Every Christopher Nolan Movie Ranked

Long before he went on to make some of the biggest movies of all time, Christopher Nolan made one of the smallest. But despite its micro-budget (reportedly in the realm of $6000), his lo-fi debut is unmistakably Nolan – a sly, paranoid crime story told in non-chronological order, stacked with twists that unfold right until the very last second. The title refers to the habit of its lead character (known only as 'The Young Man', and played by Jeremy Theobald), who looks out for interesting people and just… follows them. But when one of his stalking subjects turns out to be a slick criminal Cobb (Alex Haw), it's not long before our lead is groomed into becoming a burglar. Shot in central London in black-and white, Following is a particularly Hitchcockian noir – with its mysterious buttoned-up masculine protagonists, an alluring blonde bombshell (Lucy Russell), and a spiralling descent into crime. At only 69 minutes, it's a brief but potent introduction to a filmmaker who would go on to much, much bigger things – but taking the ethos established here with him the whole way.Buy now on Amazon

If you're in a Christopher Nolan movie, chances are you're not going to get a relaxing night's sleep. Batman spends his evenings standing on the rooftops, glaring into the night. The dreamers in Inception wake up more knackered than when they dozed off. To paraphrase the Dylan Thomas verse that Michael Caine recites in Interstellar, nobody's going gentle into that good night. So it's no big surprise that one Nolan protagonist spends the entire runtime of a film failing to get 40 winks. Insomnia's bleary cop protagonist Will Dormer (Al Pacino) is haunted by guilt and plagued by permanent daylight, stuck in an Alaskan town until he shuts a grisly case. The film he anchors, a remake of a Norwegian thriller, has a reputation as a minor Nolan; after all, there's precious little of his time-futzing trademark, and zero Michael Caine. But if you give it another go, you'll be reminded that it's a cracking little psychological study of a man on the edge, full of haunting imagery (Pacino, gun in hand, whirling through fog) and boasting a sensational performance by Robin Williams as a friendly-looking killer. The two stars and Nolan are uncharacteristically muted, which only makes the movie's strange mood linger longer. Don't sleep on it.Buy now on Amazon

After the majestic arrival of Batman Begins and the exhilarating escalation of The Dark Knight, the final instalment in Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy had its work cut out for it. That it doesn't quite match either of its predecessors is less an indictment of Rises, more an acknowledgement that Nolan had raised the bar near-impossibly high. For all its flaws – a baggy middle act, plotting that doesn't hold up to the tightest scrutiny, some questionable people-vs-the-elite politics – it's still a thunderous final chapter, a summer-blockbuster-as-revolutionary-epic that dares to make big storytelling swings in its exploration of Bruce Wayne and Gotham City. In the shadow of Heath Ledger's Joker, Tom Hardy offers brute physicality in his intense (and occasionally unintelligible) performance as Bane, while Anne Hathaway adds lightness as a sly cat-burglar incarnation of Selina Kyle. In truth, it's not a wholly satisfying conclusion to the trilogy – but by anyone else's standards it's a towering work.Buy now on Amazon

After conquering Gotham and delving into the deepest depths of the subconscious in Inception, there was nowhere to go but up, outwards, beyond. And so Interstellar was the film that shot Christopher Nolan into the stratosphere, a movie that's simultaneously his most epic and intimate work. Envisioning a future Earth (an unspecified number of years away) facing annihilation as a crop blight threatens starvation to a decimated population, Matthew McConaughey's pilot Cooper is sent on an intergalactic mission: head into the cosmos, explore a wormhole, and find a new home for humanity among the stars. While some scoff at its out-there final act, Nolan uses his biggest and boldest ideas – bolstered by theoretical astrophysics courtesy of Kip Thorne – to tell an emotional father-daughter story. The scene in which Cooper catches up on some old video messages (you know the one) is completely tearjerking in a way few Nolan films are.Buy now on Amazon

The big-screen Batman franchise was in a very, very different place before Christopher Nolan got involved. After Burton's gothic weirdness and Schumacher's campy neon-kitsch, the prospect of grounding Bruce Wayne's story in a Gotham that felt distinctly real-world seemed baffling. But that's exactly what Nolan did, taking a deep-dive into the psychology of its grief-stricken central hero, asking how exactly an orphaned billionaire decides to fight crime dressed as a giant bat. With its ninja-training sequences, tank-alike Batmobile, and evil pharmacologist baddie (Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow), it's a thrilling ground-up reinvention of the entire mythos that still feels inspired – everything from Bond to Superman to Sherlock felt its impact. As well as being an exploration of fear itself, in investing so much time in Christian Bale's characterisation of Bruce Wayne, it's the greatest outright 'Batman' movie of the three – especially since The Dark Knight, really, is all about the other guy…Buy now on Amazon

Of course a Christopher Nolan war movie wasn't going to operate like any other kind of war movie. For one, there isn't really much war in it – it's a flat-out survival story, thousands of Allied soldiers stuck on a French beach and hunkering down amid enemy attacks until civilian boats can whisk them away. And then there's the ticking-clock chronology, Nolan splitting the Dunkirk evacuation story into three distinct timelines, each running at a different speed – the boots-on-the-ground soldier's-eye view, the boats-on-the-sea position, and the planes-in-the-air perspective. Come the final reel, all three strands weave together ingeniously – and the ride there is absolutely breathless, the constant threat of danger and imminent death underpinned by a panic-attack tick-tick-ticking score from Hans Zimmer. For all the star-studded names (Branagh! Hardy! Rylance!) it's the casting of the newcomers – Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard, Harry Styles (who he?) – that's most effective, all looking so young and vulnerable, none of them assured to make it to the end credits.Buy now on Amazon

Sandwiched between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, a rising Nolan snuck in this beguiling, intoxicating, and darkly disturbing tale of obsession, rivalry, and the power of illusion. Based on Christopher Priest's novel, it casts Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as competing 'magicians' in the Victorian age, each intent on one-upping the other and discovering their secrets, no matter the (perhaps terrible) cost. Bearing Nolan's trademark jumbled chronology, it's ingeniously structured like an illusion itself, laid out in Michael Caine's exposition as The Pledge (the set-up), The Turn (the surprise twist), and The Prestige (the big reveal). If this seems like minor Nolan compared to his heavyweight blockbusters, it really isn't – it's just as exhilarating as any of his action spectacles. It's a film about what it means to have the audience in the palm of your hand, to deliver something they never expected, all the ingenious machinations hidden away, to create something that, on the surface, could only be pure magic. And that's Christopher Nolan through and through.Buy now on Amazon

On paper, it is a concept so hare-brained, highfalutin and head-scratchable that you wonder how a filmmaker ever managed to get it made in the first place. So it's going backwards, but also forwards? And it's in colour, but also black-and-white? And it starts at the end, but also the middle, and finishes at the beginning? Any film that needs to be explained with diagrams doesn't scream bankable blockbuster. And yet the confusing structure of Memento — a remarkably audacious American debut for a filmmaker who had not even turned 30 yet — is not a bug, it's a feature: inspired by our neo-noir narrator Leonard (Guy Pearce), whose anterograde amnesia, played like an anti-superpower, gives the film its elegantly disorientating structure. Forever fascinated with the nature of time, and how he can tamper with it through cinema, Nolan has tinkered with tempo like a watchmaker throughout his career, but perhaps never as successfully or as satisfyingly as this early entry. And you don't need a tattoo or a polaroid to believe that.Buy now on Amazon

And away… we… go! After constructing a whole new Gotham in Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan introduced the clown intent on tearing the whole thing down. Despite being a Batman movie (albeit the first ever not to have 'Batman' in the title), The Dark Knight is absolutely The Joker's show – the late, great Heath Ledger (an initially controversial choice) putting in a visceral, transformative, truly terrifying performance as the Clown Prince Of… not exactly Crime, but pure, unadulterated Chaos. Less than a decade after 9/11, Nolan re-conceived Batman's greatest foe as an unpredictable terrorist intent on turning the people of Gotham against each other – his actions intended to spark mass discord pulled off in jaw-dropping set-pieces. For all the spectacle, this is a very different blockbuster from the off – the genius opening clown-mask bank heist is the film in miniature, an ambitious crime saga clad in superhero trappings, daring and ruthless and full of surprises. The Dark Knight is full-strength, no-holds-barred, firing-on-all cylinders Nolan.Buy now on Amazon

Emboldened (and financially empowered) by the success of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan then went to a place only he could: several layers into his own subconscious. Inspired by his own experiences of lucid dreaming, Nolan spun the potential of malleable dreamworlds into an ultra-smart, ultra-exciting blockbuster that pumps adrenaline and taxes the brain at the same time. Leonardo DiCaprio is Dom Cobb, visionary, dream-weaver, plus criminal, who has a talent for hacking into people's dreams and stealing their secrets. But his latest job will be more complex – planting an idea inside the mind of Cillian Murphy's Robert Fischer while he sleeps, aided by a team of gunslingers, architects, and thieves. The result is part Bond movie, part action spectacle, part mind-bending psychological thriller, playing out across multiple dream-layers that threaten to topple at any moment as Cobb's own brain-glitch (the guilt-ridden memory of his dead wife Mal, played by Marion Cotillard) brings its own complications. Dizzying, complex, and unlike anything else around – it's a masterpiece that only could have been made by Christopher Nolan.Buy now on Amazon