Oppenheimer (2023) Review

rating: *****

the story: The director of the Manhattan Project discovers great achievements don't always have happy endings.

the review: Most of the time, when you see what's going to be your favorite movie of the year, there ought to be no doubt.  Christopher Nolan has been one of my favorite directors since 2001, when Memento was released, and for a few years held the slot of my favorite movie, and in the two decades or so since, he's continued to make movies that I have very enthusiastically received, The Dark Knight, Inception, and Interstellar being my favorites from their release years (2008, 2010, 2014).  Although it received a considerable amount of pre-release buzz, in part because it was scheduled to hit theaters the same weekend as Barbie, I had no idea what to expect from Oppenheimer.  I loved his previous attempt at historical, WWII drama, Dunkirk, but it didn't feel like an achievement so much as an experience.  Nolan is very good at experiences, and has at times been on the verge of letting his talents rest of that level alone (here I certainly think of Tenet, which is its own kind of great filmmaking, but not as clear a statement).  Oppenheimer is a complete package.  As social media personality Logan Paul famously lamented, it's pretty much nothing but talking, but it's a tonal masterpiece.  The score certainly helps, but three hours of a perfect score is something even Terrence Malick can't necessarily reliably pull off.  Eventually there needs to be some concrete substance, and that can be found in spades throughout Oppenheimer.

It certainly doesn't hurt the sheer embarrassment of talent, and this is something even I can sometimes get carried away being dazzled by, but Oppenheimer's cast is stuffed to the rafters, and most of its actors are in relatively small roles while the bulk of the film rests on Cillian Murphy (long looking for that one great role, which this is) and a little on Robert Downey Jr. finally proving, once again, he's not just a superhero great at making quips, very deliberately changing his look and most of the time sounding nothing at all like Tony Stark (though happily our Iron Man comes out of his shell now and then), and Emily Blunt resting comfortably in the background until she commands the screen, and Rami Malik echoing that, and Matt Damon playing first supporting role (the man is as near a genius at selecting material as modern cinema has ever found, so often willing to play whatever role he wants it's astonishing that he's also remained a reliable leading actor the whole time), and then there's also Casey Affleck, Gary Oldman and Kenneth Branagh, Jason Clarke...A pair of would-be next generation lead actors, Dane DeHaan and Josh Hartnett, they're here.

Tom Conti, a respected actor from a previous generation, turns in a chameleon role as Einstein, a pivotal if minor one in the movie.  Einstein's role itself in the movie is genius, stepping away from the theatrics of The Prestige's Tesla though hinging on the same basic story structure, of a crucial moment between two characters that must be examined either by the audience or by the story itself to be understood as so crucial, the kind of storytelling Nolan employed in his first movie, Following, that had one of those twist endings that originally made Nolan himself seem as if he might after all be dismissed as a gimmick, as M. Night Shyamalan was for so long (and so many still believe so today), a fad.  

Oppenheimer is the definitive proof that Christopher Nolan is no such thing.  When Spielberg delivered Schindler's List and then Saving Private Ryan, his own one-two WWII punch, it opened new avenues of appreciation for his talent, and depth of talent.  Nolan, even in his superhero movies, never went broad.  He sought audience approval in scale of spectacle, the way Spielberg did it in the '70s, and never in mere thrills or childlike awe.  For too long Nolan was easy to dismiss because he didn't pursue the "truly adult," the straightforward drama.  Even Dunkirk relies on a series of timelines that robs it of a center beyond the central event.  Oppenheimer is classic Hollywood, a biopic.  Except no one's done it like this before.  

In most of his films, Nolan studied the concept of not just identity but self-identity, and while his characters often find themselves misunderstood, he's never really allowed them to suffer for it, never quite left the impression of an unhappy ending, and yet that's exactly what he does with Oppenheimer, and is thus the answer to why Einstein's brief role in the film is so crucial, why the story keeps circling back to it.  In criticizing the past, Nolan is of course giving us a damning metaphor about the present, since sometimes when you can't state things outright, you have to elucidate another way.  

I've long since stopped worrying about what Christopher Nolan can possibly do next.  Anything he wants.  It's all possible.  Of course he could never make another film, and his work will have already towered over his contemporaries, and the whole history of the medium.  

The Prestige (2006) Review

rating: *****

the story: Rival magicians can't figure out that they have very different approaches to and goals for their craft.

review: I've reviewed The Prestige before, here, which you can read for yourself. It's one of those movies I'm constantly reevaluating, and it's absolutely worth the effort.  By this point, I'm perfectly willing to call it a classic.

Now, the whole reason I've struggled in this manner is that it's a film by Christopher Nolan, but unlike other film fans, this isn't the result of trying to keep up with Nolan's dizzying stories, but in comparing it to his other films themselves.  For a while, Memento was my favorite movie, having dislodged The Truman Show for that honor.  I value ambition and cleverness, but these are qualities that walk a dangerous line.  I used to view The Prestige as being the result of Nolan desperately trying to live up to the reputation of Memento.  I had a similar problem with Batman Begins, which I thought didn't chase that legacy enough.  The Dark Knight Returns was the point at which I began to realize Nolan himself wasn't that concerned with the need for some gimmick, but appreciating Nolan's abilities as mere storyteller took time.  By Tenet, I saw a director who was trying to make a point, and using all manner of tricks to achieve it.  I adore Interstellar, which hit me in a visceral way that had been absent from his other films.  Inception dazzled me most in its casting.  Dunkirk is a tour de force of tension without letting it ever get in the way, in all respects Nolan having learned his lesson from Memento.  Very early on I also went back and watched his first film, Following, which is all style.  Insomnia might have fallen into such a trap, but it's driven by two great performances, the first time Nolan allows his actors to leap ahead of him.

Integrating all his instincts is really Nolan's defining production technique.  Memento proved he could work with known actors, but it also trapped Guy Pearce into that role, and he's really never recovered since.  He's the Memento guy.  When The Prestige was released, it was most notable as starring Batman and Wolverine, so it was hardly going to suffer from known quantities.  And yet Hugh Jackman was himself in the early process of disentangling himself from one role, and hadn't yet accomplished it, so to view The Prestige, since Jackman is the lead actor, on its own terms, you need to not only separate it from Nolan, but from Wolverine, to let the story settle into itself.  For me, it was a process of letting its conclusions settle.  I always found it easiest to view the lead character as the most sympathetic, so Jackman's concluding thought ("It was the look on their faces.") that always stuck with me, and was the basis for which I would attempt to explain the movie to others, never mind myself.

It's a movie you have to understand in order to appreciate.  Bale's character doesn't have his story spelled out, not even by the ending.  Chronologically, we never really see a starting point.  We have to fill it in for ourselves.  Since the movie ends with Bale theoretically "winning," we are then to assume that maybe he was the good guy all along, and yet he really isn't.  He makes unfathomable sacrifices, and basically the whole point of the story is Jackman trying desperately to understand them, and he never can, even as he subsequently makes even more horrifying ones in order to do so.  In the end, it's because they have very different goals, and their approaches are defined by them.  For Bale, the act is its own reward, the knowledge of a trick well-performed.  For Jackman, the point is to entertain, and in order to derive any pleasure from pursuing such a craft, he needs to see his audience entertained.  It's a post-Gladiator world, folks.

Interpreting any of this through Nolan's need to live up to Memento is, in this context, absurd.  He knew very well what he was doing, and he was certainly not sending his audience any messages.  He was, if anything, telling us that how we interpret his films are as much our business as his in making them.  He knows what goes into them, and he certainly doesn't mind seeing how audiences react (he was to his detriment a proponent to reopening theaters during the pandemic), but regardless he's going to make movies the way he finds interesting, and he's now got a long career to show for it.  Studios might be willing to indulge him in scale, but if he really needed to, he could bring it back to intimate levels.  This is where his skill in casting comes in, his storytelling.  He doesn't need David Bowie (who this time I noticed actually sounds a lot like Pierce Brosnan), but it doesn't hurt to get him, either.  It doesn't hurt to include as subplot the perennially enigmatic Nicola Tesla, when anyone might have expected him to headline a Christopher Nolan film.  For Nolan, expect the unexpected, but don't expect that twist to be necessary.  That would be your mistake.

The result is a film only Nolan could have made (even if it's based on someone else's material).  The Prestige was released the same year as The Illusionist.  It used to be that I allowed this fact to distract from my enjoyment of it.  But I don't revisit Illusionist as obsessively as Prestige.  Sometimes having to work for it works in its favor.

Interstellar (2014) Review

rating: *****

the story: An astronaut goes on an epic journey.

review: Outside of Memento and The Dark Knight, my favorite Christopher Nolan film has long been Interstellar. That seems like weird wording, but they are three distinct achievements, and so at least for me it makes sense. The conventional logic always picks Inception as Nolan’s best high concept, but for me Interstellar is infinitely better. It’s not just a piece of clever filmmaking. It may be Nolan’s best emotional investment.

2001: A Space Odyssey effectively began a whole new genre. It’s often overlooked as such but Star Trek: The Motion Picture pioneered efforts to solidify the astronauts in trouble genre. The Hollywood Solaris remake revived it, and of course in recent years there have been so many that many of the more recent ones, including worthy contenders like Ad Astra and High Life are actually obscure. But the best of them, arguably the best overall, is Interstellar.

This is Nolan reaching as far into the profound as he has so far been willing to go, at least as far as the sweep of history 2001 meant to be, toward Terrence Malick, Tree of Life territory. A lot of Nolan’s movies are allegories for his criticisms of conventional modern thinking, what we keep telling ourselves we shouldn’t be doing, what’s so wrong with the world. Here he aims himself at the abject nihilism of our future prospects, chief among them what happens to a planet pushed to its environmental brink, and whether or not humans are capable of adapting.

He pursues this by telling a story about a man and his daughter, a man who goes on an epic quest, and the daughter who doesn’t want him to go, a man who sees wonders, and a daughter who sees wonders, too. About how these wonders are strangely interconnected. 

Matthew McConaughey had just reached his peak of critical approval. He had a one-two punch with True Detective on TV and Dallas Buyers Club in the movies. Suddenly he had his choice of the best material. His charisma has often been taken for granted, his stereotype seen as a big dumb hunk of beef. Yet the career I see is one filled with fascinating choices, full of unbelievable diversity. That’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say, but out of all that Interstellar, for me, somehow stands heads and shoulders above all of it. And his best scenes are wordless, are McConaughey crying at seeing his children, growing up, on a screen.

The bond he shares with his daughter, in particular, portrayed at three different ages, Jessica Chastain in the middle, is of course the heart of the movie. The message their bond sends is often overlooked. Especially if it’s a Disney movie, we’re often told the younger generation has all the answers, but this is a movie that acknowledges how progress can be made through generational ambition, how the dreams and the bonds forged between a father and daughter can change the world.

The splendor of movie magic finds its poetry in an infinite bookshelf that allows them to communicate through time. It feels like Nolan channeling Shyamalan, and maybe this is the precise moment in which they finally meet. I love them both. They are both treasures of the medium. I don’t mind observing this.

The sheer spectacle of the cast alone is worth noting. There’s McConaughey and Chastain, of course; Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Matt Damon! Topher Grace, John Lithgow, Ellen Burstyn, Timothée Chalamet, David Oyelowo, Wes Bentley...I officially ran out of space in the number of labels Blogger let me add, that’s how rich this cast is. Some roles are larger than others. Every one of them is worth admission.

It is a transcendent experience. For me, that’s the height of cinema, the ability to reach well beyond the normal, not merely some beautifully told tale, but one that’s a truly singular experience, that could not be duplicated in another medium, that uses all the available tools to maximum effect, a convergence of epic talent and vision.

The very strange thing is that Arrival is very much at the same level and tells much the same story and is as tall an achievement, and I don’t much think of them as rivals, and they were in theaters within two years of each other. That’s pretty stellar.

The Prestige (2006) Review

rating: ****

the story: Rival magicians push each other to dangerous limits.

review: I’ve had, of all Christopher Nolan’s films, the most difficulty appreciating The Prestige. For me it’s the most desperate of his efforts.

Which is kind of the point.

Following Memento there was tremendous pressure to follow it up with something equally compelling. With his next two films, actually, next three films, including Batman Begins (but that’s another matter entirely), Nolan adapted the work of others rather than conjure his own magic. Insomnia adapted a Swedish film, The Prestige a book. Insomnia, in hindsight, seems to lack the typical Nolan ambition entirely. It is, rather, “merely” Nolan playing, for the first time, as a member of the Hollywood establishment, giving two well-known actors, Al Pacino and Robin Williams, roles that instantly defined that particular stage of their careers. It was atmospheric, but it was very much an actor’s showcase.

The Prestige is the bridge. It is both an actor’s showcase and an obvious return to Nolan’s own brand of magic. 

And deliberately so. I think he took the course he did to reach this point, and beyond it, quite deliberately. Nolan rose to prominence a few years after M. Night Shyamalan’s own breakthroughs. But Shyamalan was quickly, and all but permanently, dismissed as an obvious act, always, at least perceptually, relying on a twist ending to sell his concepts. Nolan didn’t want to be seen as a gimmick filmmaker. So he first stepped away, and then leaned heavily into it.

That’s the whole point of The Prestige, to put a big emphasis on the popular perception of his work.

The story of the movie revolves around rival magicians who very nearly stop at nothing to achieve their magic. In fact, terrible sacrifice, on both their behalves, are revealed as the story reaches its climax. And again, that’s the whole point, but then it’s also in the manner in which they do it, the lengths, and the contrasts between them, they are willing to go.

Which is to say, Nolan is using this film to convey to the audience that he knows what they expect of him, and he is not going to be what they think he is. At least until Inception, anyway, when he will weave his magic in an entirely different manner.

Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman couldn’t possibly do a better job representing all this. They are a new breed of actor, and this is the moment in which they cast off all doubt. They are surrounded by other remarkable performers: Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Piper Perabo, David Bowie, even Andy Serkis, back when he was still best known for motion-capture performances. It takes a bold director to build such a cast, which is itself part of the magic of this movie.

Watching Bale and Jackman duel, learning their awful secrets, Jackman’s final confession (“It was the look on their faces”), emphasizing all over again their contrasts, what motivated them, it’s like another parable, a message well beyond the magic: Is the sacrifice worth it? Or do you become, perhaps, a monster capable of rationalizing anything? 

So when Nolan is ready, four years later, to reveal his own brand of magic again, the stakes have been raised considerably. And he has been working out of that playbook ever since. That’s only possible if he’s willing to sacrifice what came before, that budding artist, the one everyone thought they had figured out. And, well, of course it’s sleight-of-hand.

So yeah, I dig it.

Memento (2001) Review

rating: *****

the story: Guy with memory issues tracks down clues to his wife’s killer.

review: Yeah, I was one of those people who got caught up in Christopher Nolan thanks to Memento, that movie with the apparently gimmicky backwards narrative. I watched his debut feature, Following, which is on the whole fairly similar (an ending that rewrites the whole story), which confirmed for me what I thought of Nolan’s filmmaking. I didn’t actually catch his third movie, Insomnia, until a few years after it was released. I caught back up with him thanks to Batman. I actually thought the other magician rivalry movie from 2006, The Illusionist, was better, even though I enjoyed The Prestige. It wasn’t until Inception (okay, The Dark Knight, which gave me whole new reasons to appreciate Nolan and replaced Memento as my favorite Nolan) that I saw him as truly capable of living up to the promise of Memento as I originally understood his talent.

So I thought pretty highly of it. But it’s not necessarily a movie I went out of my way, in the next twenty years, to revisit.

So watching it again, especially with those additional years and all the subsequent Nolan projects, was quite interesting. I ended up viewing its achievement differently.

It’s actually thanks to his most recent effort, Tenet. A lot of observers think Tenet was basically vastly overhyped. It was an especially strange year, 2020, and Nolan positioned Tenet to carry a lot of weight. A lot of people thought it would be Nolan’s first film to live up to Inception, which is to say it seemed to be so similar, at least as far as its premise looked. But then people actually saw it and they ended up thinking, that backwards time thing, it looked a lot like Memento.

Which is nonsense. The link between them, meanwhile, is real, but also very different than people imagine. Tenet is basically a story about threat prevention. It’s a complicated way to explore what it’s like to stop a tragedy before it happens. So it’s “about” time travel, which in this version looks like time running backwards.

So Memento, from this vantage point, looks different, too. Watching it again, I see it very differently. Maybe I just understand it better now. The whole story is a parable of using, or more accurately misusing, facts.

It’s an interesting thing to think about. We live in an age fraught with the application of facts: facts versus lies, facts as a totem of truth, of moral rectitude. But facts can be unreliable. Facts can in fact be lies. It’s in how they’re reached and how they’re applied that they become, well, dangerous.

And Nolan’s whole story, the way it unfolds, is a perfect testament to that. It doesn’t hurt that he tells it so well, that he has a cast so perfect to purpose, actors who seemingly could never top their roles in it, despite being so interesting: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano. I’ll give you a minute. Tell me one thing any of them did later that was nearly as magnetic. 

Yeah, didn’t think you could. Usually that’s what happens with actors in blockbusters. Later, when Nolan exclusively made blockbusters, he could afford to access actors whose careers were well-established, could pull away from his remarkable gravity, even conjure entire careers from it (Tom Hardy, the true miracle of Inception). Here at the beginning, it was a special kind of privilege to be trapped by it. Because they inhabit the truest form of classic.

This isn’t just a movie with a clever framework, it’s one that exhibits complete command of itself. That’s what defines the potential for greatness, if not greatness itself, why everyone still talks about Christopher Nolan, even if Memento itself seems somehow forgotten. It shouldn’t. If Nolan himself abandoned the relative small scale it represents for an endless series of grand visions, none of them would have been possible without Memento, quite literally. This is the portrait of an artist discovering the canvas. And filling it. And preparing to make that canvas even bigger, in the future. Same talent, different scale. 

You cannot appreciate Nolan, or the art of film itself, without due appreciation of Memento.

Tenet (2020) Review

 rating: ****

the story: In order to prevent the end of the world, a man must travel back in time.

the review: All of Christopher Nolan’s films are about cause and effect. Usually but not always it’s easy to tell which, um, comes first. Of course, he made his name with Memento, which plays out chronologically in reverse. Tenet is sort of like that, except this time it isn’t merely for storytelling effect but built into the plot.

So I’m a big fan of Nolan’s. His existence in a persistent blockbuster moviemaking state, the sheer scale of his ideas, has of course existed since The Dark Knight. The opening of Tenet is perhaps the first time he’s consciously sought the feel of that particular achievement, which for a fan of that particular film was a great way to kick things off.

From there we eventually reach the time travel element. It’s called “inverting” in the movie, but it’s time travel. The cleverness is in how it’s executed. Visually it looks like effects being played backward. It’s memorable in that regard to how Inception most obviously presented its conceit, with the cityscape folding in on itself.

The cleverness, however, is that “inverting” essentially means time travel in Tenet is “rewinding the tape.” It reminds me of Source Code, another high concept movie using a repeating time conceit that turns into a chance to actually prevent (not merely inhabit the circumstances, as is originally believed) a catastrophe from happening. 

Unusually, Nolan lets the concept sell itself more than rest on the star power of the actors (although he did this in his last movie, Dunkirk, too). Since Memento (which for the general public was in casting a mini-reunion of actors from The Matrix), Nolan has consistently gone for as well-known a cast as he could get. His star this time, however, is as close to an unknown as he’s gotten since his first movie, Following. John David Washington (son of Denzel Washington) has one prior lead role to his credit (BlacKkKlansman), in which, for me anyway, he sported a distractingly fake-looking afro. Chances are more people viewed that as a Spike Lee movie than a John David Washington one. As a known commodity, then his screen presence is minimal. That allows the audience to follow him along in the movie far more than linger on him alone (which is half the danger of the rabbit hole Leo DiCaprio leads us through in Inception).

Robert Pattinson, still popularly known for starring in the Twilight movies, costars. He’s been making a new name for himself in recent years by pursuing the kind of “interesting project, interesting role” career that Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp previously pursued as “pretty boy actors,” though they never really succeeded in avoiding the spotlight. But these are far different cinematic times. Now if you aren’t starring in obvious blockbuster material your career plays out in relative obscurity. Pattinson plays his part in Tenet with no desire to upstage anything, and in the process is perhaps inhabiting his first mature role (a knack for which Nolan should be well-known).

The rest of the cast is filled with highlights. Clémence Poésy (like Pattinson a veteran of Harry Potter, same entry and all! as well as In Bruges) and Michael Caine trade off early efforts to guide the audience along. Elizabeth Debicki, who was a standout in a cast of standouts in Widows, takes on the role that might have been the lead in a previous Nolan project, the woman whose life unravels and is the chief beneficiary from the opportunity to rewrite things. Her nefarious husband is played by Kenneth Branagh, perhaps the best strictly villainous figure Nolan has yet conjured, in yet another mid-careee standout performance. Himesh Patel, so appealing in Yesterday last year, has a fun supporting role (which itself is not normally a feature of Nolan movies), while Aaron Taylor-Johnson, so often robbed of his ability to be the movie star he deserves to be, is unrecognizable in a performance that seems to riff on Christian Bake (a familiar Nolan presence).

The whole affair is a trademark example of Nolan’s effortless ability to create sensational moviemaking magic. It plays out like James Bond (that’s how a lot of observers seem to be simplifying it) but is fueled by clever execution of yet another stylistic gimmick, which to my mind Nolan has so far failed to make anywhere close to a routine affair. Christopher Nolan is the opposite of routine. If nothing else Tenet is the latest example of this.

I hesitate to boost the results too far. It’s bravura but stops just short of wanting to be seen as much more than an exceptional action movie. If you can wrap your head around rewinding time travel, then you aren’t left with the ambiguity that made Inception so intoxicating. It really feels as if it’s Nolan saying he could do Dark Knight without Batman. Where that film examines the surveillance state that was then hotly debated, Tenet is essentially an argument for intelligence agencies, which most often end up viewed with suspicion and distrust. It’s a sensational depiction of such work being incredibly effective.

So it’s very interesting, sometimes in ways Nolan hasn’t really pursued before. In the years to come, depending on what he does next, Tenet might be viewed differently, as the movie that transformed Nolan’s already extraordinary career. We’ll see!

Dunkirk (2017)

rating: ****

the story: British soldiers try to evacuate France.

what it's all about: I've been a huge fan of Christopher Nolan for as long as he's been making movies.  I can say that because I had the pleasure of enjoying Following early on, and that's his first movie, before Memento, which for a time was my favorite movie, or at least very near the top, period.  So I've watched the progress of his career with great interest.  Dunkirk, plain and simple, was a bid to be taken seriously by critics.  It's his Saving Private Ryan, a war movie about risking terrible losses for a noble cause.  Surprisingly, there are few war movies like that.  That's actually all of Nolan's movies, risking terrible loss for a noble cause.  Dunkirk may make that most plain for general audiences who have become more accustomed to his blockbuster material than his nuance as a filmmaking visionary, caught up in his gimmicks and getting lost along the way.  But Nolan never gets lost.

The gimmick of Dunkirk is one of his most straightforward yet, and it's hugely rewarding for the rare unambiguous ending to one of his films, where the British eventually get to leave the hell of a beach under constant siege by the enemy.  He follows three tracks of narratives, neatly laid out with cards explaining what they are, how long they take.  Keeping track of them then becomes the business of the viewer.  Tom Hardy's is shortest.  As one of the few pilots trying to clear the airways of enemy fire, his work is accomplished in an hour.  He's there to provide the muscle of star power.  Everyone watching knows who he is, so his eyes get to do most of the work, while Michael Caine cameos early as the voice helping explain the situation.  Mark Rylance, who has become a late-blooming standout in recent years, spends a day as a civilian bringing his boat, and a couple of callow youths, to the rescue.  Kenneth Branagh leads the evacuating troops over the course of a week. 

By the time Branagh celebrates "home," and one of the soldiers remarks that all they did was survive, and Hardy watches his ship burn, the full impact of the events comes into focus.  This is not a movie that beats you over the head with its significance.  This was an historic event that occurred before the Americans even entered WWII.  Churchill is quoted, calling on the British to keep fighting wherever the need arise, a famous speech, at which point you get a sense of where all this falls, if you'd never heard of Dunkirk before.  The experience itself, which like some of the best historic dramas seeks to immerse you directly into it, becomes the whole point, and because of those three story threads you get a good sense of what it was all about, what it took to reach the ending, without sensationalizing any of it.  Rylance takes on a stowaway at one point, Cillian Murphy, who at one point was to emerge as one of Hollywood's bright new stars, but things change, and Murphy seems fine to weather a different storm, even as he suffers brilliantly in Dunkirk, in the tempered Dunkirk fashion.

I don't think it's Nolan's best movie, but it'll be the favorite of a lot of other viewers, who won't question how it fits in with the rest of his movies, who maybe will never see most of his other movies, who may not even be aware that Christopher Nolan has been a significant name in film for nearly twenty years.  That's fine.  Nolan's been playing by his own rules from the very start, and he's managed to create an unbroken string of success doing it, which is incredibly rare.  He's always looking for that next challenge, that next depiction of the classic Nolan narrative, and he's managed to do it at a high level since 2005, when he did the first of three Batman movies.  He's got an epic vision every time, but it always looks different.  By virtue of its apparent awards conventions, Dunkirk may be among his most unique to date.  By removing the central figure that has previously been so integral to his movies, Nolan offers a new challenge, one that will require time, perhaps, to fully absorb. 

Maybe it is his best movie.  Finally, an enigma wrapped up in straightforward packaging.  So that's what it looks like...