At first, it seems surprising that this would be one of the few actual successes during Hollywood's worst box office summer on record. First of all, there hasn't been much interest in the Batman character after Joel Schumacher's horrible Batman and Robin frittered away the goodwill that Tim Burton's Batman movies earned. (In retrospect, Burton's films weren't that good either.)… read more!

I don't like writing reviews for movies like The Dark Knight, because what can I add to the conversation? What can I do other than agree with all the other raves? Yes, Christopher Nolan and his cowriter brother Jonathan have matched the excellence of their earlier Batman Begins. Yes, it's good that they got rid of Katie Holmes, the only… read more!

I admired Batman Begins because it rejuvenated a tired superhero franchise with a first-rate cast and an entirely new look and feel for the characters. Its sequel The Dark Knight was so strong because, well, it had the Joker – one of the most iconic villains in pop culture brought to life by Heath Ledger's sensational performance. (Even if the actor had… read more!

It's exciting, it's perfectly crafted, it's the best (meaning the least ridiculous) movie Christopher Nolan's made since Memento, yet strangely there's not much more to say about Dunkirk besides that. The film documents what, for Britain, remains one of the key moments in World War II: the 1940 evacuation of over 300,000 Allied soldiers who were surrounded by the Germans… read more!

Nolan's latest outing, his first solo screenwriting credit since his debut feature Following, is heavy duty science fiction, densely plotted and filled with fresh, exciting ideas. That's the good part. I'll get to the not-so-good part in a minute. Inception follows a team of "extractors" – criminals who use technology to infiltrate the literal dreams of corporate executives, then steal… read more!

I get suspicious of remakes of foreign films, especially when they come so soon after the original release. In this case, Norwegian filmmaker Erik Skjoldbjærg's 1997 cop thriller Insomnia barely had time to relax after its limited art house run before getting picked up by the Hollywood adaptation police. This time, however, it's not a case of a great film… read more!

I am not a Christopher Nolan apologist. In fact, I'm usually among the first to point out his films' plot holes, contrivances, and overall self-seriousness. So when, during the very first days after Interstellar's release, I began seeing people complaining about the same things I usually complain about, I thought, Oh well, here we go again. I still see all… read more!

Grim film noir with a fascinating premise: a man on the hunt for his wife's killer suffers from an extreme case of short-term memory loss – and a fascinating structure: the film begins at the end and works backwards through a series of scenes, like Harold Pinter's Betrayal but with more twists. Leonard (Guy Pearce) has been suffering from his… read more!

It's ironic that The Prestige would open in theatres hot on the heels of the sleeper hit The Illusionist. While it's not uncommon for two big-budget features about the same subject matter – in this case, Victorian-era magicians – to come out at the same time, what makes this coincidence especially interesting is that The Prestige is explicitly about the… read more!

Call him arrogant, but you've got to hand it to Christopher Nolan: Despite a worldwide pandemic shutting down cinemas, he wasn't going to let his new blockbuster Tenet debut on some streaming service, or wait until the coast is clear in 2021 (or even 2022, at the rate things are going). It would screen in theaters only – on 35mm,… read more!