with its opposite: Batman. Nolan’s Batman had to realize that the seemingly regular cultivation of masked outlaws would only stop if he did, and to do the responsible, anti-egoist thing was antithetical to playing dress-up. To claim Batman was generous with his duties while Wayne hoarded billions becomes impossible; to claim fascist desire for control of Gotham both as the financial Wayne and the militant Batman becomes autocracy. In the end, The Dark Knight is Nolan’s greatest film and the greatest superhero film of all time because it proposes that humanity as a whole is good — see the citizens and prisoners on the ferries collectively sacrificing their lives rather than harming the other — but the individual hero will devour power whenever idolized. If The Dark Knight becomes his most beneficial to Gotham when he relinquishes idolatry and control over it, then Batman’s greatest villain is Batman.

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