Universal/Warner Bros/Paramount
There are only a handful of directors on this planet who can open a movie on the back of their name alone, and Christopher Nolan is undeniably one of those directors, if not the apex of them all.
Virtually ever since the release of Batman Begins 20 years ago, Christopher Nolan has become a tenant of blockbuster filmmaking and a pioneer of new movie-making techniques, particularly as it relates to IMAX.
Remember now, for all of the talk you’ve heard about what format you should see Sinners or One Battle After Another in, those discussions became truly popularized with the release of Oppenheimer in 70MM IMAX back in 2023.
If you’re reading this, it means you’re likely of a certain age — born after the year 1980, let’s say — which means Christopher Nolan is to our generations what the likes of James Cameron and Ridley Scott were to the previous ones: not just an auteur, but an auteur doing it at the biggest scale possible, marrying entertainment and art at its highest level.
We’re now 11 feature films and nearly 30 years into Nolan’s career and he only seems to be getting better — but as of now, here’s how his movies stack up, ranked worst to best.
Editor’s note: this list will not include Following, Nolan’s 1998 independent film which was technically his directorial debut.
All of Christopher Nolan’s 11 feature films ranked from worst to best
11. Insomnia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emIHzg4VH8A&pp=ygUOaW5zb21uaWEgbW92aWU%3D
Insomnia is a massive outlier in Christopher Nolan’s filmography, as it’s the only time he’s directed a film from a script that was written by someone else. As such, it feels the least like a “Nolan movie,” placing it at the bottom of this list. Hell of a combo in Al Pacino and Robin Williams, though.
10. Tenet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P95KvR9SMgU&pp=ygUGdGVuZXQg
Defenders of Tenet, Christopher Nolan included, will tell you it’s a movie that you should focus on feeling and not thinking about. And while cinema can ultimately be an empathetic medium, those emotions don’t register the way they should if the intellectual aspect isn’t clicking.
So for however fun Tenet may be to watch, it’s still a difficult experience to enjoy because of the density of its plot and mechanics, and is perhaps the only time in Nolan’s career that he’s truly jumped the shark. How else do you explain a YouTube video called “I Finally Figured Out TENET” nearly being as long as the movie itself?
9. Memento
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3-UIdApbyw&pp=ygUGbWVtZXRv
There are two kinds of people in this world: people who admit that still can’t fully wrap their head around Memento, and liars. Still, the level to which Nolan was able to equally confuse and enthrall audiences is what set him on the path to directorial stardom he’d eventually forge.
8. The Dark Knight Rises
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuWsOHIlbfE&pp=ygUbdGhlIGRhcmsga25pZ2h0IHJpc2VzIGZpZ2h0
While the worst of Nolan’s three Batman movies, The Dark Knight Rises is still better than 95% of all of the superhero movies ever made, and also has the best pure action scenes in the trilogy, as eminently cerebral director finally figured out how to comprehensively shoot a kinetic action scene (i.e. Bane vs. Batman, both times).
7. Dunkirk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7O7BtBnsG4&pp=ygUPZHVua2lyayB0cmFpbGVy
The true start of Christopher Nolan’s “big boy” era (this is a phrase I’ve just coined, don’t take it too seriously) that’s seen him level up from Dunkirk to Oppenheimer to The Odyssey, Dunkirk proved that the acclaimed director could operate as effectively in the real world as he does in his own.
6. Batman Begins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w3IbaURE8s&pp=ygUmYmF0bWFuIGJlZ2lucyBpIGRvbid0IGhhdmUgdG8gc2F2ZSB5b3U%3D
If Spider-Man represented the dawn of the modern era of superhero movies, Batman Begins marked the start of the “gritty origin story” trend that become popular in the decades since.
It can be difficult to imagine now, but Batman was in the cinematic doldrums following 1997’s disastrous Batman & Robin, leaving Nolan tasked with essentially reinventing the character on the big-screen, with he very much achieved with Batman Begins by zooming in on the Dark Knight’s earliest days as a crimefighter, therefore adding far more dramatic depth to the man under the mask.
Nolan’s origin story in Batman Begins was so effective, in fact, that it’s been skipped over in the two Batman franchises since. While Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice includes a brief and widely mocked montage of Thomas and Martha Wayne’s murder, the film focuses on a veteran Batman whose decades into his career. Similarly, Robert Pattinson’s The Batman not only jumped directly to his second year on the job but eschewed depicting his parents’ deaths, as well. Nolan did it so well that subsequent filmmakers can count on audiences carrying that foundational Batman knowledge with them.
5. The Prestige
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLtaA9fFNXU&pp=ygUNdGhlIHByZXN0aWdlIA%3D%3D
You will find the occasional Nolan-head out there who will argue that The Prestige is actually Nolan’s best movie. I, at time, can be one of those people. This, however, is not one of those times.
The affection for The Prestige comes from the fact that, considering what Nolan’s filmography would eventually become, it’s a uniquely small and intimate story, filled with all sorts of the clever twists that the filmmaker’s early outings were heralded for.
4. Inception
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6BZkFatFuI
Once you reach the top three or four of Nolan’s filmography, an already subjective task becomes even more difficult to discern, as a case could be made for virtually every one of these movies to claim the top spot. If I were to make the case of Inception, I’d reason that it’s become the platonic ideal of what a Christopher Nolan movie is: inventive, ingenious, elaborate, and exciting. Even the famed “WOOOOOOMMMMPPPP” sound from the movie has penetrated popular culture in a way that few films do.
3. Oppenheimer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZYD-H4V2M0&pp=ygUYb3BwZW5oZWltZXIgdHJpbml0eSB0ZXN0
Oppenheimer marked the long-awaited and deserved critical anointing of Christopher Nolan, as it barnstormed both the box office — grossing almost $1B despite being a three-hour-long, partially black-and-white biopic — and the Academy Awards, taking home the prizes for Best Director and Best Picture in the process.
What Nolan achieved with Oppenheimer was genuinely something that could not have been pulled off by any other director in the world — not Martin Scorsese, not Quentin Tarantino, not Paul Thomas Anderson, not Denis Villeneuve — and that was the eventization of a biopic. And not a biopic about a cultural icon like John Lennon or Muhammed Ali, but a theoretical scientist best known for chillingly uttering “And now I have become Death, destroyer of Worlds.”
If Top Gun: Maverick saved movie theaters from the brink of deaht, Oppeneheimer — alongside Barbie, creating the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon — gave the industry a new lease on life.
2. Interstellar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyc6RJEEe0U&pp=ygUUaW50ZXJzdGVsbGFyIHRyYWlsZXI%3D
Perhaps the best way justify Interstellar’s position on this ranking is to reference Letterboxd, the beloved social media app used by movie fans to log and review what they’ve seen. And on Letterboxd, Interstellar is Nolan’s most popular project, having been watched by over 5.9 million users (The Dark Knight is second at 5.2 million).
But what does popularity — viewership — actual translate to? What does it actually mean? To me, it means that Interstellar is not just a foundational Christopher Nolan movie, but a pillar of 21st century cinema at large. Even people who aren’t familiar with Christopher Nolan have likely heard of, or at least seen, Interstellar. Its revolutionary visuals have also provided the framework for what most people picture when they think of a blackhole.
That sort of cultural ubiquity and omnipresence represents something beyond just critical praise and box office glory — it becomes shorthanded, meme’d, routinely referenced. When a movie achieves the sort of recognition that Interstellar has, it truly crosses the threshold from entertainment to art.
1. The Dark Knight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co2bs_OjLG8&pp=ygUfZGFyayBrbmlnaHQgaW50ZXJyb2dhdGlvbiBzY2VuZQ%3D%3D
On a technical level and a cultural level, it’s possible that Christopher Nolan has already surpassed The Dark Knight — and, if not yet, certainly will with the release of The Odyssey next summer. But in order to properly rank the movies of a director as iconic as Nolan, you must consider what the movie meant at the time of its release, and that’s what ultimately slots The Dark Knight into the #1 spot — it was a cinematic event unto itself.
For about a 5ish-year run from 2015 to 2020, a superhero movie grossing a billion dollars or more became relatively commonplace. And that was only possible because of the success of The Dark Knight, which was the first-ever comic book movie to gross the billion-dollar threshold at the box office, thus elevating the genre as a whole.
The Dark Knight not only redefined what a superhero movie could be, but what a blockbuster movie could achieve, as it became the first comic book film to receive an Oscar for acting — for the late, great Heath Ledger, whose performance as the Joker still stands as one of the finest acting works of the 21st century — and forced the Academy to expand its Best Picture field from five to ten, giving the film a tangible legacy of achievement alongside its intangible reverence.
That, combined with the fact that virtually everything I said about Interstellar sans its digital effects is true about The Dark Knight, ultimately cements it as Nolan’s greatest ever project. For now… I say ‘for now’, because it feels virtually undeniable at this point that Nolan is looking to take the scope of Interstellar with the history (albeit fictional in The Odyssey’s case) Oppenheimer to create what very well could prove to be his true masterpiece.
The Odyssey is currently scheduled to be released in movie theaters on July 17, 2026.