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Oppenheimer review – Nolan’s atom bomb epic is flawed but extraordinary

Christopher Nolan’s account of the physicist who led the Manhattan Project captures the most agonising of success stories

T he wartime Soviet intelligence services had a codename for the Manhattan Project, the US’s plan to build an atom bomb: Enormoz . Christopher Nolan’s new film about it is absolutely Enormoz , maybe his most enormoz so far: a gigantic, post-detonation study, a PTSD narrative procedure filling the giant screen with a million agonised fragments that are the shattered dreams and memories of the project’s haunted, complex driving force, J Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant physicist with the temperament of an artist who gave humanity the means of its own destruction.

The main event is that terrifying first demonstration: the Trinity nuclear test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, when Oppenheimer is said to have silently pondered (and later intoned on TV) Vishnu’s lines from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds …”

This is the big bang, and no one could have made it bigger or more overwhelming than Nolan. He does this without simply turning it into an action stunt – although this movie, for all its audacity and ambition, never quite solves the problem of its own obtuseness: filling the drama at such length with the torment of genius-functionary Oppenheimer at the expense of showing the Japanese experience and the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nolan moves back and forth in time, either side of the historic 1945 firebreak, giving us Oppenheimer’s beginnings as a young scientist, lonely and unhappy, electrified by the new developments in quantum mechanics, the young leftist who never became a Communist party member but whose anti-fascism galvanised his desire to develop the bomb before the Nazis could, directing the work of hundreds of scientists.

Later in the 50s, there is the disillusioned, compromised administrator, hounded by the McCarthyites for his communist connections, nauseated by his own pointless celebrity, by his failure to establish postwar international atomic control and by a single denied thought: the Nazis surrendered long before there was any suggestion they had the weapon, and bombing the defeated Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was merely to cow the Russians with a ruthless demonstration of the US’s nuclear mastery.

Cillian Murphy is an eerily close lookalike for Oppenheimer with his trademark hat and pipe, and is very good at capturing his sense of solitude and emotional imprisonment, giving us the Oppenheimer million-yard stare, eyeballs set in a gaunt skull, seeing and foreseeing things he cannot process.

Matt Damon is the boorish Lt Gen Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer’s exasperated military minder; Kenneth Branagh is his genial scientific hero and mentor Niels Bohr; Robert Downey Jr is the duplicitous Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss; Florence Pugh plays his lover Jean Tatlock, whose heart he broke, while Emily Blunt is his wife, Kitty, also badly treated. Tom Conti plays the sorrowfully detached Albert Einstein, and it has to be said that Nolan, rightly or wrongly, uses non-Jewish actors for Oppenheimer and Einstein, two of the most famous Jewish people in history and in fact doesn’t quite get to grips with the antisemitism that Oppenheimer faced as an assimilated secular American Jew.

Nightime. Military vehicle off the side of the road. Men holding torching looking at something on ground in rain

There is a horribly gripping scene showing Oppenheimer’s formative experience as an unhappy graduate student in England at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He suffered what amounted to a psychotic breakdown and left a poisoned apple on the desk of his testy supervisor Patrick Blackett (James D’Arcy), which Blackett fortunately didn’t notice and didn’t eat. Nolan coolly invites to see this as a parable for the lost Eden of a more innocent prewar physics, with Oppenheimer as a serpent with Adam’s foolish innocence. And of course there is the creeping biographical irony: how terribly close Oppenheimer came to … killing someone.

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The purest payload of fear is delivered in a scene that Nolan handles with forthright gusto. After the successful detonation of the Hiroshima bomb, Murphy shows us Oppenheimer in shock, but also realising he has to address an audience of cheering colleagues and subordinates. He knows it is his duty as a leader to congratulate them and be upbeat, stammering out some fatuous remark about how the Japanese “didn’t like it”, then realising how callous that was, and beginning to hallucinate the horror. Of course, Oppenheimer did not witness the actual use of his weapon, he never saw anything becoming death, the destroyer of worlds, and Nolan takes the decision to look away from it too, to stay in the US, to stay with Oppenheimer himself in all his sudden tragic irrelevance.

Perhaps the film’s most important moment is the one that addresses its own flaw: the legendary postwar encounter in the White House Oval Office between Oppenheimer and President Harry S Truman (played by Gary Oldman), the man who took the final executive decision to drop the bomb. Nolan and Murphy show how Oppenheimer shrinks and cringes into the couch in front of him, like a scared little boy, apparently wanting something like absolution from the president and mumbling that he feels he has “blood on his hands”. Angry and baffled, Truman tells him curtly that all this is his responsibility as president and asks a very pertinent question: does Oppenheimer think the Japanese care who made the bomb? No, they want to know who dropped it. It’s true: concentrating on Oppenheimer is simultaneously fascinating and beside the larger historical point.

In the end, Nolan shows us how the US’s governing class couldn’t forgive Oppenheimer for making them lords of the universe, couldn’t tolerate being in the debt of this liberal intellectual. Oppenheimer is poignantly lost in the kaleidoscopic mass of broken glimpses: the sacrificial hero-fetish of the American century.

Oppenheimer is released on 20 July in Australia, and 21 July in the US and UK.

Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan
Cillian Murphy

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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.

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‘Oppenheimer’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director christopher nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film, starring cillian murphy..

Hi, I’m Christopher Nolan director, writer, and co-producer of “Oppenheimer.” Opening with the raindrops on the water came late to myself and Jen Lane in the edit suite. But ultimately, it became a motif that runs the whole way through the film. Became very important. These opening images of the detonation at Trinity are based on the real footage. Andrew Jackson, our visual effects supervisor, put them together using analog methods to try and reproduce the incredible frame rates that their technology allowed at the time, superior to what we have today. Adapting Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus,” I fully embraced the Prometheun theme, but ultimately chose to change the title to “Oppenheimer” to give a more direct idea of what the film was going to be about and whose point of view we’re seeing. And here we have Cillian Murphy with an IMAX camera inches from his nose. Hoyte van Hoytema was incredible. IMAX camera revealing everything. And I think, to some degree, applying the pressure to Cillian as Oppenheimer that this hearing was applying. “Yes, your honor.” “We’re not judges, Doctor.” “Oh.” And behind him, out of focus, the great Emily Blunt who’s going to become so important to the film as Kitty Oppenheimer, who gradually comes more into focus over the course of the first reel. We divided the two timelines into fission and fusion, the two different approaches to releasing nuclear energy in this devastating form to try and suggest to the audience the two different timelines. And then embraced black-and-white shooting here. Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss being shot on IMAX black-and-white film. The first time anyone’s ever shot that film. Made especially for us. And he’s here talking to Alden Ehrenreich who is absolutely indicative of the incredible ensemble that our casting director John Papsidera put together. Robert Downey Jr. utterly transformed, I think, not just in terms of appearance, but also in terms of approach to character, stripping away years of very well-developed charisma to just try and inhabit the skin of a somewhat awkward, sometimes venal, but also charismatic individual, and losing himself in this utterly. And then as we come up to this door, we go into the Senate hearing rooms. And we try to give that as much visibility, grandeur, and glamour to contrast with the security hearing that’s so claustrophobic. And takes Oppenheimer completely out of the limelight. [CROWD SHOUTING]

By Manohla Dargis

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.

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The movie is based on “ American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.

The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.

The story tracks Oppenheimer — played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy — across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child.

A man in shadow stands beside an atomic bomb inside a shed in a desolate desert.

It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot.

It also isn’t a story that builds gradually; rather, Nolan abruptly tosses you into the whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods. In rapid succession the watchful older Oppie (as his intimates call him) and his younger counterpart flicker onscreen before the story briefly lands in the 1920s, where he’s an anguished student tormented by fiery, apocalyptic visions. He suffers; he also reads T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” drops a needle on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and stands before a Picasso painting, defining works of an age in which physics folded space and time into space-time .

This fast pace and narrative fragmentation continue as Nolan fills in this Cubistic portrait, crosses and recrosses continents and ushers in armies of characters, including Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), a physicist who played a role in the Manhattan Project. Nolan has loaded the movie with familiar faces — Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman — some distracting. It took me a while to accept the director Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and I still don’t know why Rami Malek shows up in a minor part other than he’s yet another known commodity.

As Oppenheimer comes into focus so does the world. In 1920s Germany, he learns quantum physics; the next decade he’s at Berkeley teaching, bouncing off other young geniuses and building a center for the study of quantum physics. Nolan makes the era’s intellectual excitement palpable — Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 — and, as you would expect, there’s a great deal of scientific debate and chalkboards filled with mystifying calculations, most of which Nolan translates fairly comprehensibly. One of the film’s pleasures is experiencing by proxy the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse.

It’s at Berkeley that the trajectory of Oppenheimer’s life dramatically shifts, after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland. By that point, he has become friends with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist who invented a particle accelerator, the cyclotron , and who plays an instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. It’s also at Berkeley that Oppenheimer meets the project’s military head, Leslie Groves (a predictably good Damon), who makes him Los Alamos’s director, despite the leftist causes he supported — among them, the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War — and some of his associations, including with Communist Party members like his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold).

Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically. Working with his superb cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan has shot in 65-millimeter film (which is projected in 70-millimeter), a format that he’s used before to create a sense of cinematic monumentality. The results can be immersive, though at times clobbering, particularly when the wow of his spectacle has proved more substantial and coherent than his storytelling. In “Oppenheimer,” though, as in “ Dunkirk ” (2017), he uses the format to convey the magnitude of a world-defining event; here, it also closes the distance between you and Oppenheimer, whose face becomes both vista and mirror.

The film’s virtuosity is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandizement. Big subjects can turn even well-intended filmmakers into show-offs, to the point that they upstage the history they seek to do justice to. Nolan avoids that trap by insistently putting Oppenheimer into a larger context, notably with the black-and-white portions. One section turns on a politically motivated security clearance hearing in 1954, a witch hunt that damaged his reputation; the second follows the 1959 confirmation for Lewis Strauss (a mesmerizing, near-unrecognizable Downey), a former chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission who was nominated for a cabinet position.

Nolan integrates these black-and-white sections with the color ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation — Strauss’s role in the hearing and his relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation’s outcome — to create a dialectical synthesis. One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark, existential terms. Yet Oppenheimer’s genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the naked antisemitism of the Red scare.

These black-and-white sequences define the last third of “Oppenheimer.” They can seem overlong, and at times in this part of the film it feels as if Nolan is becoming too swept up in the trials that America’s most famous physicist experienced. Instead, it is here that the film’s complexities and all its many fragments finally converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery, who personified the intersection of science and politics, including in his role as a Communist boogeyman, who was transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.

François Truffaut once wrote that “war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive.” This, I think, gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls. You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.

Oppenheimer Rated R for disturbing images, and adult language and behavior. Running time: 3 hours. In theaters.

Audio produced by Kate Winslett .

An earlier version of this article misidentified J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Manhattan Project. He was director of its clandestine weapons laboratory, Los Alamos.

How we handle corrections

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Oppenheimer

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Oppenheimer marks another engrossing achievement from Christopher Nolan that benefits from Murphy's tour-de-force performance and stunning visuals.

Oppenheimer is an intelligent movie about an important topic that's never less than powerfully acted and incredibly entertaining.

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‘oppenheimer’ called the “best” and “most important film this century”.

Writer-director Paul Schrader offers some strong praise for Christopher Nolan's science epic.

By James Hibberd

James Hibberd

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The official review embargo for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer isn’t lifted until Wednesday, but writer-director Paul Schrader has some strong words about the World War II science epic.

Writing on Facebook, the Taxi Driver , Raging Bull and Last Temptation of Christ screenwriter called Oppenheimer : “The best, most important film of this century. If you see one film in cinemas this year it should be Oppenheimer . I’m not a Nolan groupie but this one blows the doors off the hinges.”

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Oppenheimer First Reviews: Breathtaking, Ballsy, and One of the Best Biopics Ever Made

Critics say this may be not only christopher nolan's most impressive film but one of the best of the year, period, anchored by an award-worthy performance from cillian murphy..

TAGGED AS: blockbusters , First Reviews , movies

Here’s what critics are saying about Oppenheimer :

Is this possibly the best movie of the year?

“ Oppenheimer isn’t just an epic masterpiece but one of the most important films of the year.” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

“The most breathtaking film of the year.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Unless Hollywood has a sleeper hit waiting in the wings, Oppenheimer is primed to be 2023’s best film.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

“The film stands as the best of 2023.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“2023’s best.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“The best film of 2023 and one of the greatest biopics ever.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

Christopher Nolan on the set of Oppenheimer (2023)

(Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/©Universal Pictures)

Will Christopher Nolan fans enjoy it?

“It’s hard to know how the Nolan fanboys will respond to a movie as heady, historically curious, and grounded in gravitas as Oppenheimer which has little in common with the brooding majesty of his Batman movies or the tricky mindf–kery of films like Inception or Tenet . In terms of its stirring solemnity, it’s perhaps closest to Dunkirk , while its melding of science and emotion recalls Interstellar .” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“ Oppenheimer feels like the culmination of everything the director has done so far in his already remarkable career.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“ Oppenheimer is nothing if not a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make one. Indeed, it would seem like the ideal vehicle for Nolan’s career-long exploration into the black holes of the human condition — the last riddles of a terrifyingly understandable world.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Is it one of his most impressive films?

“ Oppenheimer —a film of endless contrasts and contradictions—is the fullest expression of the writer/director’s artistry to date… surely the finest and most inspired film of Nolan’s career.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“Nolan has created not just one of his best films, but easily the most mature film of his career.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“With Oppenheimer , Nolan might just be at his most experimental… [He] is now in the conversation for the greatest director of all time.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“It may just be Nolan’s magnum opus… [his] most profound and career-defining film to date.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

How is the screenplay?

“In what could be Christopher Nolan’s best screenplay thus far, Oppenheimer weaves through a three-act structure that can be divided into these unique entities; a rich character-driven deconstruction, a tense-filled thriller, and a politically laced courtroom drama.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“It is undoubtedly his strongest script and most cohesive plot.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

“Nolan has crafted an incredibly dense script that never manages to feel too convoluted or overwhelming—a feat in itself, considering how many timelines and characters are thrown into the mix.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Is it difficult to understand?

“While the four-act structure asks a lot of the film’s audience, our patience and concentration are amply rewarded.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Considering the subject of Oppenheimer involves quantum mechanics, the film does a reasonable job explaining scientific concepts for laymen.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

How is Cillian Murphy in the title role?

“Cillian Murphy leads the ensemble for Oppenheimer with a career-defining performance… a tour de force, encapsulating the complexities of the man with a haunting intensity and continuous dead look in the eye.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“A tour de force… It’s a performance that demands his name to be called on Oscar nomination morning.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Murphy’s performance is every bit as inspired as his casting.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“Murphy’s take on Oppenheimer will go down as one of the best performances ever captured by Nolan’s camera.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Cillian Murphy, with a thousand-yard beam, the half-smile of an intellectual rake, and a way of keeping everything close to the vest, gives a phenomenal performance as Oppenheimer, making him fascinating and multi-layered.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“It’s a magnificent marquee turn from the Peaky Blinders star (and frequent Nolan collaborator), providing a micro and macro concept of the physicist’s internal and external battles.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

Do any of his co-stars particularly stand out?

“In a mighty ensemble of heavy-hitters, Downey gives the drama’s standout performance as Strauss, a founding member, and later chair, of the Atomic Energy Commission.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Downey should be a shoo-in for the awards circuit. A Best Supporting Actor nomination might just be a lock.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“Downey offers a thunderous, Oscar-worthy performance that is one of his career’s best.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Special mention goes to David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“David Krumholtz is extraordinary…[and] in one of his best roles in years, there’s Matt Damon as Leslie Groves.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“It speaks to the caliber of this cast that there’s not enough room to praise the excellent Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck and Rami Malek, all of whom make a porterhouse out of a slice of roast beef.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer (2023)

How is the movie’s representation of women characters?

“Though efforts were made, one can’t deny this movie ignores the women characters.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“Despite attempts to include three significant female characters in a male-dominated story, all three women fare poorly enough to suggest it might have been less glaring to stick to the military story.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

“Nolan still has problems with substantial female roles, and that does continue in Oppenheimer .” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Emily Blunt’s role at first seems limited to the supportive wife, urging her husband to fight harder for his reputation. But she has a knockout scene in the hearing.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

How does it look and sound?

“The major draw for hardcore film geeks will be the visuals… DP Hoyte van Hoytema brings visceral intensity to the Trinity sequence and extraordinary texture and depth of field to the many dialogue-driven scenes.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Hoyte van Hoytema continues to impress as one of the best cinematographers. The film, shot with 70mm IMAX cameras, stands as one of the crowning achievements of IMAX with astonishing visuals that are set to leave with cinephiles upon the film’s conclusion.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Every frame is breathtaking, and just when you think you’ve seen all the tricks Nolan and van Hoytema have up their sleeves, they shock with another.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Shot with grandeur by regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the film is sensorially overwhelming, its titanic visuals matched by Ludwig Göransson’s bellowing score of anxious ticking, thunderous foot-stomping, discordant buzzing, and strident Psycho-esque strings.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“Ludwig Göransson wrote a good score, but the constant use of it is exhausting… Nolan may have taken criticisms about his films’ inaudible dialogue to heart and strove to keep dialogue at least as audible as the music.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

What about the pacing?

“Nolan begins with a flurry of borderline avant-garde cutting between spaces, places, and faces (courtesy of stellar editor Jennifer Lame), and he never lets his foot off the gas… I can recall no biopic ever hurtling forward at such a scorching clip” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“At no point did this film ever feel slow because it had my attention for every single minute.” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

“It’s more slow-burn than explosive.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Does it have any surprises?

“Perhaps the most surprising element of this audacious epic is that the scramble for atomic armament ends up secondary to the scathing depiction of political gamesmanship.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Many unbelievable scenes fill the entire screen.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

Do we need to see it in IMAX?

“If you’re lucky enough to be near one of the 30 screens worldwide showing the film in IMAX 70mm, you’ll experience a movie that, even at its talkiest, exerts an immersive hold, pulling you in to absorb the molecular detail of every shot.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“See it in IMAX on 70-millimeter film — you’ll be very glad you did.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

“It’s a film that must be experienced on the biggest screen possible!” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

Oppenheimer opens in theaters everywhere on July 21, 2023.

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Review: 'Oppenheimer' emerges as a monumental achievement on the march into screen history

VIDEO: Christopher Nolan breaks down one of the most highly anticipated films of year

"It's kind of a horror movie," understates director Christopher Nolan of "Oppenheimer,"

his brilliant, bruising take on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the dark knight of the atomic age. Murphy's pale blue eyes become a path into a tortured soul as Nolan—a true film artist in works as diverse as "Memento" and "Dunkirk," creates a new film classic.

Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman's 2005 biography, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," Nolan's three-hour-plus masterpiece fills up our senses with the details of quantum mechanics to ignite the story of an American theoretical physicist who helped invent the ultimate weapon of mass destruction and lived to regret it.

Murphy's performance, flawless in every detail, encompasses how Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project team relocated to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to accelerate development of the weapon that would help end WW2 through the cataclysmic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and usher in the threat of nuclear annihilation that's only escalated over time.

Nolan uses radio reports to detail the effects of those bombs, saving the eye-searing visuals for the 1945 Trinity test in the New Mexico desert to bring home the destruction being unleashed. The superb sound design in which silence alternates with waves of reverberation to bring the unthinkable to devastating life is unmissable, unforgettable and scary as hell.

Shot with Imax cameras by the great Hoyte van Hoytema, "Oppenheimer" deserves to be seen on the biggest screen with a state-of-the-art sound system. This despite the fact that the film is often a series of debates among scientists arguing in close-ups that find endless fascination in the geography of the human face.

The actors in "Oppenheimer could not be better. They include Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, the blustering military supervisor at Los Alamos, Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, who pushed to develop the even more dangerous hydrogen bomb, and Gary Oldman in a sensational cameo as Harry Truman, the president who ordered the use of the bomb on Japan and dismissed Oppenheimer as a "crybaby" for objecting.

Oppy, as intimates called him, had a personal life that mirrored his professional turbulence. Though he mingled with such greats as Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), and Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Oppy's sexual entanglements, notably with psychologist Jean Tatlock (a mesmerizing Florence Pugh) made the wrong kind of headlines.

Britain BAFTA Film Awards 2024 Red Carpet

His marriage to biologist Katherine "Kitty" Puening (Emily Blunt), an alcoholic suffering from postpartum depression, added to the chaos. Kudos to Blunt for building the role with a fierce independence as Kitty defended Oppy from the political gamesmanship that plagued him.

In the riveting last section of the film, Nolan shows us Oppenheimer fighting against those eager to discredit him, first in the Sen. Joseph McCarthy commie witch-hunts of 1954 and five years later during the Senate confirmation hearings for the nomination of former Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) as secretary of commerce.

Nolan shoots both these sections in a vivid black-and-white to underscore the resentment Strauss feels for Oppenheimer for hiding his Jewish roots, communist proclivities and fears about government backed nuclear energy.

In a film of standout performances, Downey delivers a tour de force of festering animosity that blows the doors off. All his time in the Marvel universe might lead you to forget that Downey is one of the best actors on the planet. Here's a reminder. Prepare to be wowed.

"Oppenheimer," set to Ludwig Göransson's thundering orchestral score, is one of the best movies you'll see anywhere. With Nolan's extraordinary talent shining on its highest beams, the film emerges as a monumental achievement on the march into screen history.

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Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ is a supersize masterpiece

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s masterful portrait of the man known as the father of the atomic bomb, has been anticipated with some skepticism among filmgoers who wonder how Nolan’s penchant for Imax cameras and thundering sound designs would serve a story that, at its core, amounts to scenes of different groups of men arguing in different kinds of rooms (chalkboard with indecipherable physics equations optional).

It turns out that Nolan’s monumentalist aesthetic is perfectly suited for a story that otherwise could barely fit within a feature-length narrative: It’s too big, too consequential, its layers of hubris and history and swirling social impulses too unruly to be neatly contained. If “Oppenheimer” is a supersize movie, that’s because anything else would do a disservice to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the tragic figure at its core brought to fascinatingly paradoxical life by Cillian Murphy.

It’s easy to see why Nolan was attracted to Oppenheimer as a protagonist. Not only was he a man of seductively gnarly complications, but he moved through the 20th century as an avatar of its most deeply held aspirations and anxieties. And he’s not always sympathetic: We meet him as a promising student in theoretical physics who gets back at a condescending tutor at Cambridge by poisoning an apple on his desk. “Oppenheimer” begins in medias res — in the middle of things, the “things” being the title character’s whirlwind academic career, which took him from England to Germany and Amsterdam, then finally to Caltech and Berkeley. As Oppenheimer makes a name for himself in quantum mechanics — he’s written a widely circulated paper on molecules — we also meet the man who will become his chief antagonist: Lewis Strauss, the businessman and philanthropist who recruited Oppenheimer to head the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and who would ultimately bring Oppenheimer low after their work together on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

There’s a lot of information to keep track of in “Oppenheimer.” Spanning four decades, during which the title character goes from protégé to prophet to pariah, the movie is a jumble of time frames, narrative arcs, and characters who move in and out of the subject’s life in sometimes shocking but always intriguing ways. Luckily, Nolan — who wrote the script, adapted from Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “ American Prometheus ” — knows his way around a scrambled chronology. With movies like “Inception,” “Interstellar” and “Tenet,” Nolan has enjoyed keeping the audience one step behind, world-building across the space-time continuum in ways that probably only Oppenheimer himself could understand. Here, he tames the impulse to be too opaque, keeping the audience oriented and informed throughout a consistently absorbing narrative that demands close attention but rewards that commitment with a movie that evolves from a historical and biographical deep dive to a meditation on moral injury and, in its final hour, to a thoroughly gripping psycho-political thriller.

Who knew that the question of sending radioactive isotopes to Sweden could be so riveting? But it is, thanks to a superbly crafted film in which we watch Oppenheimer not just pursue his career at Berkeley but become besotted by the brilliant psychiatrist and political activist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). Like many in his era, Oppenheimer and his brother Frank (Dylan Arnold) were sympathetic to the freedom fighters in Spain, and sent their contributions to the cause by way of the American Communist Party. Like so many of their peers, the Oppenheimers would be attacked for leftist sympathies during the McCarthy era. But in “Oppenheimer,” the title character’s attraction to inventing the atomic bomb is portrayed within the context of the greater modernist project: When Picasso, Eliot, Stravinsky and Freud are reinventing the world, shouldn’t scientists be just as revolutionary?

Of course, it helps if that enterprise is undertaken during a moment of supreme moral clarity, like beating Hitler to the punch. When Manhattan Project overseer Gen. Leslie Groves (a relaxed, often dryly funny Matt Damon) approaches Oppenheimer to assemble a scientific team to build a bomb that will end the war, “Oppenheimer” enters the let’s-put-on-a-show phase. At Los Alamos, N.M., Oppenheimer becomes “founder, mayor and sheriff” of a community of thousands of researchers and family members who will take three years to build the bombs that would eventually decimate Hiroshima and Nagasaki and launch an era of nuclear escalation and brinkmanship.

One of “Oppenheimer’s” most powerful moments is the A-bomb test, code-named Trinity, which Nolan stages with the familiar self-engulfing flames, but in almost complete silence; the only sound is of Oppenheimer’s nervous breath. Then the shattering boom. Later, when Oppenheimer addresses his Los Alamos team on Aug. 6, 1945, Nolan stages a magical-realist breakdown wherein the man who would be lionized for ending the war becomes overtaken by horror and grief. Throughout “Oppenheimer,” the already reed-thin Murphy seems to grow more skeletal, ethereal, a wraith whose chief features are his glasslike blue eyes, ever-present cigarette and catlike purr of a voice. His Oppenheimer is part machinist, part mystic, ever questioning the apocalyptic implications of what he’s discovering. (Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti, pops up helpfully as an occasional interlocutor.)

Toggling backward, forward and sideways in time, Nolan doles out tantalizing hints to what would become of Oppenheimer after the war: How Strauss, cannily played by a virtually unrecognizable Robert Downey Jr. as a cold-eyed Washington knife fighter, executed his bureaucratic defenestration during the Red Scare, fueled by actual instances of espionage at Los Alamos. How Oppenheimer would cope with sudden fame, power and his own personal foibles. And how so many of his famous and to-be-famous colleagues responded to the strain of American anti-intellectualism that today feels all too dispiritingly familiar.

Murphy commands “Oppenheimer” as its deceptively still, small center, but he’s surrounded by an impressive cast of supporting players — not just Damon and Downey, but Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr and Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman. In a film with precious few female roles, Pugh brings bruised life to the commitment-phobic Tatlock, and Emily Blunt mounts an artfully calibrated sneak attack as Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, who spends much of the film sour and disappointed, only to morph into the film’s most ferocious Cold Warrior, her armor a carapace of pearls, Cherries in the Snow lipstick and righteous rage.

There is so much substance to “Oppenheimer”: so many ideas and contradictions and philosophical quandaries; so many egos, talents and temperaments, loyalties and lofty ideals. Murphy’s mesmerizing performance notwithstanding, those ineffable forces are what drive “Oppenheimer,” which Nolan films mostly in finely etched close-ups, punctuated with shots of stars and water and cosmic blasts. Visually, the movie is nothing short of magnificent, both the color footage of the Los Alamos years and the black-and-white sequences featuring Strauss, which glisten as if they were filmed by James Wong Howe. Nolan’s weakness for underscoring detracts from a few scenes that would have been better served simply by letting viewers hear the actors at work, without intrusion. (The film’s urgently propulsive music is by Ludwig Goransson.) But the dialogue in “Oppenheimer” is scrupulously comprehensible — a victory for anyone who has found Nolan’s sound mixes to be unintelligible in the past.

One of the conundrums of “Oppenheimer” is whether its enigmatic title character was a Great Man or the victim of his own inflated self-importance. With that in mind, it feels hyperbolic to call the film a masterpiece. But, without a chalkboard and hyper-credentialed brain trust handy, that word will have to do. As a filmmaker at the height of his powers, Nolan has used those prodigious skills, not simply to amaze or spectacularize, but to plunge the audience into a chapter of history that might feel ancient, as he reminds us, but happened just yesterday. By making that story so beautiful, so elegantly crafted and compulsively watchable, he has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end. “Oppenheimer” boldly posits that those arguments are still worth having, in a film of magnitude, profundity and dazzling artistry.

R. At area theaters. Contains some sexuality, nudity and coarse language. 180 minutes.

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ is a supersize masterpiece

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Oppenheimer, common sense media reviewers.

Nolan's complex A-bomb biopic has sex, swearing, violence.

Oppenheimer Movie Poster: Oppenheimer stands against the image of a nuclear bomb explosion

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

You may have the knowledge and skill to create som

Scientists are elevated to celebrity status, and t

Most characters -- historical figures from the 193

Death by suicide. Massive fiery, loud bomb explosi

Several sex scenes with partial nudity, including

Strong language includes a few uses of "f--k," plu

Frequent drinking, including by a character who's

Positive Messages

You may have the knowledge and skill to create something dangerously powerful -- but should you?

Positive Role Models

Scientists are elevated to celebrity status, and their brain power is aspirational -- as is their perseverance and ability to work as a team to accomplish a daunting goal.

Diverse Representations

Most characters -- historical figures from the 1930s–'50s -- are White American or European men. Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists, including Albert Einstein, are Jewish (though the main Jewish characters aren't portrayed by Jewish actors). One female scientist is featured, and other women can be spotted working in the background. The victims of the atomic bomb detonations (Japanese people, interned Japanese Americans, and Native Americans) don't have a voice in the film. A sex scene that includes White characters reading from the holy Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita has drawn complaints for being insensitive/offensive.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Death by suicide. Massive fiery, loud bomb explosion, accompanied by a loud "doom" score that underlines the future impact of the detonation. Discussion of the impact of the atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a hallucination, the skin on a woman's face appears to blow off. Attempted murder through the eyes of the protagonist.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Several sex scenes with partial nudity, including long sequences with bare breasts. Recurring infidelity.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes a few uses of "f--k," plus "balls," "goddamn," "idiot," and "s--t."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Frequent drinking, including by a character who's portrayed as having an alcohol dependency. Smoking cigarettes and a pipe.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan 's drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ), the scientist responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb. But it's less an entertaining history lesson than it is a dense examination of the unholy matrimony of quantum physics and military bureaucracy, and things can get pretty confusing thanks to frequent undated time jumps and a barrage of names and characters to keep straight. The sex scenes (Nolan's first) include frequent partial nudity (particularly co-star Florence Pugh 's breasts). Characters smoke, as would be expected in the 1930s–'50s setting, and drink. A bomb trial demonstrates the enormousness of the weapon's capabilities, with fire, noise, and smoke. But viewers are told about, rather than shown, the horror that unfolded after the bomb was ultimately dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are references to mass assassination and to suicide, and a brief hallucination of a young woman's skin appearing to blow off. Language includes a few uses of "f--k," plus "goddamn," "s--t," and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Silhouette of a man in a suite standing in front of a massive ball of fire

Community Reviews

Parents say (67)
Kids say (86)

Based on 67 parent reviews

I wouldn't ever take my kids (even when they were teenagers)

What's the story.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan , OPPENHEIMER follows brilliant scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) as he studies and masters quantum physics. As the United States enters World War II, Oppenheimer is tapped to assemble and lead a group of allied scientists to create a war-ending bomb.

Is It Any Good?

Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nolan is a genius -- and, also like Oppenheimer, he may be too close to his subject matter to realize that he lost the thread. It's now abundantly clear that Nolan is fascinated with World War II, but it may be hard for many viewers (even those who love history) to follow this story with ease. If you need a reference card, captions, the ability to pause and rewind the film, and Wikipedia on standby to understand what's going on, it's an issue. And if some viewers' thoughts start drifting to wondering how Aaron Sorkin , Ron Howard , or Steven Spielberg might have made this movie better, that's a big problem.

The atomic bomb is just part of the story in Oppenheimer -- the plot is actually more about whether the leader of The Manhattan Project will get his security clearance renewed a decade after the end of World War II. Really. And given that Oppenheimer apparently wasn't the greatest guy (the film softens the fact that he apparently tried to murder his teacher), it's difficult to invest or care. Nolan is beloved for creating cinematic puzzles that challenge viewers' intellect and keep us on our toes -- we may sometimes be confused, but we know it's part of the long game. Here, he tries to play that game with viewers again, but it doesn't really work in a biopic that's directed at having audiences examine the morality of innovation. Nolan seems to intend for us to question our present race into artificial intelligence, but the film only leaves us questioning him.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the real-life moral dilemma of building a weapon of mass destruction. Given the circumstances, do you think the scientists had another choice? If you create something powerful, can you be sure it won't be misused in someone else's hands -- and should that worry impede innovation?

Nolan flips between color and black-and-white cinematography as a storytelling device in Oppenheimer . What do you think that choice means?

Discuss the fears and accusations related to Communism in the 1950s. Who were the victims? How does Oppenheimer show how McCarthyism was used to target opponents? Do you see any modern parallels?

How do you think history should judge J. Robert Oppenheimer? Do you think he's depicted accurately or fairly here?

How are drinking and smoking portrayed? Is substance use glamorized? Does the historic setting affect the impact of seeing characters smoke and drink?

Movie Details

In theaters : July 21, 2023
On DVD or streaming : November 21, 2023
Cast : Cillian Murphy , Emily Blunt , Matt Damon
Director : Christopher Nolan
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Universal Pictures
Genre : Drama
Topics : Brothers and Sisters , History , Science and Nature
Run time : 180 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : some sexuality, nudity and language
Awards : Academy Award , BAFTA , Golden Globe
Last updated : May 1, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Oppenheimer Review

21 Jul 2023

Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is not an easy movie. To say its subject matter and theme are inherently downbeat is something of an understatement. It flings you into a very specific, crowded world and refuses to hold your hand, with a notable absence of date- or location-providing subtitles. It is three hours long, densely packed with info-rich dialogue, and mostly plays out, to paraphrase one character, in “shabby little rooms far from the limelight”. Its story unfurls along two oscillating lines – one titled “Fission”, in vivid colour; the other titled “Fusion” in high-contrast black-and-white – and cuts between their beats and revelations like an anxious channel-hopper. It is, of course, a Christopher Nolan movie.

However, despite being deeply stamped with Nolan’s hallmarks (anti-chronological, shot with IMAX cameras, avoids CGI, stars Cillian Murphy ), Oppenheimer feels like something new from the writer-director. While it has a logline-level similarity to Nolan’s favourite Spielberg film, Raiders Of The Lost Ark (a man in a hat is racing the Nazis for control of an existentially powerful weapon), its release — and impact — feel more like we’ve reached Nolan’s Schindler’s List moment: a step into deadly serious, portentously resonant, adult material. With one fundamental difference: this difficult historical figure is on a very different trajectory to Oskar Schindler. One might even say the exact opposite trajectory.

Oppenheimer is based on American Prometheus , Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s wide-spined biography of the theoretical physicist who “fathered” the atomic bomb. But it is not a biopic. No time is spent on J. Robert’s childhood, with his disturbingly troubled early academic life tackled only briefly. Instead, the film moves briskly from his establishment of quantum theory on US curricula to his recruitment as director of the Manhattan Project (by take-no-shit Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, played with avuncular appeal by Matt Damon).

At the film’s pulsing nucleus is Murphy as Oppenheimer, and he is compelling throughout.

Interestingly, Nolan does devote some time to Oppenheimer’s romantic entanglements, allowing Florence Pugh to elegantly dominate her few scenes as communist activist Jean Tatlock, the physicist’s first lover (which also involve a Nolan first: sex scenes with prolonged nudity). Meanwhile, Emily Blunt thankfully busts out of the supportive/suffering wife archetype as the alcoholic but sharp-witted Kitty Oppenheimer, who gives us one of the film’s most rousing scenes in an intense verbal duel with bullish lawyer Roger Robb (Jason Clarke).

Given the sheer extent of the dramatis personae, it’s no exaggeration to say that Oppenheimer features Nolan’s most impressive cast yet. Playing admirably against type, Robert Downey Jr. leads the “Fusion” strand as haughty US Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss, whose attempt to join Eisenhower’s cabinet as Secretary of Commerce becomes intriguingly more relevant as the film progresses. Then we have a supporting cast like no other: Benny Safdie as Edward Teller (the inspiration for Dr Strangelove ), Kenneth Branagh as Oppenheimer’s Danish mentor Niels Bohr, Josh Hartnett as his close colleague Ernest Lawrence — plus the likes of Olivia Thirlby, Rami Malek, Jack Quaid, Macon Blair, Casey Affleck, David Krumholtz and Alden Ehrenreich popping up in sometimes the smallest of roles. Not to mention Gary Oldman’s acidic cameo as President Truman, who famously dismissed Oppenheimer as “a cry-baby scientist”.

At the film’s pulsing nucleus is Murphy as Oppenheimer, and he is compelling throughout. Given the movie’s hefty import, you’d have expected him to infuse every ounce of his talent into this performance, and that is certainly evident from his every moment on screen — often with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s IMAX lens focused squarely and unsparingly on his face, as he conjures the conflicting emotions that rage beneath Oppenheimer’s surface. This is, after all, a uniquely complex man: praised as a hero for ending the war, wracked with guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and perhaps desperate to cleanse his soul through martyrdom.

Nolan complements this exquisitely tuned performance by using his subject’s memories and visions as a kind of visual punctuation, from raindrops rippling ominously in puddles like bomb blasts, to a chilling, briefly glimpsed depiction of “atmospheric ignition”: a posited world-ending outcome of the first A-bomb test. The Trinity sequence itself, in which Nolan’s SFX team somehow create a CG-free approximation of a nuclear explosion, is truly shock-and-awesome, featuring what might just be cinema’s most intense countdown scene. But the film is never visually stronger than when it is inside Oppenheimer’s head, especially during its lengthy closing act, when apparitions of his creation’s life-snuffing effects bleed into his waking life with such nightmarish potency, they’ll be hard to shake for days.

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How “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” Bring Monumental Figures to Life

By Anthony Lane

The new film from Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer,” starts and ends in the round. In the opening shot, ripples expand in puddles as raindrops fall. Three hours later, we get a vision of Earth beginning to burn, as nuclear explosions bloom across the globe. Nolan is always entranced by the vast and the tiny; “Inception” (2010), wherein city streets fold like paper under the pressure of dreams, concludes with a spinning top. This obsession with scale is well served by “Oppenheimer,” in which the amassing of refined uranium, for the construction of an atomic bomb, is indicated by marbles piling up inside a goldfish bowl. How much roundness can you take?

The antidote to this circularity is J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Though named for his father, Julius, he insisted, with Prufrockian nicety, that the “J” stood for nothing at all.) Lean, sticklike, skullish in his gauntness, and too clever for comfort—his own or anyone else’s—he has gone down in history as the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, in New Mexico, where the bomb was built, and it is from history that Nolan seeks to pluck him. Oppenheimer is played by Cillian Murphy, who catches the quiet inquietude of the man, and his tobacco-softened speech. In the blaze of his blue eyes we see not candor but a kind of undimmed shock, as if he were staring straight through us at matters invisible to regular mortals. “What happens to stars when they die?” he says, by way of small talk, at a party in Berkeley. There he meets the incandescent Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh); later, at her bidding, he translates a Sanskrit text as they make love. For Oppenheimer, no talk is ever small.

The film is adapted from “ American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer ,” a 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. I hate to say it, but, if you zip through all six hundred pages of the book before seeing the film, you’ll enjoy the ride more. Much is omitted in the adaptation; there is no whisper, for example, of the fact that Oppenheimer was born into serious wealth. Yet Nolan, who wrote the screenplay, has a fine taste for the delicious detail. During a youthful sojourn in the Netherlands, Oppenheimer doesn’t just learn Dutch in six weeks. He learns enough to give a lecture on quantum physics. The irony is that what makes the movie challenging is not the scientific theory—which is delivered with a diplomatically light touch—but a glut of political paranoia.

Like “The Social Network” (2010), “Oppenheimer” is structured around two inquisitions, each of which is designed to load us with information and to trigger significant flashbacks. If, in the process, we feel dumb and dumber, tough. The first is a closed hearing, in 1954, at which Oppenheimer’s security clearance is revoked—an affront from which he never recovers. The revocation (which was not officially voided until last year) turns upon his left-wing sympathies before the war, but it has clearly been engineered by the F.B.I. and by certain figures who have Oppenheimer’s worst interests at heart. The second occasion is a Senate hearing, in 1959, that is held to confirm the appointment of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. And what does that , you may wonder, have to do with blowing things up?

The answer is far from simple, and the tangle left me genuinely torn. The upside is that Downey, liberated from the stranglehold of Marvel, provides the least mannered and the most densely textured performance of his career. Polite, bespectacled, and immune to panic, Strauss—a chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—comes across, in Downey’s rendering, as the most pitiless of Machiavels. The downside is that he all but commandeers the film. Even Oppenheimer’s marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt), troubled but enduring, seems to flit by in snatches when set beside the enmity of Strauss, who believes that Oppenheimer has humiliated him. Addicts of Cold War conspiracy will be in bliss, but not everyone, I suspect, will thrill to the truffling up of former Communists in West Coast academia. Folks want some bang for their buck.

The bang is Trinity—the first detonation of a nuclear device, in July, 1945. The name was chosen by Oppenheimer, in tribute to a sonnet by John Donne. (For the complete poem, listen to the agonized aria sung by Oppenheimer in “Doctor Atomic,” John Adams’s 2005 opera.) The explosion, two hours into the film, reaches to the pure core of Nolan’s visual intensity. For once, in the midst of this talkative movie, the chattering dies down. Many observers, including Oppenheimer’s boss, General Leslie R. Groves (Matt Damon), lie flat on the ground. One scientist, confronting the blast, wears sunscreen and shades, as if he were at the beach. All music is finally hushed. The sole sound is human breathing, in and out. The clock counts down; time stops; then comes the flowering of fire.

It’s a hell of a sequence, and, as you might expect, it’s infernally beautiful to behold. Rising in the wake of such images is the issue of moral decorum: What can you, or should you, show? When slides of Hiroshima are projected at Los Alamos, some people look away, unable to countenance what their loyal efforts have wrought. Not a frame of this film is set in Japan; Nolan relies on his leading man to suffer the fallout in spirit. There are screen-filling closeups of Oppenheimer, who appears to be haunting himself. Now and then, the very space around him quivers in response, as if his tremors of conscience were giving off shock waves. (“That crybaby,” Harry Truman says of him.) The grandeur is tremendous, and yet, this being Nolan, it needs to be surrounded with the little things. When Groves is searching for someone to oversee the creation of the bomb, he walks into a classroom for his first meeting with Oppenheimer and, to his face, calls him theatrical, egotistical, and unstable. Oppenheimer smiles. He gets the job.

What’s the difference between Greta Gerwig’s previous movie, “Little Women” (2019), and “Barbie,” her latest enterprise? Well, one is based on a book by Louisa May Alcott, and the other on a well-thumbed classic toy by Mattel. (I won’t spoil things by saying which is which.) Also, if memory serves, Jo, Beth, and the other girls didn’t spend that much time on fluorescent Rollerblades. Their loss.

Powering the new film is the idea that there’s a magical place called Barbie Land, which is home to all the Barbies, not least the Barbie (Margot Robbie), who is proud to describe herself as “stereotypical.” She sleeps in a heart-shaped bed, in a house that lies so brazenly open for inspection that J. Edgar Hoover would moan with delight. Being a doll, Barbie kicks off her day with a dry shower, has her breakfast without consuming it, and floats down to ground level rather than taking the stairs. The dominant, not to say overbearing, hue of her existence is pink. Watching the first half hour of this movie is like being waterboarded with Pepto-Bismol.

Barbie has a male chum, Ken (Ryan Gosling), though he wishes he were more than that. “We’re girlfriend-boyfriend,” he tells her, running the words together into a single unit. Smooth. They can’t have sex, although a showing of “Team America: World Police” (2004) might give them some handy tips. Still, they can party every night. All is well until Barbie starts having thoughts of death, whatever that may be; bewildered, she consults Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who lives on a hill, does the splits, makes a case for being “sad and mushy and complicated,” and proposes a trip to reality.

What we have here, in short, under layers of stylization, is a standard-issue journey of discovery. Barbie, with the uninvited yet eager Ken in tow, follows the pink road like a shrimp-colored Dorothy, travelling not from Kansas to Oz but from Barbie Land to Los Angeles. There she meets a teen-ager named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and her mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), one of whom is or was Barbie’s owner; if Barbie is feeling depressed or messed up, it’s because of them. By a helpful coincidence, Gloria works at the headquarters of Mattel. “Barbie in the real world—that’s impossible,” she says, summarizing the hook of the film and, incidentally, echoing the hero of “Oppenheimer,” when he learns that German scientists have split the atom. “That’s not possible,” he says. (I was hoping that he’d shout out “Fission: impossible!” but you can’t have everything.)

A further similarity: just as Downey threatens to pull Nolan’s film out of orbit, so, in “Barbie,” does Gosling attract a dangerous share of the dramatic energy. His line readings keep taking you by surprise; a late-night solo dance, outside Barbie’s house, has a mournful shimmy; and he is the beneficiary of Gerwig’s most inspired joke, which is that Ken, in California, discovers—and totally digs—the patriarchy. “I’m just going to pop into the library and see if I can find some books on trucks,” he says. He then spirits that leathery masculinity back into Barbie Land, which he rechristens Kendom. He fights with his fellow-Kens, plays guitar not to but at Barbie, and (this has to be peak Gosling) pauses in mid-conversation with her to smirk at the bulge of his own biceps.

All of which is tricky for the balance of the story, but, then, the entire movie, like Barbie when she ditches her high heels, struggles to find its footing. The membrane between the two arenas, the true and the fantastical, grows so porous as to be meaningless; not only are Gloria and Sasha imported into Barbie Land but so is the angry C.E.O. of Mattel (Will Ferrell), plus a gang of his corporate henchmen. “Barbie” is, in every sense, all over the place. Because it’s “A Mattel Production,” as the opening credits inform us, it wants to have its cake, eat it, mock it, smear it on the faces of the manufacturers, and still sell a shitload of dolls—or, as a recent piece in the Times suggested, “drive near-infinite brand synergies,” the sort of phrase that makes me want to move to Bhutan and raise goats.

“Barbie” is fun, no question, yet the fun is fragmented. You come away with a head full of bits: interruptions that are sprinkled over the plot like glitter. Moping Barbies tend to watch the BBC’s “Pride and Prejudice” for the seventh time, we hear, whereupon the screen fills with a clip of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. Wackier still is a scene in which Barbie complains of no longer being pretty; a voice-over (Helen Mirren) butts in to point out that hiring Margot Robbie to play unpretty is poor casting. This earned a laugh when I saw the movie, but you have to ask: Who’s it for? Will young girls return to the film again and again, as they did to “Frozen” (2013)? If so, what will they make of the dialogue, with its mentions of “sexualized capitalism,” “rampant consumerism,” and “cognitive dissonance”? How will they react when Sasha addresses Barbie as “you fascist”?

Maybe the movie is for Greta Gerwig. And, by extension, for anyone as super-smart as her—former Barbiephiles, preferably, who have wised up and put away childish things. Nobody else would even attempt to meld a feminist colloquium with a plug for a chunk of plastic, and, if the result is a deep disappointment after “Little Women,” perhaps depth is the wrong thing to ask for. Think of the kid in Charles Baudelaire’s essay “The Philosophy of Toys,” who shakes and bangs a toy in exasperation, before finally prizing it open. “ But where is its soul? ” Baudelaire says, adding, “This moment marks the beginnings of stupor and melancholy.” Sometimes the shiny surface is enough. Or, as Barbie’s beau would say, Kenough. ♦

An earlier version of this article misquoted a line from “Oppenheimer.”

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Oppenheimer Review: A Technical Feat That Felt Like A Chore

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer is an IMAX®-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Oscar® winner Matt Damon portrays General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

Academy Award® nominee Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie plays theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano plays Robert Serber and Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence. Oppenheimer also stars Oscar® winner Rami Malek and reunites Nolan with eight-time Oscar® nominated actor, writer and filmmaker Kenneth Branagh. The cast includes Dane DeHaan (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets), Dylan Arnold (Halloween franchise), David Krumholtz (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) and Matthew Modine (The Dark Knight Rises).

The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. The film is produced by Emma Thomas, Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer is filmed in a combination of IMAX® 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX® black and white analogue photography.

Oppenheimer Trailer :

One of the strongest elements of Oppenheimer lies in the acting of the cast. Cillian Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer is a tour de force. He convincingly portrays the brilliance, internal conflicts, and moral dilemmas of the renowned physicist. Murphy’s ability to embody Oppenheimer’s complex persona elevates the film, making it an engaging character study. Emily Blunt was probably one of my favorites in the film. She had some key moments where she simply shined and probably seemed the most relatable out of all the characters. Matt Damon was solid as well given his role as Gen. Groves Jr. Additionally, the witty dialogue and banter between Matt Damon, who plays General Leslie Groves Jr., and Cillian Murphy enhance the film’s entertainment value. However, the one potential scene-stealer might have been Robert Downey Jr. He completely disappeared into the role of Lewis Stauss, and his delivery was so good that it would be no surprise to have him be considered for Best Supporting Actor.

Nolan’s signature cinematography is at its finest in Oppenheimer . The best part was the artistic visuals used to convey the mental duress faced by Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project. The visuals captured the weight of the decisions he had to make and the profound implications of his work. I appreciated the sections shot in black-and-white analog photography, which created a visually striking contrast and added depth to crucial scenes.

Other technical feats were well executed too such as the sound production. I was really impressed with how both the sound design and score played such a significant role in enhancing key moments in the film. From the deafening sounds of the testing ground to the hauntingly atmospheric musical compositions, the audio elements contribute to the film’s emotional impact. The tension and build-up leading to the moment of the atomic bomb’s creation are masterfully handled. I thought it was a brilliant decision by Nolan to mute all sound during some key moments. As a viewer, it almost felt like after so much suspense was built up you still had a moment where you were holding your breath in anticipation for what was still to come. Nolan navigated the ethical dilemmas faced by Oppenheimer and his team, crafting an immersive experience that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats.

Oppenheimer is not without its flaws and I personally wasn’t the biggest fan of the editing. I thought that it made the plot feel a bit cumbersome and challenging to follow. Given the 3 hour runtime, the editing and writing made the pacing of the movie noticeable. Just when you think this movie was all about the making of the bomb, it swerves into another direction about Oppenheimer’s personal life, and then another swerve into the political drama. Essentially, it felt like multiple movies crammed into one.

To make matters a bit more difficult, in true Nolan fashion, much of the exposition felt heavy-handed. There seemed to be a presumption in the film that viewers should already be aware of the politics during the 1940s and have a physics degree of some sort. The issue I think this may pose is that while some people are learning many of the historical or scientific facts for the first time, it takes away the opportunity to really engage with the plot. It would be like studying for a test and listening to a friend tell you a story at the same time. Moreover, the film’s political and legal drama may feel heavy-handed to some viewers. While it is essential to depict the socio-political context of the era accurately, a more subtle approach could have balanced the film’s focus better.

Another aspect that draws criticism is the portrayal of female characters in the film. While Florence Pugh’s performance as Jean Tatlock is commendable, the writing of her characters may come across as lacking an authentic appeal. I think this also trickled down into an over-arching issue in the writing which was that I didn’t feel much of an emotional anchor was present. When I talk about an emotional anchor, that usually comes from the main protagonist in the film to help create a relational point for the audience. While it was demonstrated that Oppenheimer did have some trying times, my issue with the editing of the story came back into play. Right when I started to connect with Oppenheimer, we immediately jumped into some science experiment, legal drama, or historical event that snapped me out of it. A bit more of a focus might have been helpful in that case.

The Verdict:

Oppenheimer is an enthralling deep dive into the life and choices of J. Robert Oppenheimer. With outstanding performances, impressive cinematography, and gripping tension, it offers a captivating experience for audiences. I do believe that the marketing of Oppenheimer was a bit misleading because it initially gives the impression that it’s about Oppenheimer and the lead-up to the A-bomb. If you’re going into this thinking that you’re going to get some crazy explosion and massive casualties and such, then you’re going to be disappointed. This is a biopic that has a lot of story to tell. Too much story in some instances.

While I did enjoy Oppenheimer overall, I can’t say I’d ever want to watch this movie again. Out of the previous categories I mentioned, I’m a Nolan fan, but I didn’t particularly care for Dunkirk . I have a general understanding of physics from school, but this movie felt like I walked into a pop quiz. I also wasn’t fully aware, nor interested, of the politics of the time. So for me, this movie felt like a chore to get through. I feel like Nolan does so many things technically right in his movies that it’s really hard for him to make a bad movie. With that said, I wouldn’t say Oppenheimer is one of Nolan’s best films, but his worst films are still better than most. I’d say Oppenheimer probably ranks in the bottom three of Nolan films along with Dark Knight Returns and Dunkirk.

One thing I noticed in my observations with people who have seen the movie is that there are factors that might depend based on the viewer. For those of you who are history buffs, that are remotely familiar with the communist party, WWII, and the politics of the 1940s, then this movie is for you. For those of you who have a general understanding of physics, then this movie is for you. If you’re a Nolan fan and love movies like Tenet or Dunkirk , then this movie is really for you. If you don’t fall into any of those categories, then I wouldn’t say this movie isn’t for you. I’d just say to prepare for more than what was advertised. Nevertheless, be sure to see Oppenheimer in theaters when you can.

Director: Christopher Nolan Writer(s): Christopher Nolan Stars: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey, Jr., Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Josh Hartnett and Kenneth Branagh Oppenheimer hits theaters July 21, 2023. Be sure to follow E-Man’s Movie Reviews on Facebook, Subscribe on YouTube , or follow me on Twitter/IG @EmansReviews for even more movie news and reviews !

Acting - 10/10 10/10
Cinematography/Visual Effects - 9/10 9/10
Plot/Screenplay - 6/10 6/10
Setting/Theme - 7/10 7/10
Watchability - 8/10 8/10
Rewatchability - 5/10 5/10

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About Emmanuel "E-Man" Noisette

Emmanuel is a Rotten Tomatoes Approved, Chicago film critic who founded Eman's Movie Reviews . He's contributed to other outlets such as ScreenRant andThe Wrap, and has been featured on television such as MSNBC. Be sure to join the other fans on his Facebook Fan Page for even more movie opinions and fun. Feel free to contact him with any professional inquiries: [email protected]

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Movie Review: A bomb and its fallout in Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Cillian Murphy in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, left, and Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Dane Dehaan as Kenneth Nichols in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Jason Clarke is Roger Robb in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Benny Safdie as Edward Teller in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

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Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is a kinetic thing of dark, imposing beauty that quakes with the disquieting tremors of a forever rupture in the course of human history.

“Oppenheimer,” a feverish three-hour immersion in the life of Manhattan Project mastermind J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), is poised between the shock and aftershock of the terrible revelation, as one character calls it, of a divine power.

There are times in Nolan’s latest opus that flames fill the frame and visions of subatomic particles flitter across the screen — montages of Oppenheimer’s own churning visions. But for all the immensity of “Oppenheimer,” this is Nolan’s most human-scaled film — and one of his greatest achievements.

It’s told principally in close-ups, which, even in the towering detail of IMAX 70mm, can’t resolve the vast paradoxes of Oppenheimer. He was said to be a magnetic man with piercing blue eyes (Murphy has those in spades) who became the father of the atomic bomb but, in speaking against nuclear proliferation and the hydrogen bomb, emerged as America’s postwar conscience.

Nolan, writing his own adaptation of Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” layers the build-up to the Manhattan Project with two moments from years later.

FILE - An Oscar statue appears at the 91st Academy Awards Nominees Luncheon, Feb. 4, 2019, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Danny Moloshok/Invision/AP, File)

In 1954, a probing inquiry into Oppenheimer’s leftist politics by a McCarthy-era Atomic Energy Commission stripped him of his security clearance. This provides the frame of “Oppenheimer,” along with a Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who chaired the Atomic Energy Commission and was a stealthy nemesis to Oppenheimer.

The grubby, political machinations of these hearings — the Strauss section is captured in black and white — act like a stark X-ray of Oppenheimer’s life. It’s an often brutal, unfair interrogation that weighs Oppenheimer’s decisions and accomplishment, inevitably, in moral terms. “Who’d want to justify their whole life?” someone wonders. For the maker of the world’s most lethal weapon, it’s an especially complicated question.

These separate timelines give “Oppenheimer” — dimly lit and shadowy even in the desert — a noirish quality (Nolan has said all his films are ultimately noirs) in reckoning with a physicist who spent the first half of his life in headlong pursuit of a new science and the second half wrestling with the consequences of his colossal, world-altering invention.

“Oppenheimer” moves too fast to come to any neat conclusions. Nolan, as if reaching to match the electron, dives into the story at a blistering pace. From start to finish, “Oppenheimer” buzzes with a heady frequency, tracking Oppenheimer as a promising student in the then-unfolding field of quantum mechanics. “Can you hear the music, Robert?” asks the elder Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). He can, absolutely, but that doesn’t mean finding harmony.

Nolan, whose last film was the time-traveling, palindrome-rich “Tenet,” may be the only filmmaker for whom delving into quantum mechanics could be considered a step down in complexity. But “Oppenheimer” is less interested in equations than the chemistry of an expanding mind. Oppenheimer reads “The Waste Land” and looks at modernist painting. He dabbles in the communist thinking of the day. (His mistress, Jean Tatlock, played arrestingly, tragically by Florence Pugh, is a party member.) But he aligns with no single cause. “I like a little wiggle room,” says Oppenheimer.

For a filmmaker synonymous with grand architectures — psychologies mapped onto subconscious worlds (“Inception”) and cosmic reaches ( “Interstellar” ) — “Oppenheimer” resides more simply in its subject’s fertile imagination and anguished psyche. (The script was written in first person.) Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema render Oppenheimer’s interiority with flashes of images that stretch across the heavens. His brilliance comes from his limitlessness of thought.

Just how much “wiggle room” Oppenheimer is permitted, though, becomes a more acute point when war breaks out and he’s tasked by Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. (Matt Damon) to lead the race to beat the Nazis to an atomic bomb. The rapid building of Los Alamos on the white-sand mesas of New Mexico — a site chosen by and with personal meaning to Oppenheimer — might not be so different than the erecting of movie sets for Nolan’s massive films, which likewise tend to culminate with a spectacular explosion.

There is something inherently queasy about a big-screen spectacle dramatizing the creation — justified or not — of a weapon of mass destruction. Oppenheimer once called the atomic bomb “a weapon for aggressors” wherein “the elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.” Surely a less imperial, leviathan filmmaker than Nolan — a British director making an American epic — might have approached the subject differently.

But the responsibility of power has long been one of Nolan’s chief subjects (think of the all-powerful surveillance machine of “The Dark Knight”). And “Oppenheimer” is consumed with not just the ethical quandary of the Manhattan Project but every ethical quandary that Oppenheimer encounters. Big or small, they could all lead to valor or damnation. What makes “Oppenheimer” so unnerving is how indistinguishable one is from the other.

“Oppenheimer” sticks almost entirely to its protagonist’s point of view yet also populates its three-hour film with an incredible array of faces, all in exquisite detail. Some of the best are Benny Safdie as the hydrogen bomb designer Edward Teller; Jason Clarke as gruff special counsel Roger Robb; Gary Oldman as President Harry Truman; Alden Ehrenreich as an aide to Strauss; Macon Blair as Oppenheimer’s attorney; and Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, the physicist’s wife.

The greatest of all of them, though, is Murphy. The actor, a Nolan regular, has always been able to communicate something more disturbing underneath his angular, angelic features. But here, his Oppenheimer is a fascinating coil of contradictions: determined and aloof, present and far-away, brilliant but blind.

Dread hangs over him, and over the film, with the inevitable. The future, post-Hiroshima, is sounded most by the wail of children who will grow up in that world; the Oppenheimers’ babies do nothing but cry.

When the Trinity test comes at Los Alamos after the toil of some 4,000 people and the expense of $2 billion, there’s a palpable, shuddering sense of history changing inexorably. How Nolan captures these sequences — the quiet before the sound of the explosion; the disquieting, thunderous, flag-waving applause that greets Oppenheimer after — are masterful, unforgettable fusions of sound and image, horror and awe.

“Oppenheimer” has much more to go. Government encroaches on science, with plenty of lessons for today’s threats of annihilation. Downey, in his best performance in years, strides toward the center of the film. You could say the film gets bogged down here, relegating a global story to a drab backroom hearing, preferring to vindicate Oppenheimer’s legacy rather than wrestle with harder questions of fallout. But “Oppenheimer” is never not balanced, uncomfortably, with wonder at what humans are capable of, and fear that we don’t know what to do with it.

“Oppenheimer,” a Universal Pictures release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some sexuality, nudity and language. Running time: 180 minutes. Four stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

A Profound Review of Oppenheimer: A Masterpiece of History & Emotion

There are times in the history of cinema when a director’s entire career seems to condense into a single work, resulting in a masterpiece that transcends its genre. “Oppenheimer,” directed by none other than Christopher Nolan , is one such cinematic marvel that encapsulates the historical depth, emotional resonance, and technical brilliance.

Drawing inspiration from the pages of “American Prometheus,” this film breathes life into the enigmatic persona of J. Robert Oppenheimer, presenting a riveting character study that lingers long after the credits roll.

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Oppenheimer (2023)

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Oppenheimer Movie Review Summary

A haunting exploration of guilt and consequence.

Unlike conventional biopics that center on the extraordinary achievements of their subjects, “Oppenheimer” chooses a path less traveled. Nolan’s lens does not simply capture the creation of the atomic bomb; instead, it peers into the depths of Oppenheimer’s conscience, unearthing the guilt and weight that accompanies wielding unprecedented power.

With Cillian Murphy’s masterful portrayal, Oppenheimer’s inner turmoil, conveyed through a mere glance or a furrowed brow, becomes a palpable force that resonates with viewers on a profoundly emotional level.

A Stellar Cast of Characters

The casting choices in “Oppenheimer” stand as a testament to the film’s commitment to authenticity and nuance. Murphy’s Oppenheimer, nuanced and haunting, is complemented by Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Lewis Strauss. Downey’s performance, arguably one of his career bests, humanizes Strauss beyond the role of a mere antagonist.

Emily Blunt’s role as Kitty Oppenheimer provides a counterbalance to the turmoil, showcasing a woman’s strength in the face of adversity. The ensemble cast, including the likes of Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, and Rami Malek, contributes to the film’s intricate tapestry of characters and emotions.

A Visual Feast, Crafted with Precision

Nolan’s penchant for practical effects shines in “Oppenheimer.” Every frame exudes authenticity, with an absence of CGI that grounds the film in a tactile reality. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema captures the essence of the era, immersing audiences in the 1940s with breathtaking shots. Ludwig Göransson’s musical score heightens tension and emotion, evoking a sense of thrilling intensity reminiscent of a thriller and a horror film.

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Navigating Complexity with Elegance

In a narrative that spans three hours, “Oppenheimer” seamlessly weaves its tale, balancing between subjective color scenes and objective black-and-white perspectives. This creative approach adds layers to Oppenheimer’s character, underscoring his complexity and moral dilemmas. The dialogue, crisp and engaging, fuels the film’s pacing, holding the audience captive within its intricate web of history, humanity, and ethical quandaries.

The Heart of “Oppenheimer” J. Robert

Exploring the Depths of Oppenheimer’s Character

“Oppenheimer” delves beyond historical events, revealing J. Robert Oppenheimer’s internal conflicts. Cillian Murphy’s performance unveils moral dilemmas through Oppenheimer’s close-ups, engaging viewers in a world where ambition clashes with ethics.

Navigating Ambition and Ethics:

Cillian Murphy embodies J. Robert Oppenheimer’s struggle at the crossroads of ambition and ethics. The film traces his journey from scientific zeal to ethical reckoning, prompting us to ponder the complexities of choices that shape humanity’s trajectory.

Unearthing the Complexity of Science and Morality :

“Oppenheimer” underscores the intricate ties between scientific advancement and moral accountability. Murphy’s portrayal uncovers the tension between brilliance and remorse, compelling us to reflect on the profound interplay of knowledge and consequences.

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A Symphony of Emotions: Musical Mastery of Ludwig Göransson

The Soundtrack as an Emotional Guide:

Ludwig Göransson’s composition becomes a narrative force in “Oppenheimer,” guiding emotions. His music weaves an unseen thread, connecting us intimately with the characters’ experiences and intensifying our immersion.

Emotion as a Language:

Göransson’s music transcends words, communicating emotions universally. His compositions amplify Oppenheimer’s inner turmoil, granting audiences access to unspoken thoughts. The film becomes an immersive, emotional journey.

Heightening Tension and Catharsis:

Göransson’s manipulation of musical elements enhances the film’s climaxes, intensifying emotions. His score transforms scenes into visceral experiences, underscoring the film’s narrative impact.

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Conclusion: A Triumph of Art and History

As the final credits roll, “Oppenheimer” cements its place in cinematic history. Christopher Nolan’s directorial prowess finds its zenith, crafting a profound biopic that pays homage to one of the most consequential figures of the 20th century.

The film’s ability to evoke empathy, its technical brilliance, and its commitment to historical accuracy make “Oppenheimer” not just a movie, but an experience. In an age where storytelling often falls victim to spectacle, “Oppenheimer” stands as a triumphant reminder that true cinematic excellence lies in the convergence of craft, emotion, and intellect.

“Oppenheimer” primarily centers on the life and moral dilemmas of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant physicist instrumental in the Manhattan Project. Rather than solely focusing on the creation of the atomic bomb, the film delves deep into Oppenheimer’s character, exploring his internal conflicts, ethical choices, and the aftermath of his contributions.

Cillian Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer adds a layer of authenticity and emotional depth to the film. Through his nuanced portrayal, Murphy vividly captures Oppenheimer’s inner turmoil, allowing the audience to connect with the complex emotions and ethical struggles faced by the renowned physicist.

Ludwig Göransson’s musical score is a pivotal element of “Oppenheimer.” The score enhances the film’s emotional resonance, guiding viewers through the narrative’s highs and lows. By using music as a conduit for unspoken emotions, Göransson’s compositions elevate the film’s intensity and connection with the characters’ experiences.

Yes, “Oppenheimer” employs a distinctive storytelling technique that engages viewers on multiple levels. The film alternates between color scenes subjective to Oppenheimer and black-and-white scenes objective to other characters. This creative choice adds depth to the narrative, providing insights into Oppenheimer’s thoughts and external perspectives simultaneously.

Roger Ebert, a prominent figure in the world of movie criticism, is not just a film enthusiast but a dedicated blogger as well. With a profound passion for cinema, he indulges in a diverse range of films spanning various genres and eras. The prime objective is to offer readers a window into his perceptive analyses through insightful and thoughtful reviews. He loves discovering new favorite movies, from classics to the latest releases.

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'Oppenheimer': Everything We Know About Christopher Nolan's Masterpiece

Nolan's first biopic was one of the biggest films of the year.

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Every few years, Christopher Nolan descends from the Mount Olympus of directors to deliver another must-see movie. His consistency rivals any living or legendary filmmaker. As a writer, director, and producer, he’s one of the most successful auteurs working in cinema, and he’s making blockbusters that match the scale of Spielberg’s or Kubrick’s classics. The Dark Knight Trilog y , Inception , Memento : his body of work is a checkerboard of originality and adaptation.

Nolan's twelfth film will be a change of pace for his filmography; the director is writing and producing a biopic concerning the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. For more about who that is, what the movie might be about, and the cast—so far—check out our breakdown of everything we know about Oppenheimer .

Editor's Note: This piece was updated on November 6, 2023.

Oppenheimer

The story of American scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

Swiftly after Universal Studios announced its deal as the new distributor for the director’s films, they announced his new movie is set to be released on July 21, 2023. Oppenheimer will be Christopher Nolan's first R-rated film in 20 years . His last R-rating was for his 2002 film, Insomnia .

Oppenheimer was initially released exclusively in theaters, and was available in the standard digital cinema projection and in IMAX, 70mm, and 35mm formats . The film opened opposite another star-studded blockbuster from an auteur director in Greta Gerwig 's Barbie ; creating the worldwide phenomenon, Barbemheimer.

Nolan is also one of the most vocal proponents of celluloid film and the silver-screen experience. In March 2020, he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post about the magic of movies and movie theaters. In the documentary Side By Side , which dissects the differences between celluloid film and digital cameras, his comments reveal him as a film purist. His commitment bleeds into the distribution of his pictures where he ensures a limited authentic film release—ala Quentin Tarantino. Even when almost literally every other film was pulled from release in 2020, Nolan and Warner were insistent on Tenet ’s summer release. While it didn’t save cinema when Warner Bros forced its release amid the coronavirus pandemic in August 2020, it was another heady and action-packed picture by the Englishman. It was his lowest-grossing feature since The Prestige .

After Warner Brothers announced plans to give their films same-day streaming service debuts on HBOMax, Nolan, along with other creators and the movie theater companies themselves, was more than displeased. He ripped the decision and the service, calling HBOMax, “the worst streaming service.” In an interview with Entertainment Tonight , he said, “...they didn’t tell anyone. In 2021, they’ve got some of the top filmmakers in the world, they’ve got some of the biggest stars in the world who worked for years, in some cases, on these projects very close to their hearts that are meant to be big-screen experiences. They’re meant to be out there for the widest possible audiences...and now they’re being used as a loss-leader for the streaming service--for a fledgling streaming service—without any consultation. So, there’s a lot of controversy. It’s very, very, very, very, messy. A real bait and switch.”

The director separated as a working partner with Warner shortly thereafter and assuredly became the hottest free agent on the market. Even Netflix tried their best to court the streaming service naysayer, their film chief Scott Stuber stating, “He’s an incredible filmmaker. I’m going to do everything I can.” But Nolan aligned with Universal for the release of his newest picture . The studio allegedly won favor by promising a six-week blackout surrounding the film’s release date where no other Universal properties are to be released, as well as by promising a 100-day exclusive theatrical release.

“Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas’ films have shattered the limits of what cinematic storytelling can achieve,” said Donna Langley , Universal Filmed Entertainment Group Chairman, in a statement. “We are thrilled to be working alongside them on this exceptional and extraordinary project and are grateful for their shared passion and commitment to the theatrical experience.”

The full trailer for the film was released exclusively in theaters ahead of IMAX showings of Avatar: The Way of Water .

A different cut of the official trailer was released online on December 18, 2022. The trailer, which is narrated by Cillian Murphy teases a much more emotional and human film than some might have expected from a film about the creation of the nuclear bomb directed by Christopher Nolan but paired with Ludwig Göransson ' s score, that's what it feels like.

The second full trailer for Oppenheimer was initially released exclusively in movie theaters and played before IMAX screenings of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 . On May 8, 2023, Universal uploaded the trailer to their YouTube channel.

Universal released a five-minute video that gives us an in-depth look at the film. While it's not a proper trailer, this "Opening Look" does a terrific job of setting expectations for what's coming. A beautifully shot drama with an incredible score by Ludwig Göransson.

Oppenheimer is an adaptation of the book American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J . Robert Oppenheimer by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird . The Pulitzer Prize-winning book is being adapted into a movie described as, “An IMAX-shot epic thriller that thrusts the audience into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.”

Oppenheimer was a scientist most famous for leading The Manhattan Project—the team that developed the atomic bomb for the United States of America in World War II. He later served as chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission where he worked to slow the developing nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.

In 1954, Oppenheimer was branded a communist for his affiliation with multiple groups. He was relieved of service from the federal government and would continue his contributions to science as a teacher and groundbreaking theoretical physicist during his exile. He received three Nobel Prize nominations in physics from 1946 to 1967, though he never won one before his death in 1967.

The above clip highlights the production of Oppenheimer and Nolan's dedication to the IMAX format . If you weren't aware, a regular movie screen has a 16:9 aspect ratio, while IMAX’s exclusive 1.90:1 aspect ratio is roughly 26% larger. Most films reserve IMAX cameras for action set pieces, such as the final battle in an Avengers movie, but Nolan chose to shoot the entirety of Oppenheimer in IMAX. It was reported that the rolls of IMAX film that Nolan used to shoot Oppenheimer stretched to 11 miles long, weighing as much as 600 lbs.

Nolan explained why he loves shooting his films in IMAX .

"The sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled. The headline, for me, is by shooting on IMAX 70mm film, you’re really letting the screen disappear. You’re getting a feeling of 3D without the glasses. You’ve got a huge screen and you’re filling the peripheral vision of the audience. You’re immersing them in the world of the film.”

Oppenheimer will only be available in 70mm in 30 theaters worldwide.

As previously mentioned, Christopher Nolan directed the film and wrote the screenplay. The acclaimed filmmaker also re-teamed with some of his previous collaborators. Academy Award Winner Ludwig Göransson who worked on the score for Tenet will compose Oppenheimer 's score. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema who was the cinematographer for Interstellar , Dunkirk , and Tenet serves as the film's DP. Another returnee from Nolan's Tenet team is editor Jennifer Lame who has also worked on films such as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever , Manchester by the Sea , and Marriage Story . Ruth De Jong ( Twin Peaks ) serves as the film's production designer while Emmy Winner Ellen Mirojnick ( Bridgerton ) designed the costumes. Academy Award Winner Scott R. Fischer ( Top Gun: Maverick ) and Laurie Pellard ( Avengers: Infinity War ) are behind the film's visual effects.

Nolan's wife Emma Thomas is producing the film alongside her husband as well as Charles Roven, who previously worked with Nolan on The Dark Knight Trilogy .

Nolan revealed that he initially wrote the film from a first-person perspective because it helped him understand the mindset of Oppenheimer. The director said:

“I actually wrote in the first-person, which I’ve never done before. I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before. But the point of it is, with the colour sequences, which is the bulk of the film, everything is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view — you’re literally kind of looking through his eyes.Odd thing to do. But it was a reminder to me of how to shoot the film. It was a reminder to everybody involved in the project, ‘Okay, this is the point of view of every scene.’ I wanted to really go through this story with Oppenheimer; I didn’t want to sit by him and judge him. That seemed a pointless exercise. That’s more the stuff of documentary, or political theory, or history of science. This is a story that you experience with him — you don’t judge him. You are faced with these irreconcilable ethical dilemmas with him.”

Notably, Nolan has revealed that Oppenheimer will not feature any CGI. He clarified his statements , saying:

"One of the first people I showed the script to was my visual effects supervisor, Andrew Jackson. He’s very well-versed in CG, but he’s also very well-versed in practical effects and understands the value of that. I showed it to him very early on, and I said, 'Okay, what we need in this film is a thread between the interior process of Oppenheimer, his imagining, his visualizing of atoms, molecules, those interactions, those energy waves. We need a thread that runs from that right through to the ultimate expression of the destructive power when that force is unleashed. It has to live in the same family.'"

Doomsday Approaches for Cillian Murphy in New 'Oppenheimer' Poster

Frequent Christopher Nolan accomplice Cillian Murphy ( Peaky Blinders ) is set to star as J. Robert Oppenheimer himself . Cillian collaborated with Nolan previously in The Dark Knight Trilogy , Inception , and most recently, Dunkirk .

Emily Blunt ( A Quiet Place ) reteams with Murphy, her co-star from A Quiet Place II , as Katherine Oppenheimer. Katherine was an activist and scientist, and one of many links between Oppenheimer and the communist ideology.

Academy Award Winner Matt Damon ( The Martian ) joined the cast as Lieutenant General Leslie Groves. Groves was the military director on the Manhattan Project, and he also oversaw the construction of the pentagon.

It was announced that Academy Award Nominee Robert Downey Jr .( Iron Man ) joined the film as Lewis Strauss. Strauss and Oppenheimer found themselves on opposing sides of the debate about the development of the hydrogen bomb in late 1940. Like Oppenheimer, Strauss would go on to serve as chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.

Academy Award Nominee Florence Pugh ( Black Widow ) is set to star as Jean Tatlock. Tatlock was one of several points of connection between Oppenheimer and communism, and the two were locked in an affair that would spark off and on for years.

It was also announced that Academy Award winner Rami Malek ( Bohemian Rhapsody ) would play a scientist, and director and actor Benny Safdie ( Goodtime ) would play Edward Teller—a Hungarian physicist who helped create the first hydrogen bomb.

Oppenheimer also has a massive ensemble which includes Academy Award Nominee Tom Conti ( The Dark Knight Rises ) as Albert Einstein, Josh Hartnett ( Penny Dreadful ) as Ernest Lawrence, Dane DeHaan ( Chronicle ), Jack Quaid ( The Boys ), Matthew Modine ( Stranger Things ) as Vannevar Bush, Dylan Arnold ( Halloween ) as Frank Oppenheimer, Alden Ehrenreich ( Solo: A Star Wars Story ), as Richard Feynman, David Krumholtz ( The Santa Clauses ) as Isidor Isaac Rabi, Michael Angarano ( Sky High ) as Robert Serber, Academy Award Winner Kenneth Branagh ( Death on the Nile ), David Dastmalchian ( The Suicide Squad ), Jason Clarke ( Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty ), Josh Peck ( Drake & Josh ), as Kenneth Bainbridge, Devon Bostick ( Diary of a Wimpy Kid ) as Seth Neddermeyer, Alex Wolff ( Hereditary ), Tony Goldwyn ( King Richard ), Academy Award Winner Gary Oldman ( Darkest Hour ) as Harry S. Truman, Academy Award Winner Casey Affleck ( Manchester by the Sea ), Scott Grimes ( The Orville ), Josh Zuckerman ( The Offer ), James D'Arcy ( Dunkirk ), Matthias Schweighöfer ( Army of the Dead ), Christopher Denham ( The Gilded Age ) as Klaus Fuchs, David Rysdahl ( No Exit ), Guy Burnet ( Pitch Perfect 3 ) as Guy Eltenton, Danny Deferrari ( Shiva Baby ) as Enrico Fermi, Louise Lombard ( CSI: Crime Scene Investigation ), Harrison Gilbertson ( Need for Speed ), Emma Dumont ( Licorice Pizza ) as Jackie Oppenheimer, Gustaf Skarsgård ( Vikings ) as Hans Bethe, Trond Fausa ( Lilyhammer ), Olli Haaskivi ( The Falcon and the Winter Soldier ), and Olivia Thirlby ( Juno ).

Pre-production on Oppenheimer began in January 2022 in New Mexico and filming kicked off a month later. Filming wrapped the following May. To truly capture the atmosphere, Nolan revealed how they were able to shoot some of the film's fiery scenes .

"I mean, I've done a lot of explosions in a lot of films. But there is something very unique and particular about being out in a desert in the middle of the night with a big cast, and really just doing some enormous explosions and capturing that. You couldn't help but come back to this moment when they were doing this on the ultimate scale, that in the back of their minds they knew there was this possibility that they would set fire to the atmosphere. It was pretty amazing to engage in that kind of tension."

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During the dark war days of 1942, the U.S. government gathered a group of the most brilliant scientists in the nation and sent them to live in the dust and mud of Los Alamos, N.M., where the Army had hammered together a town for them overnight. Their mission on this top-secret base was to design and build an atomic bomb. They made an odd assembly, the intellectuals from Berkeley and Chicago, the refugees from Hitler, the tinkerers and craftsmen who were to physically construct the bomb, and all of their wives, children, lovers, pets, libraries, pianos and eccentricities. To weld them together, the Army assigned Gen. Leslie R. Groves, whose previous task had been to build the Pentagon.

Their endeavor was known as the Manhattan Project, and they were told they were in a race with Germany to build the first doomsday weapon. Germany surrendered before the bomb was finished, but it was used, of course, on Japan, and the shadow cast by its mushroom cloud still hovers over all of us today. "Fat Man and Little Boy" is a fiction based on the Manhattan Project, but it is thin and unfocused and hardly even suggests the enormous moral and practical questions that the scientists wrestled with in the New Mexico desert.

The movie labors under an enormous handicap: A much better, more intelligent and more exciting film has already been made about this same subject. It is "The Day After Trinity" (1980), a documentary by Jon Else that includes government footage from Los Alamos as well as interviews, then and now, with many of the men who worked on the bomb.

In my review of "The Day After Trinity," I wrote that it "delivers more suspense than most of the thrillers I have seen," and now that we have a fiction film to compare it to, that is even more clear.

The story of the birth of the bomb is one of high drama, but it was largely intellectual drama, as the scientists asked themselves, in conversations and nightmares, what terror they were unleashing on the Earth. "Fat Man and Little Boy" reduces their debates to the childish level of Hollywood stereotyping, giving us a simplified personality conflict between Gen. Groves ( Paul Newman ) and J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Dwight Schultz ), the scientific leader of the undertaking.

Gen. Groves is portrayed as a saner, gentler version of George Patton - gruff, barking orders - and Oppenheimer is seen as a brilliant but unworldly intellectual. Since the two men do not really violently disagree on anything, their conflict reduces itself to emotional speechmaking, which, when carefully listened to, is not really about anything.

"The Day After Trinity" paints a picture of the community that grew up in Los Alamos, where the music of Glenn Miller and the popularity of the martini helped to break the tension after the day's work. "Fat Man and Little Boy" simplifies this, too, by showing the social life but not the tension. Most of the scientific details in the movie are reduced to scenes like the one where a young scientist ( John Cusack ) triggers an experiment, holds his breath, and then relaxes when the world does not vaporize. After work, the scientists attend cocktail parties that seem to exist only to introduce minor characters, or they sit around holding earnest (but very brief) discussions that are so simplified by the screenplay that they sound like parodies.

The usual romantic subplots don't contribute much. Oppenheimer is torn between his left-wing, security-risk mistress ( Natasha Richardson ) and his adoring wife ( Bonnie Bedelia ), who essentially thinks he is the greatest man alive and deserves anything he wants. The Cusack character also has an adoring woman, a local nurse ( Laura Dern ) who whispers that she loves him as he dies of radiation poisoning. But the movie is cobbled together so ineptly that Cusack's death scene is intercut with the night of the first bomb test and is so thoroughly upstaged that it never really gets the emotional reaction it deserves.

This movie, written by Bruce Robinson and the director, Roland Joffe , can't even steal successfully. In "The Day After Trinity," there is gallows humor as a scientist remembers that he and his colleagues placed bets before the first atomic explosion on whether it would destroy the world, or only New Mexico. They thought there was a real possibility the first nuclear explosion would rip the fabric of matter and expand wildly out of control. If "Big Man and Little Boy" had simply recycled the dialogue and the incredibly exciting events of that day, it would have had an ending. Instead, Joffe is unable to deliver a climax even as the bomb explodes; he shows it reflected in the goggles of a character, and then cuts to what looks like special effects footage of nuclear flames.

Much of the imagery in "Fat Man" is obviously inspired by the earlier documentary footage, including such details as what the first bomb looked like and how odd it was suspended in a tower in the desert.

The look of the film is nevertheless all wrong. Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography bathes everything in muted browns and golds and maroons, so that New Mexico looks like outtakes from " The Godfather " when it should look stark and bright in the Southwest sunlight, and painted with bold O'Keefe colors.

As for the performances, they are mostly hapless. Newman is unable to generate any particular tone for his Gen. Groves - no wonder, since the character has been written as a schoolmaster and scold - and Schultz's Oppenheimer lacks the quickness and fire of the real man, and seems curiously muted and befuddled. Many of the scientists at Los Alamos were young, it is true, but were they as young as the actors who play them here? Wearing their fedora hats and rimless glasses and smoking cigarettes, some of these actors look like high school kids playing adults in the class play.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Fat Man And Little Boy (1989)

Rated PG-13

126 minutes

Natasha Richardson as Jean Tatlock

Bonnie Bedelia as Kitty Oppenheimer

John C. McGinley as Richard Schoenfield

John Cusack as Michael Merriman

Del Close as Dr. Kenneth Whiteside

Dwight Schultz as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Laura Dern as Kathleen Robinson

Paul Newman as Gen. Leslie R. Groves

Ron Frazier as Peer De Silva

Screenplay by

Bruce Robinson

Directed by

Roland Joffe

Photographed by

Vilmos Zsigmond
Francoise Bonnot
Ennio Morricone

Produced by

Tony Garnett

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Oppenheimer movie review & film summary (2023)
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Oppenheimer movie review & film summary (2023)
The movie is an academic-psychedelic biography in the vein of those 1990s Oliver Stone films that were edited within an inch of their lives (at times it's as if the park bench scene in "JFK" had been expanded to three hours).There's also a strain of pitch-black humor, in a Stanley Kubrick mode, as when top government officials meet to go over a list of possible Japanese cities to bomb, and the ...
The Best Performance in Oppenheimer Belongs to Alden Ehrenreich
Ehrenreich's job is to blend in, to keep a straight face against the peacocking Strauss. It's a role that could, too, have disappeared into the background, but Ehrenreich knows that the best scene stealers are the ones who react to the carnage. Ehrenreich, a character actor with the face of a 1950s leading man, has always excelled in parts ...
Roger Ebert on the Films of Christopher Nolan
The Editors July 19, 2023. Tweet. With Christopher Nolan 's " Oppenheimer " releasing in theaters this week, we thought we'd look back at what Roger Ebert wrote about the films of this brilliant filmmaker before his passing. Roger was able to review seven films by Nolan between 2001 and 2012, giving all of them three stars or more.
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Christopher Nolan's new film about it is absolutely Enormoz, maybe his most enormoz so far: a gigantic, post-detonation study, a PTSD narrative procedure filling the giant screen with a million ...
'Oppenheimer' Review: A Man for Our Time
Christopher Nolan's complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms. The writer and director ...
Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer is an intelligent movie about an important topic that's never less than powerfully acted and incredibly entertaining. During World War II, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. appoints physicist ...
'Oppenheimer' Called the Best and Most Important Film This Century
The official review embargo for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer isn't lifted until Wednesday, but writer-director Paul Schrader has some strong words about the World War II science epic ...
Oppenheimer First Reviews: Breathtaking, Ballsy, and One of the Best
According to the first reviews of Nolan's latest, Oppenheimer is a remarkable achievement, and it's sure to go down as one of the best films of 2023. The biopic stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the American effort to create the first atomic bomb. His performance is being celebrated, though many in the movie's cast ...
Review: 'Oppenheimer' emerges as a monumental achievement on the march
In the riveting last section of the film, Nolan shows us Oppenheimer fighting against those eager to discredit him, first in the Sen. Joseph McCarthy commie witch-hunts of 1954 and five years later during the Senate confirmation hearings for the nomination of former Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) as secretary ...
'Oppenheimer' review: Ambitious, deeply Nolan, deeply flawed
Cillian Murphy, who has previously worked with Nolan on The Dark Knight trilogy, Dunkirk, and Inception, stars as Oppenheimer, the Jewish-American theoretical physicist who led the U.S. government ...
Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' is a supersize masterpiece
As Oppenheimer makes a name for himself in quantum mechanics — he's written a widely circulated paper on molecules — we also meet the man who will become his chief antagonist: Lewis Strauss ...
Oppenheimer Movie Review
lilydivine Parent of 9-year-old. July 23, 2023. age 18+. I wouldn't ever take my kids (even when they were teenagers) We enjoy movies based on historical events but were disappointed in Oppenheimer. The story was okay but the infidelity, sex scenes, and lingering frontal nudity had me giving the film "thumbs down".
'Oppenheimer' movie review: A towering triumph of filmmaking
Movie Reviews 'Oppenheimer' is a towering triumph of filmmaking Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" is one of the most ambitious and comprehensive historical dramas ever put to film.
Joshua Oppenheimer movie reviews & film summaries
Behold the foolish and the brave: standing on one of the islands that appear during the dry season, kayacker's Steve Fisher, Dale Jardine and Sam Drevo, were able to peer over the edge after paddling up to the lip of Victoria Falls; the largest waterfall in the world and which flows between Zambia and Zimbabwe, in Africa.
Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer is not an easy movie. To say its subject matter and theme are inherently downbeat is something of an understatement. It flings you into a very specific, crowded world and refuses to ...
"Oppenheimer" and "Barbie," Reviewed
Christopher Nolan sets the physicist in a swirl of Cold War conspiracy, and Greta Gerwig tries to imbue a story about the doll with a feminist critique of capitalism. By Anthony Lane. July 20 ...
Oppenheimer Review: A Technical Feat That Felt Like A Chore
Essentially, it felt like multiple movies crammed into one. To make matters a bit more difficult, in true Nolan fashion, much of the exposition felt heavy-handed. There seemed to be a presumption in the film that viewers should already be aware of the politics during the 1940s and have a physics degree of some sort.
'Oppenheimer' Review: A bomb and its fallout
Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" is a kinetic thing of dark, imposing beauty that quakes with the disquieting tremors of a forever rupture in the course of human history. "Oppenheimer," a feverish three-hour immersion in the life of Manhattan Project mastermind J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), is poised between the shock and aftershock of the terrible revelation, as one ...
Oppenheimer (2023) Review: A Masterpiece of History & Emotion
Within the realm of cinematic brilliance, "Oppenheimer" effortlessly secures a well-deserved 4 stars out of 5 from me. This captivating masterpiece delves into the depths of history while evoking profound emotions. Through exceptional performances, meticulous craftsmanship, and a narrative with layers of nuance, "Oppenheimer" emerges as ...
Oppenheimer, Poor Things Big Winners at the 2024 Golden Globes
The 2024 Golden Globe Awards were handed out last night to the following. Click through for our reviews. BEST MOTION PICTURE - DRAMA: "Oppenheimer" BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE - DRAMA: Lily Gladstone, "Killers of the Flower Moon" BEST PERFORMANCE BY A MALE ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE - DRAMA: Cillian Murphy, "Oppenheimer"
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert | Oppenheimer movie review & film summary (2023) 17K subscribers in the OppenheimerMovie community. Dedicated to Christopher Nolan's IMAX thriller "Oppenheimer," the thought-provoking film about J….
'Oppenheimer' movie review: A strange, surreal, stirring saga from
Instead, the filmmaker completely goes for the jugular and paralyses us with shock in a scene right after, when "the father of the atomic bomb" has to address a crowd of colleagues who are ...
Alan Oppenheimer movie reviews & film summaries
Alan Oppenheimer movie reviews & film summaries | Roger Ebert. ... Alan Oppenheimer movie reviews & film summaries | Roger Ebert. Movie Reviews TV/Streaming Interviews Collections Great Movies Chaz's Journal Contributors Cast and Crew Alan Oppenheimer Find on IMDB. Find on Wikipedia.
'Oppenheimer': Everything We Know About Christopher Nolan's ...
The above clip highlights the production of Oppenheimer and Nolan's dedication to the IMAX format.If you weren't aware, a regular movie screen has a 16:9 aspect ratio, while IMAX's exclusive 1. ...
Fat Man And Little Boy movie review (1989)
Fat Man And Little Boy. During the dark war days of 1942, the U.S. government gathered a group of the most brilliant scientists in the nation and sent them to live in the dust and mud of Los Alamos, N.M., where the Army had hammered together a town for them overnight. Their mission on this top-secret base was to design and build an atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer review – Nolan’s atom bomb epic is flawed but extraordinary

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Oppenheimer First Reviews: Breathtaking, Ballsy, and One of the Best Biopics Ever Made

Is this possibly the best movie of the year?

Will Christopher Nolan fans enjoy it?

Is it one of his most impressive films?

How is the screenplay?

Is it difficult to understand?

How is Cillian Murphy in the title role?

Do any of his co-stars particularly stand out?

How is the movie’s representation of women characters?

How does it look and sound?

What about the pacing?

Does it have any surprises?

Do we need to see it in IMAX?

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Review: 'Oppenheimer' emerges as a monumental achievement on the march into screen history

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Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ is a supersize masterpiece

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