Chess Club
Year Book Staff
“Most Likely to be the King of Hollywood”

We can all relax because I’ve collated and curated the definitive ranking of the thirteen feature films directed by Sir Christopher Edward Nolan (CBE).

So, now that it’s official, we don’t have to discuss it or [God-forbid] argue about it ever again! (You’re welcome)

We did it! It’s done. We have it now.

Here it is:

13. Following (1998)

“The Source of the Nile.” The decade that began with Gen X upstarts like Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, and Kevin Smith maxing out their credit cards to help pay for raw stock, ended with a 27 year old Anglo-American cinephile with a degree in English literature, begging, borrowing and stealing every amateur actor, location, or 16mm black and white short end he could get his hands as he deconstructed the Film Noir exercise and reasembled it in his own nonlinear image. It would be the first and last time he would ever have to make a feature film on a shoestring budget.

12. Batman Begins (2005)

“The Baptism” (“Bat-tism?”). Without Batman Begins, there’s obviously no The Dark Knight. But there’s also no Casino Royale, no Iron Man, and no 2009 Star Trek reboot. Your mileage may vary on how you feel about prequelitis and the “origin story boom” of the late 2000s. But there’s no denying that Nolan’s first foray into the franchise that he redefined blew the doors off the cinematic comic book space and worked wonders in grounding and legitimizing it for a cynical, traumatized, post-9/11 audience.

11. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

“The Victory Lap.” Nolan’s messiest and least disciplined film also feels like a reaction to the hyper-focused rigidity of its franchise predecessors, as well as metacommentary about the weight of responsibility leveled upon his shoulders after the unprecedented success of The Dark Knight. Like Bruce Wayne himself, who is ready to renounce the cape and cowl for good, Nolan takes one last joyride through Gotham and throws ALL of the spaghetti at the wall. Much of it doesn’t stick, but what does comprises some of the most sublime and staggering set pieces in the filmmaker’s canon (see: the mid-air highjacking and Bruce escaping from the pit).

10. Insomnia (2002)

“The Call to the Bullpen.” Thanks to a couple of creative meetings initiated by Memento superfan Steven Soderbergh, 31-year-old Nolan suddenly found himself “called up to the show” as he entered into a relationship with Warner Brothers (the studio that would be his home for nearly two decades) and, on only his third feature, tasked with directing a trio of Oscar-winners. This conclusion to Nolan’s unofficial “Daylight Noir” trilogy–completely successful in meeting its modest ambitions–is an outlier in his filmography, given that it’s a straight remake and still the only one of his directorial features for which which he has no writing credit. His perspective and style are apparent, if not his fingerprints.

9. Tenet (2020)

“The Remix.” One of the most vocal, vociferous, and high-profile admirers of the James Bond series, Nolan found a way to play in the high-tech, globe-trotting, super-spy sandbox (as well as tailor it to fit his specific science fiction interests) without having to tether himself to another franchise or sacrifice artistic autonomy. In doing so, he also engineered an opportunity to clap back at the cultural discourse about the narrative complexity of his films. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” became an impatient dismissal, a cheeky provocation, and a fanbase rallying cry in equal measure.

8. The Prestige (2006)

“The Deep Cut.” Brian Eno is credited with stating that “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” If The Dark Knight is Nolan’s “Abbey Road” and Inception is his “Dark Side of the Moon,” then The Prestige is probably his “The Velvet Underground & Nico.” The “idea of Nolan” as iconoclast obviously started with Memento. But the “cult of Nolan” as a stylistic and intellectual brand most certainly began with The Prestige. To say it’s the “hipster choice” for Nolan’s secret masterpiece isn’t meant as insult (to hipsters or to Nolan). But not for nothing that he soundtracks the end credits with a Thom Yorke song–the last time he would do something that “pop” until he began his professional collaboration with Travis Scott, 14 years and 6 films later (and with all due deferrence to Edith Piaf).

7. The Dark Knight (2008)

“The Investiture.” Has there ever been as drastic and dramatic a “level up” in both artistic achievement and cultural penetration (and, for that matter, financial return) as the progression from Batman Begins to The Dark Knight? In that regard it’s also the ultimate example of professional leveling up for a filmmaker–in terms of industrial importance and creative cache–given that The Dark Knight not only made Nolan a household name and a hero to a generation of cinephiles in the course of a single summer, but also guaranteed his access to resources and top tier above and below the line talent for decades to come. To say nothing of the fact that it also cemented his status as a “thinking man’s entertainer” and “franchise auteur” all in one fell flip a semi truck.

6. Interstellar (2014)

“The Message in a Bottle.” Nolan’s outside-the-box casting choices that perennially pay dividends (see: Heath Ledger, Robert Downey Jr., Samantha Morton, et. al), as well as his unsung facility as an actor’s director were both in full bloom in 2014’s Interstellar–an all time tearjerker anchored by the performance of Matthew McConaughey’s career (the REAL capper on the “McConaissance,” in spite of him having won the Oscar nine months earlier). Interstellar is one of Nolan’s most ambitious and divisive works, and perhaps stands out as the film of his whose reach most exceeds its grasp. But it’s so chockablock with pathos and beauty (Hans Zimmer’s score here is probably the composer’s masterpiece) that it’s hard to deny its rightful reputation as one of Nolan’s defining works in spite of or even because of what it’s ultimately attempting to accomplish.

5. The Odyssey (2026)

“The Flex.” Perhaps more so than anything else in his oeuvre, The Odyssey is the ultimate example of a Nolan film representing something greater than the sum of its parts. There are plenty of things in the film that don’t “work,” or, at least, are not as effective in execution as they are in design or conception. But the Gestalt effect of The Odyssey is so confidently earnest, so complete in scope, and so cinematically pure as to reflect something about the filmmaker that had been there from the beginning but didn’t fully reveal itself as a creative keystone until he was a baker’s dozen features into a filmography. Namely, that the manner in which stories are told and the ever-evolving relationship between fact, fiction, history, and legend, is not only the backbone of mythology and classicism, but perhaps is what Nolan–for all of his structural experimentation and epistimological boulder-pushing–has ultimately been trying to get at, all along. His storytelling innovations and cultural impact feel very much in conversation with the vitality and durability of Homer’s work. Here’s hoping that the bards will still be reciting Nolan’s songs in 3000 years.

4. Dunkirk (2017)

“The Challenge.” If Interstellar was Nolan’s reaction to pundits who accused him of being cold and cerebral, and Tenet was his puckish rejoinder to those who minimized his storytelling as byzantine and convoluted, then Dunkirk was a reaction to critiques that his subjects, runtimes, and scope had gotten bloated and out of control. As he approached his tenth feature film–having finally put his Dark Knight trilogy to rest and cinematically reckoned with Interstellar travel–it felt like a moment where Nolan was looking to challenge himself and explore minimalism. At 106 minutes, Dunkirk is his second-shortest film (Following just barely grazes the feature-length threshold at 69 minutes) and is a svelte, streamlined, sublime Swiss Watch. But it’s also one of his most handsomely mounted, most hopeful, and most structurally radical (which I mean as a HUGE compliment) films. It’s designed as a “feature-length third act,” but it’s also in the conversation for his most approachable and complete work to date.

3. Memento (2000)

“The Rosetta Stone.” The independent film movement of the 1990s led to an influx of innovative and influential sophomore features from a cohort of heavy hitters who would help to define the cinema of the early 21st Century (see: Pulp Fiction, Dazed and Confused, Boogie Nights, Rushmore, Requiem for a Dream, et al.). But perhaps no Sophomore film from a Gen X auteur announced the coming of a singular voice upon the world cinema stage quite as inexorably as Memento (which didn’t even make it to the Sundance Film Festival until January of 2001, making it a true turn-of-the-century harbinger), Nolan’s breakout. What the film did then and still does today is foreground an individual who makes art cinema for mainstream audiences, not the other way around. He’s been doing it from the beginning, and Memento still feels as fresh, vital, challenging, and capital-C cinematic (!) today as it did 25 years ago when I saw it in the smallest, dingiest, most inauspicious auditorium at the Meridian 16 multiplex in Seattle and thought to myself, “I don’t know who this guy is. But I know he’s the future. And I know I will follow him anywhere.”

2. Oppenheimer (2023)

“The Legitimizer.” Nolan pulls off so many cinematic miracles over the course of his sprawling, Oscar-winning biopic that I almost don’t even know where to start when reflecting on its importance both to the filmmaker’s oeuvre as well as audiences writ large when it dropped in the summer of 2023 (and would go on to land within striking distance of a billion dollars at the box office). But suffice to say that, watching Oppenheimer, one gets the sense that the filmmaker has truly come into his own as both master storyteller and sui generis stylist. At three hours long (practically to the second!) Oppenheimer is Nolan’s most robust and baroque work. But his approach to the material (aided in no small part by editor Jennifer Lame) is that of an action filmmaker, and he tackles security clearance hearings with the same verve and ferocity as his staging of the Trinity Test. This is a film about the weight of guilt and humanity’s capacity to destroy itself, featuring a denouement that’s in the conversation for the darkest and most hopeless coda in cinematic history. But the film’s secret sauce is that it remains an absolute barnburner of a thriller, even as its revelations and epiphanies divulge themselves within the most deathly serious thematic territory a Nolan film has ever dared to explore.

1. Inception (2010)

“The Game Changer.” There’s a moment in every Christopher Nolan film when I find myself rendered giddy by the cinematic fireworks that his unique approach to narrative can cultivate. In Memento, it’s the “Oh, I’m chasing this guy… nope… he’s chasing me…” revelation. In Interstellar, it’s the moment when Coop sees his daughter’s face for the first time in years, only to discover that she’s now the same age as he is. In Tenet, it’s the sequence when the Protagonist volunteers to have his body inverted in a last-ditch effort to retrieve the film’s MacGuffin. And so on and so on. The reason that Inception is my number one Nolan and why it likely always will be is because that giddy feeling that I associate with the dramatic “convergences” (Nolan’s term) created when his rotating timelines and shifting temporalities find complementary synchronization–thus throwing off sparks and surprises through friction and correspondence–reveals itself within the opening moments of the film and basically never subsides (up to and including the infamous final image of the spinning top). It’s Nolan at his most Nolan, which is exactly how I want my Nolans– self-aware, ambitious, experimental, and transcendent. Nolan has a reputation for being cold, serious, and humorless. I fundamentally disagree. The humor in his films can be found in the puckish audacity with which he designs his set pieces and lays out narrative challenges for us, beckoning us along for the ride, as if punctuating his intentions with a winking promise that he intends to take us someplace and show us something that we have never experienced before. As far as I’m concerned, Inception represents the greatest payoff of that promise. I get giddy just thinking about it.

“The structural notions to me always have to be worked out very carefully in the script stage. Whatever a particular structure is. Whether it's chronological or non-chronological. To me that's always about what point of view are we trying to address in the film?”

-Christopher Nolan