8. “Batman Begins” (2005)
“Insomnia” was enough for Warner to feel confident in giving Nolan the keys to their big franchise revival, and the helmer moved swiftly into developing a bold new take on Batman with co-writer David S. Goyer. The film made him the A-lister he is now, and spawned two massive sequels, but it can’t just be us that finds “Batman Begins” in retrospect one of the director’s weakest films. The approach is absolutely something to be lauded; only Nolan could take the premise of man dressed as a bat fighting crime and make it as plausible as possible. And for the first time we had a Batman movie that was actually about Batman, with Christian Bale giving three distinct and excellent performances: Bruce Wayne in private, wounded and still grieving and furious; Bruce Wayne in public, the drunken, irresponsible playboy; and the Batman, a terrifying force of nature. These little choices unquestionably make Bale’s the definitive portrayal of the character, and in Gary Oldman and Michael Caine, he has wonderful support. But Nolan’s still adjusting to his bigger playset, with the action mostly choppy and confusing and the tone is slightly uneven. And while the first two acts are pretty good, Nolan loses the thread in the third, the realistic tone giving way to a hammy Liam Neeson performance (“Excuse me, I have a city to destroy!”— although it should be said that Tom Wilkinson gives him some competition in the scenery chewing), some creaky lines, uneven, misjudged humor (including Gary Oldman acting like Jake Lloyd in “The Phantom Menace“) and some slightly cheap and ill-conceived hallucination scenes (Batman the monster and the Scarecrow’s fire-breathing horse are nice ideas but let down in the execution). The film slows to a crawl every time Katie Holmes is on screen — the actress was reportedly forced on Nolan by the studio, and his disinterest shows. It’s a laudable first effort in mega-budget filmmaking and can be credited with basically launching a whole new way to look at superhero movies, but far, far better things were to come.
7. “Insomnia” (2002)
Praised hugely on release, Nolan’s studio debut has slipped in critical standing over the last decade. Looking back, that’s somewhat unfair —it’s a very strong little thriller with some of the best acting in any of Nolan’s films. But it’s a hard film to truly love, perhaps because for arguably the only time in his career, it feels like a gun-for-hire job, a chance to prove himself with big names and more scope. Nolan had been picked out by Steven Soderbergh —who had raved about “Memento,” helping the film to get a U.S. release— who hired him to direct a remake of the Norwegian thriller of the same name for his Section 8 production company and Warner Bros. Stellan Skarsgård took the role in the original, but here it’s Al Pacino as an LAPD cop sent to Alaska with his partner Hap (Martin Donovan) to help with the enquiry into the death of a 17-year-old girl. Chasing a suspect, Pacino accidentally shoots his partner, who’s just told him that he’s going to testify against him to Internal Affairs, an incident witnessed by the killer (Robin Williams), who blackmails him into helping frame the victim’s boyfriend for his own murder. Nolan handles everything handsomely in an old-fashioned way, but the film sometimes feels a little disengaged, and the screenplay by Hillary Seitz occasionally inches into cop movie cliches. But at the same time, Nolan gives the story a wonderfully creepy atmosphere (again, as with “Memento,” the film takes place entirely in daylight; few filmmakers can make the sun as menacing and bleak as nighttime) and coaxes very strong performances out of his cast. Robin Williams was near-revelatory (this and “One Hour Photo,” released the previous year, remain his best dramatic turns), and it was, until very recently anyway, the last true Pacino turn of greatness, the actor perma-tired and letting a lifetime of sins catch up to him with quiet dignity. It’s a world away from the Shouty Al persona that would largely take over thereafter. So in retrospect, yes, it’s minor Nolan, but it’s still markedly better than 99% of Hollywood procedurals these days.
6. “Interstellar” (2014)
Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” might be the filmmaker’s most frustrating movie. It is at once his most ambitious, his most beautiful and perhaps his most silly. It’s a breathtaking achievement, an immersive tactile experience and yet it possibly reaches beyond its grasp; sometimes leaving you with the simultaneous sensation that you’ve witnessed something emotionally profound, but also maybe a little bit ridiculous. Not quite shrouded in mystery anymore (though we won’t discuss the picture past the first act), “Interstellar” takes place in the near future where a blight has caused a cataclysmic food shortage. The culture of earth has radically changed towards farming and harvesting and all other aspirations have been set aside. When a former astronaut turned farmer (Matthew McConaughey) is recruited by Earth’s most formidable scientists, he has to choose between his family and an interstellar voyage towards a wormhole near Saturn, which could be the planet’s last hope. So “Interstellar” is guts, glory and adventure like “The Right Stuff” mixed with a cerebral mystique, scale and scope that is more like Kubrick‘s grand space odyssey. But while it can aspire to spellblinding awe and wonder in moments, “2001: A Space Odyssey” it is not. “Interstellar” suffers from a pretty clunky screenplay which often spells out its themes awkwardly; some of its on-the-nose lines of dialogue are particularly ungraceful. And while its starry-eyed feeling isn’t as over-pitched as some have suggested, the film’s vague notion that love may be the part of the equation we haven’t accounted for is a little hokey. At some point “Interstellar” takes a quantum leap into the black hole of your suspension of disbelief. Whether you ultimately reject or embrace where the film boldly goes will be up to your subjective experience. “Interstellar” can be experienced like a battle between your optimistic and cynical selves. One hopes you can give yourself over to its grand aims and often rapturous, majestic visuals —and Hans Zimmer’s score might be the MVP of emotional authenticity— but some may find themselves pulled back to the cold reality of logic and skepticism due to the film’s uneven execution. “Interstellar” can be incredibly gorgeous and can engage the mind, the heart and even the soul, but we’d be lying if we didn’t admit the movie buckles under the idealistic weight of its heady and yet sentimental aspirations.
5. “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012)
While the expectations for “Interstellar” have been grand, Nolan had the previous experience of unmatchable hype and fan anticipation with the concluding part of his “Dark Knight” trilogy. But short of delivering a film that could actively cure cancer and feed the starving, he was never really going to be able to meet those expectations, and so “The Dark Knight Rises” is merely a very good film. It feels now like a slight wheeling back on the bleak existentialism of the peerless “The Dark Knight,” delivering more in the way of outright entertainment (Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman, for example) but maybe a little less in terms of braininess and coherent philosophy. Still, it’s a fine send-off for a series that redefined the look and feel and ambition of the super-hero genre, the summer blockbuster and the big-budget studio tentpole all in one go. Tom Hardy’s villainous Bane in retrospect seems like a solid adversary/red herring and if his turn didn’t reach the heights of Heath Ledger’s Joker, perhaps that was necessary so that the focus of this final instalment could go back onto Christian Bale’s Batman/Bruce Wayne. In fact, as so often occurs with trilogies, this final film feels perhaps slightly hampered by having to end on a definitively redemptive note, where the second in the series can afford to be that much more ambivalent. But there is still tremendous texture here, from the very topical-feeling 99%-isms (actually the film was more inspired by Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” than contemporary geopolitical events, but that just goes to show you how timeless the theme of class struggle is) to the idea, overtly put forward, that anyone can be a hero, anyone could be Batman. Most fittingly of all, Bale puts in his best-ever Batman/Bruce Wayne, infusing the character with a kind of melancholic aloneness that makes that final moment with Alfred and the Fernet Branca feel even more touching, and surprisingly well-earned. It’s not without its flaws by any means, the plotting often does get in the way of what should be clean, bold throughlines, but as a grace note love letter to a character who made Nolan’s career, and to a vision for a comic book film which simply redefined what the genre could do, it’s a fitting farewell.
