Every Christopher Nolan Film, Ranked

In a film only Nolan could pull off, a CIA officer known only as the Protagonist (John David Washington) fights antagonists from the future as objects move backward in time. That premise sets up a temporal puzzle that film buffs are still piecing together. Iconic scene: After approaching one of the timeline-flipping turnstiles, the Protagonist and fellow agent Neil (Robert Pattinson) are both attacked by two versions of the same masked man, one moving forward in time and one moving backward.

A remake of Erik Skjoldbjærg’s acclaimed 1997 Norwegian thriller, Christopher Nolan’s 2002 crime drama stars Al Pacino as Will Dormer, a grizzled Los Angeles detective investigating the murder of a teenage girl in a small Alaskan town. Kept awake by the region’s endless summer daylight, Dormer’s insomnia is fueled by overwhelming guilt after he accidentally shoots and kills his partner in the fog. The real killer then exploits Dormer’s sleep deprivation and guilt, blackmailing him into covering up the truth. Nolan brings his signature tension through the use of constant daylight, but it is Robin Williams who shines in this neo-noir pic. —Erin Maxwell

Right out of the gate, Christopher Nolan’s debut let film fans know there was a new auteur in town, and he was here to stay. Released in 1998, a young man (Jeremy Theobald) has a strange hobby: He selects people at random and follows them. His only rule is never to follow the same person twice. But one day, he breaks his own rule, and his target, a burglar named Cobb (Alex Haw), catches him and takes him under his wing, introducing him to the world of breaking into apartments. Following introduces audiences to Nolan’s non-linear storytelling structure and the narrative jumps that would eventually become his calling card.—Erin Maxwell

Come for Harry Styles’ feature-film acting debut; stay for one of the most gripping World War II films in this depiction of the perilous effort to save thousands of Allied service members trapped by German forces during the Battle of France. As he depicts ground, sea, and air warfare, Nolan keeps the tension maxed out. Iconic scene: In the film’s opening, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) escapes both enemy and friendly fire and reaches the beach, where thousands of troops await rescue.

After years of increasingly campy Batman films, Nolan gave the caped crusader a gritty origin story that put the “dark” back in “Dark Knight.” In Nolan’s lens, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) battles baddies, inner demons, and moral quandaries in equal measure. Iconic scene: Batman speeds through Gotham to save Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) from a hallucinogen, as moviegoers witness both Bruce’s “Tumbler” Batmobile in action and Nolan’s gift for action scenes.

As Nolan closes out his Dark Knight trilogy, Bruce Wayne contends with a fearsome foe in Tom Hardy’s Bane and a felonious feline-like thief in Anne Hathaway’s scene-stealing Catwoman, but the heart of the film is Bruce’s emotional scenes with Michael Caine’s Alfred. Iconic scene: Bane gets the upper hand on a CIA agent (played by Game of Thrones’ Aidan Gillen) by hijacking a plane with another plane and plucking a nuclear physicist out of a disintegrating fuselage.

Nolan demonstrated his penchant for mind-bending entertainment in only his second-ever feature film, adapting a short story by brother Jonathan into this neo-noir about an amensiac man named Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) trying to solve his wife’s murder. The story toggles between chronological and reverse-chronological scenes, leaving the audience as confused as Leonard. Iconic scene: Nolan establishes the format from the jump, with a Polaroid un-developing in the reversed lead-out of Leonard shooting a man.

“Inception” entered the cultural parlance thanks to this blockbuster film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Elliot Page, and others in a story about thieves stealing secrets from their targets’ dream lives. That premise gives Nolan carte blanche for action sequences in which the usual laws of physics do not apply. Iconic scene: As Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) fights agents in his target’s subconscious while a car chase plays out in the real world, gravitational forces go for a spin, and Arthur has to battle his opponents on the floor, walls, and ceiling of a hotel hallway.

After a decade and a half of playing with chronologies on screen, Nolan and brother Jonathan crafted a story in which time is the antagonist. As astronauts search for a new home for humanity in the cosmos, they face a black hole thats robbing them of precious years, to heartbreaking consequence, in Nolan’s most moving film. Iconic scene: One possible Earth replacement turns out to be awash in tsunamis, and the Endurance crew loses both one of its members and, perhaps worse, decades of time.

“Are you watching closely?” Part sci-fi film, part thriller, The Prestige is the story of two rival magicians who not only try to outsmart and outdo each other, but also play tricks on the audience. Starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, the two friends become bitter enemies after a fatal accident, embarking on a deadly, lifelong game of one-upmanship that ultimately destroys their lives and erodes their morals in pursuit of the perfect illusion. Co-starring Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, and the late, great David Bowie in one of the greatest character entrances of all time, The Prestige remains one of Nolan’s most ingenious films.—Erin Maxwell

In Hollywood’s latest attempt to bring Matt Damon home, he stars as Odysseus in Nolan’s adaptation of the Homer epic telling the tale of his journey after the Trojan War. It’s a masterpiece, even with some changes from the original, with a stellar cast — Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, John Leguizamo, Robert Pattinson, and Samantha Morton are all sure to be Oscar contenders. Iconic scene: There are quite a few, but we have to go with the moment Odysseus strings his bow and lets that warning pluck ring out upon his return home. The suitors never stood a chance. —Meredith Jacobs 

This biopic of tortured theoretical scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer earned a year’s-best seven Academy Awards, including trophies for Nolan, lead actor Cillian Murphy, supporting actor Robert Downey Jr., and the picture itself. The development of nuclear weapons is frightening to witness, but the film’s real pyrotechnics come from the adversarial scenes between Oppenheimer (Murphy) and Atomic Energy Commission leader Lewis Strauss (Downey). Iconic scene: The Manhattan Project comes to a head with the Trinity test, shown from Oppenheimer’s perspective to claustrophobic degree.

Nolan set a new bar for the superhero genre with the second Dark Knight film — one in which Batman faces a psychopathic prankster, as Heath Ledger plays the Joker in an Oscar-winning performance, and a fallen hero, as Aaron Eckhart’s district attorney takes a Two-Face-d turn. And the director’s action sequences were never better. Iconic scene: In a showdown on the streets of Gotham, our hero arrives via Batpod, and the latter shows he values chaos even over his own physical safety.