Christopher Nolan Films Ranked
9. Insomnia (2002)
Christopher Nolan’s first star-studded Hollywood thriller Insomnia wasn’t quite the follow-up to Memento that the art-house crowd had envisioned, but as an early piece indicative of the excellent thriller work to come in his career, it remains a vital viewing experience. Fans of Nolan can see so many of the director’s best traits on offer here, while the film also offers a wider insight into how cinema was approached at the time and has evolved in the years since, meaning that while Insomnia wasn’t quite to the standard of Nolan’s more well rounded work to come, it remains interesting and vital as well as being an entertaining entry into his catalogue of work.
8. Tenet (2020)
The most Nolanian release of Christopher Nolan’s storied career, Tenet was expected to unite audiences and critics alike in a celebration of the cinema experience after a tough year, but was instead met with a divisive reaction that had some people describing it as a masterpiece and others describing it as too confusing to follow. Regardless of which side of the fence you land on, there’s no denying that Tenet is absolutely Nolan’s most divisive film to date, something that illustrates its challenging evolution of the blockbuster formula but also speaks of its inability to unite the vast majority of cinema goers in a demand for a more imaginative form of summer movie.
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7. Batman Begins (2005)
Nolan was just 32 when he was appointed director of Warner Bros’ latest Batman reboot, the filmmaker tasked with reigniting a monolith of DC Comics for cinema audiences based on little more than his work on a few excellent but vastly less watched releases. What he offered was a darker and deeper version of the Batman that would come to rewrite DC’s philosophy and change the comic book movie landscape forever, Batman Begins being hardly as sharp or monumental a screen experience as his work on its sequel The Dark Knight, but remaining a timeless comic book movie nonetheless, one that many a fan of the franchise still point to as their most enjoyable.
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