The Best Christopher Nolan Movies

Isn’t it kind of nice to have a designated last-place dweller on this list that likely won’t bother anybody? Surely there are some Following partisans, and there’s plenty to like about Christopher Nolan’s debut; before you even get to the hooky budget-noir premise – an aspiring novelist starts following people at random and meets a criminal, becoming ensnared in his world of deception in the process – there’s the fact that it’s a 70-minute movie shot on black-and-white 16mm film, essentially a scrappy student film with the chops to score a limited indie release. But this is also a filmmaker who has excelled in the studio space, with the top-notch actors, practical effects, and bigger canvases those jobs have afforded him, so this one can’t help but look a bit slim by comparison. (In a clear case of “take what you can get,” this is the only Nolan movie in the Criterion Collection.) That said, it would be a kick to see Nolan pick up any of those limitations again, presumably still at a cost greater than the six grand or so this one supposedly cost; imagine the Nolan of 2025 turning in a movie under 90 minutes! Imagine the grain if he blew up a 16mm print to those IMAX screens! Following is still very much worth seeing, and there’s no shame in its placement here. Who among us wouldn’t hope to place work we did in our twenties below what we worked up to afterwards?

11. Dunkirk (2017)

Warner Bros. Pictures/Everett Collection

Almost all of Nolan’s movies bend time, whether through non-chronological editing, actual time-travel devices, or the occasional “Wait, how much time just passed?” elision. Though it creates zero temporal pincer movements, Dunkirk is one of his headiest time-trips, following a World War II troop evacuation from three cross-cut perspectives: characters in land, sea, and air. The unusual trick is that these three stories, though afforded similar amounts of screen time, cover different spans of action. The land evacuation takes place over one week, the sea material takes place over one day, and the air mission happens in a single hour. It’s like Inception’s dream-layered climax recreated in real life. On a purely practical level, the movie can be a little hard to follow, because it features a bunch of pasty, largely uniformed English guys running, sailing, and flying around in great numbers, depending on action far more than dialogue or characterization. Even more so than many of Nolan’s visually spectacular films, Dunkirk is best seen in a format that’s vanishingly difficult to actually attain: full 70mm film IMAX, which is available at all of about 20 U.S. locations. That’s why, terrifically visceral as it is, the movie doesn’t rate higher here; its full immersive effect (still occasionally imitated in films as diverse in style as 1917 and Warfare) can’t be reproduced in your living room, no matter how big your TV is.

10. Insomnia (2002)

First Run Features/Everett Collection