christian movie reviews oppenheimer

Oppenheimer

Reviewed by: Alexander Malsan CONTRIBUTOR

Secular Humanist worldview promoted

World War Two

American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist and his role in developing atomic bombs

Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project

Films with heavy subject matter

Result was a weapon that destroyed thousands of people

Both the U.S. AND the Nazis where rushing to develop atomic bombs during WWII, can you imagine what would have happened if the Nazis had succeeded before America. Which nightmare would you prefer to pick?

The availability of atomic weapons changed the world

“Genius is no guarantee of wisdom .”

What is the Biblical perspective on war? Answer

War in the Bible

Why does God allow innocent people to suffer?

What about the issue of suffering ? Doesn’t this prove that there is no God and that we are on our own? Answer

ORIGIN OF BAD THINGS —Why are they in our world if a good God created us? Answer

Is the portrayal of anti-Communists in this film fair and accurate, or distorted?

Definitely not a feel-good movie

D r. J. Robbert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) is one of the most revered scientists in the history of theoretical physics. The narrative for the film “Oppenheimer” takes place in four different settings: his time working as a professor at Cambridge University, his time as the manager of the Manhattan Project (the project that led to the creation of both the hydrogen bomb and the atomic bomb). And both a closed and open session with members of Congress.

Within these various settings, we witness the rise and fall of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man whom the world would later name the “father of the atomic bomb.” We watch as Oppenheimer struggles with himself in what may occur with the atomic bomb (as it is being created in Los Alamos) and what DOES occur as a result of not only releasing one, but two atomic bombs on Japan. We watch his claim to fame after spending three years in Los Alamos creating these weapons of destruction and his sudden fall from grace among the public during the Second Red Scare (a time in our history where individuals with left-wing political beliefs were persecuted and ostracized for having Socialist and Communist associations with the Communist Party USA, regardless of whether these accusations were true or not).

“Oppenheimer” serves as a stern, grim reminder of the cost of greatness, the cost of war, and the emotional inner turmoil that comes from unleashing the most destructive and powerful weapon on the planet.

“Oppenheimer,” as I stated, is far from a feel-good film. Anyone who is versed in even a little U.S. history, knows exactly what the implications of the Manhattan Project were. As a result of the Manhattan Project, just like an atomic bomb itself, the fallout led to a new variety of issues in the United States and abroad, such as the regulation of atomic weapons, both their creation and use.

The film “Oppenheimer” brings a complex, yet conflicting message that addresses the age old question “Does the end justify the means?” If you were ask to some historians, many would state that, yes, the bombings were necessary in an effort to quell the fighting by the Japanese and bring an end to World War II. However, as famous physicist Niels Bohr, states in the film, “A bomb falls on the just and the unjust.” While the bombings did lead to the end of WWII and Japan’s surrender, it came at a heavy cost: the loss of over 129,000-226,000 individuals, most of them Japanese civilians. The film, “Oppenheimer,” beautifully dives into both sides of the discussion, while critically examining the thoughts and actions of everyone involved in the Manhattan Project, not just Dr. Oppenheimer himself.

To put it simply, “Oppenheimer” has elements of a cinematic masterpiece. The film, coming in at a whopping 3 hours in length never felts overly lengthy to me, nor does it feel underwhelmingly short. Within the 3 hours, the level of tension and anxiety almost never lightens up. As I sat there, trying to take as many notes as I could, I felt the level of gravitas surrounding the film. Director Christopher is without a doubt one of the most prolific and skilled directors and producers in Hollywood. His films alway carry heavy, yet difficult messages to examine. Nolan takes such a clear approach to this film. He is not trying to preach a message we don’t already know or understand. He is clearly trying to make his audience realize that even the father of the atomic bomb did not take the creation of the bomb lightly. He does this, as previously mentioned, through the careful examination of the four most significant moments of Dr. Oppenheimer’s life.

Let me be clear from the start: “Oppenheimer” is not a film for the faint of heart, and it is certainly NOT for young audiences (this includes teens). There is some intense violence in the film (though some, like the results of the bombings, are never shown), as well as some INCREDIBLY unnecessary graphic nudity and sexual content throughout the entire film (I mean really Nolan? Don’t cheapen yourself with this kind of content in your films. You’re better than this).

On a performance note, Cillian Murphy , who plays Oppenheimer, gives the performance of his career. Every line he gives is carefully delivered, and he brings depth and humanistic understanding of Dr. Oppenheimer. Robert Downey Jr. also puts in a brilliant performance as Dr. Leopold Strauss, as does Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan project. Additionally some commendable performances come from Emily Blunt as Katherine Oppenheimer and Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr.

On a final note, the visuals and camerawork in this film are spot on. As I stated, the film almost never lightens up in its 3 hour run, and this is in part due to the jaw-dropping visuals of the film, whether this is during Dr. Oppenheimer’s dreams or during the testing of the bomb, every visual is carefully crafted to receive the maximum amount of shock and awe.

Content of Concern

Nudity: Extreme. There is some serious, graphic nudity in the film, not just once but FIVE times! The first scene includes a woman displaying full frontal nudity for an extended sequence (her genitals are not shown) while engaging in intercourse with another naked individual. In another scene, these two characters are seen again, engaging in intercourse in front of someone who accidentally walks in. In the third instance, these individuals are, again, fully naked, sitting in chairs having a discussion with each other. In one final scene, a character is seen sitting naked on a chair. In a dream sequence, Oppenheimer is naked, once again, in front of members of Congress.

Sexual Content: As previously mentioned, two characters are engaging in graphic sexual intercourse on two different instances. Oppenheimer was known as a “womanizer” during his lifetime, and he engages in an affair while married to someone else. He begins to describe to his wife how wonderful his intercourse was to his mistress. This affair is mentioned in Oppenheimer’s testimony to Congress.

Adultery and fornication in the Bible

Sexual lust outside of marriage —Why does God strongly warn us about it?

Purity —Should I save sex for marriage?

Violence: Someone is seen committing suicide by drowning. There are multiple discussions about the destruction and aftermath of a possible atomic bomb, including discussions on which of the Japanese cities to target. In some dream sequences, Oppenheimer imagines the atomic bomb melting the skins off of people. In another sequence, Oppenheimer is seen walking on the burnt carcasses of individuals. There is another moment when people are discussing the horrific aftermath of the atomic bomb (this is after it’s been used). Someone throws a glass at another person. We witness a couple dummy tests of the bomb, as well as the first test of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. There are some suggestions about torturing individuals. President Truman mentions to Oppenheimer that only he will be remembered for the deaths of the people of Hiroshima and Nagaski, not Oppenheimer and his team. We witness the test of the atomic bomb.

Vulgar Language: F***ing (7-10), Sh*tty (1), Sh*t (2), Scr*w you (1), “Cr*p,” “Smart a**” (1), A**-hole. Someone makes a crude reference to male anatomy. A female character mentions to someone that the fallout of an atomic bomb will affect male anatomy more than female as the male has “anatomy that is exposed.”

Profanity: J*sus (2), Chr*st (1), D*mn (1), D*mnit (2), “G*d d*mn,” “Go to H*ll” (1), “What the h*ll (1)

Drugs: Someone is seen addicted to painkillers, which causes her to drown herself in her tub.

Alcohol: There are multiple scenes where characters are seen drinking alcohol.

Other: There are references to the fact that members of Oppenheimer’s family are part of the Communist Party of America (it is even rumored in the film that Oppenheimer was part of the party, but these are only rumors. He even criticizes his brother for being a member of the Party). People are seen throwing up. Kitty and Oppenheimer are seen as neglectful parents in the film: the children are often seen crying, and Kitty and Oppenheimer even pass off their children to some friends to be taken care of for several months.

A huge portion of the film is devoted to showing the audience how conflicted many scientists were during the Manhattan Project, including Oppenheimer. In fact, Oppenheimer quotes to himself on two occasions, “Now I am becoming Death. The destroyer of all worlds” (a line from the Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita).

Initially after the detonation of the atomic bomb on the two cities, Oppenheimer is praised for all his hard work and the success of the bombs. But as quick as Oppenheimer is praised, he is quickly admonished by members of Congress and the public during the Second Red Scare.

This moment reminded me of the following Scriptures which discuss the lunacy of living in the world and the dangers of fame…

“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.” — 1 John 2:15-16

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” — Mark 8:36

In essence it is important to remember that as Christians we should be very cautious about seeking fame and fortune, for both of them are frail and fleeting moments, and in the end do not matter to God. What will matter on the day of Judgment will be where are hearts are for the Lord and our witness to the world.

Closing Thoughts

Like Dr. Oppenheimer and the members of the Manhattan Project, I feel conflicted when it comes to the film “Oppenheimer.” On one hand, the film is cinematically brilliant from start to finish: the camera work, the performances, the tone, the setting, and the pacing of the film (in spite of its 3 hour length, in my opinion).

On the OTHER hand, this film is littered with vulgar dialog, profanity and extremely graphic sexual content and nudity (even two days after having seen the film, the obscenely graphic imagery still plays in my head).

Due to the above mentioned content (all of which could have been left out of the film), I strongly discourage anyone from viewing “Oppenheimer” (please note the stars do NOT warrant a recommendation either. They are based on cinematic quality ONLY). As I mentioned previously, this film is NOT for children, teens or Christians in general. You are better off reading a history book on this matter instead.

• Nudity: Extreme
• Sex: Very Heavy
• Vulgar/Crude language: Very Heavy
• Profane language: Moderately Heavy
• Violence: Moderate
• Drugs/Alcohol: Moderate
• Wokeism: Mild
• Occult: None

See list of Relevant Issues—questions-and-answers .

PLEASE share your observations and insights to be posted here.

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Catholic Review

Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore

Movie Review: ‘Oppenheimer’

NEW YORK (OSV News) – If writer-director Christopher Nolan’s impressive but uneven portrait “Oppenheimer” (Universal) is anything to go by, famed theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was a highly complex man. As portrayed by Cillian Murphy in a layered performance, he was at once charismatic yet naïve, by turns a champion and victim of his times.

Just as its protagonist had his highs and lows, so Nolan’s three hour-long film has its strong passages and weaker chapters. The depiction of Oppenheimer’s collaboration with the U.S. Army’s hard-driving Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) in the race to develop the atomic bomb during World War II, for instance, is compelling.

So too is the recounting of his far more complicated relationship with former patron-turned-critic Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). A wealthy businessman who reached the rank of admiral during his time in the Navy, in the late 1940s Strauss served on the newly established Atomic Energy Commission alongside Oppenheimer — and the two came into conflict.

Strauss’ eventual opposition to him contributed to the travails the left-leaning Oppenheimer faced once anti-Communist sentiment became prevalent during the early stages of the Cold War. These troubles culminated in a hearing to see whether Oppenheimer’s temporarily suspended security clearance should be permanently revoked.

Less intriguing than the sequences devoted to these subjects are those detailing Oppenheimer’s early career and his murky personal life. Though in some respects devoted to his feisty, bibulous wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), a biologist, Oppenheimer doesn’t hesitate to comfort his troubled psychiatrist ex-girlfriend, Jean (Florence Pugh), by carrying on an affair with her.

Needlessly frank scenes of their erotic interaction, both before and after Oppenheimer’s marriage, not only prevent endorsement of this biography for youngsters but constitute material that even some mature viewers may wish to avoid. That’s a shame because, as an absorbing historical retrospective, the movie might have had considerable educational value.

If its treatment of bedroom behavior is questionable, “Oppenheimer” is on firmer ground in its balanced approach to the morality of war. Enigmatic and noncommittal, its namesake wavers between rejoicing over Japan’s belated surrender and meditating on the horrors required to bring it about.

It may never be definitively established how many soldiers and civilians would have died in an American invasion of the Japanese homeland. But it is safe to say that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people alive today would never have been born had their forebears fallen in that struggle.

As one of the figures primarily responsible for averting such a catastrophe – at however great a price – Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, aged 62, has left a weighty legacy. While this extensive profile of him may have its flaws, it’s an immersive and thought-provoking experience that touches on both the best and worst in human nature.

The film contains strong sexual content, including graphic activity and recurring upper female nudity, an adultery theme, brief gruesome sights, about a half-dozen profanities, a couple of milder oaths, several rough terms and occasional crude and crass language. The OSV News classification is A-III – adults. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

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Oppenheimer, common sense media reviewers.

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

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

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…

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

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (67)
• Kids say (85)

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 : March 11, 2024

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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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• DVD & Streaming

Oppenheimer

• Biography/History , Drama

Content Caution

In Theaters

• July 13, 2023
• Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer; Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer; Matt Damon as Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves; Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss; Macon Blair as Lloyd Garrison; Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence; Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock; Jefferson Hall as Haakon Chevalier; Josh Zuckerman as Rossi Lomanitz; David Krumholtz as Isidor Rabi; Guy Burnet as George Eltenton; Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr; James D’Arcy as Patrick Blackett; Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer; Tom Conti as Albert Einstein; David Dastmalchian as William Borden; Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols; Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs; Benny Safdie as Edward Teller; Casey Affleck as Boris Pash; Gary Oldman as Harry Truman

Home Release Date

• November 21, 2023
• Christopher Nolan

Distributor

• Universal Pictures

Movie Review

“Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown,”Jesus said in Luke 4:24

That can certainly be said of J. Robert Oppenheimer, too. The theoretical physicist is called a prophet among physicists in the field. But despite his advancements in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, very few people in America seem to like him.

In fact, when Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves comes to Oppenheimer’s classroom, looking to recruit him for a secret experiment called the Manhattan Project, Groves tells him as much: People around him see Oppenheimer as a “dilettante, womanizer, suspected communist.”

“Oppenheimer couldn’t run a hamburger stand,” Grove quotes.

Oppenheimer smirks. “I couldn’t,” he admits. “But I can run the Manhattan Project.”

From a technical standpoint, Oppenheimer’s selection as the director of the Project was an obvious choice. His awards and accolades made him the perfect man for the job.

But from a political standpoint, Oppenheimer garners a lot of suspicion.

That’s because while Oppenheimer might never say that he’s a Communist sympathizer, he’s sure got a lot of friends and family who are. And sure , maybe the Russians are technically fighting on the same side of World War II as the Americans, but that doesn’t mean the two superpowers truly see each other as allies.

So when someone leaks information to the communist-dominated country, it’s not long until the finger points at Oppenheimer. And that’s only the tip on an iceberg of evidence against the man.

And those accusations about his character and conduct will threaten to sink the father of the atomic bomb professionally in the years to come.

Positive Elements

The dropping of an atomic bomb is not an easy topic. Characters debate the morality of such an action. Someone warns that the creation of the atomic bomb will result in the deaths of many innocent people. “You drop a bomb,” he says, “and it falls on the just and the unjust.”

In one scene, officials argue about whether the bomb would result in fewer deaths on both sides of the conflict than a ground invasion of Japan. And so those involved continue to press forward with their grim “gadget” because they believe an invasion would be deadlier for all.

Characters furthermore debate the morality of creating a bomb itself. Some feel that such a weapon will force countries to get along, since people will finally realize that a future war could now end the human race with a single button push. And when physicists theorize that the bomb could ignite the world’s atmosphere in a chain reaction, some push to share the findings with Russia and the Nazis in order to warn them about that potentially world-ending consequence.

Though the film’s depiction of Oppenheimer tends to sit more towards the middle of the political spectrum, unwilling to fully commit one way or another, such a mentality makes him a prime suspect during the Red Scare. Indeed, many of Oppenheimer’s family members and friends sympathized with the Communist party, and the government fears that Oppenheimer might leak information to the Russians. But when Oppenheimer comes under fire for his alleged beliefs, many people, including those who disagree with him, stick up for him, expressing that they believe he’s loyal to the country.

Early in the movie, Oppenheimer and many of the scientists he recruits to his team seem particularly motivated by the plight of the Jews in Germany. Oppenheimer himself is Jewish, though not particularly devout. But he and many of his peers are primarily motivated not just by the desire to beat Germany in the production of the atomic bomb, but to save Jews and to keep Hitler from potentially using the invention upon them should his scientists succeed first (which they don’t).

Not all of those German scientists, we learn, want to serve Hitler’s research, and at least one of them is liberated from Nazi-held territory and then encourages Oppenheimer’s team.

Spiritual Elements

Oppenheimer is compared to an Old Testament prophet by another Jewish man, and the man warns Oppenheimer that such a title means he can’t be wrong—not once. He’s also compared to Prometheus, a Greek deity who stole fire from the gods to give it to humanity.

Oppenheimer also has a few visions or hallucinations. While some of these visions are depicted as something like traumatic moments of PTSD for the physicist, others show Oppenheimer seemingly looking into the cosmos to divine deeper meaning.

We additionally hear some other brief mentions of spirituality. Oppenheimer’s famous quote, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” comes from the Hindu sacred writing the Bhagavad Gita and is spoken there by the Hindu god Vishnu.

A passing comment references Albert Einstein’s objection to quantum physics: “God does not play dice.” A man is described as the “son of a Russian Orthodox priest.” When thinking about the code name for the nuclear test, Oppenheimer offers “Trinity,” referencing a poem by John Donne. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” Oppenheimer recites.

After Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, learns of one of her husband’s affair, she tells him that he doesn’t “get to commit a sin and have us all feel sorry” for him. A thermonuclear reaction is described as “a terrible revelation of divine power.”

Sexual Content

Oppenheimer is described as a “womanizer,” and we endure some scenes of his escapades. In several scenes, Oppenheimer has sex with a woman. They’re both naked, and her breasts are visible, as are sexual movements. There’s also post-coital conversation afterward in which the woman’s breasts are again visible.

In one case, when a board questions Oppenheimer’s visits to a woman who was a known member of the Communist party, he suddenly appears naked in the room as the woman has sex with him there in front of everyone. The scene is meant to artistically symbolize how Kitty feels betrayed while she listens to Oppenheimer discuss the moment.

And on the subject of Kitty, the two initially meet at a party, and Oppenheimer continues to flirt with her despite discovering that she’s already married. The two engage in an affair (something we’ll hear is a relatively common thing for Oppenheimer). Kitty soon reveals that she’s pregnant, and she resolves to divorce her husband and marry Oppenheimer before the pregnancy begins to show. And even after Oppenheimer marries Kitty, we see him have an affair with another woman, and we hear of another that is spoken about during the testimony against him.

Someone crudely and sarcastically references doing violence to a man’s male anatomy. When a male scientist argues with a female scientist regarding how radiation exposure might affect her reproductive system, she quips, “Your reproductive system is more exposed than mine.” Two people kiss in celebration of the bomb’s success. Oppenheimer and Kitty kiss as well.

Violent Content

As Oppenheimer and his team cheerfully celebrate the successful dropping of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer has a disturbing vision of sorts in which he imagines the people in the audience suffering the effects of the bomb: One woman’s skin begins peeling from her face, and Oppenheimer accidentally steps into the chest cavity of a charred corpse. We later hear reports of the bomb’s gruesome effect on the Japanese people. We’re also told of a firebombing which killed an estimated 100,000 people, “mostly civilians.”

The number of casualties ultimately reported by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are perhaps bigger than what had been estimated, and we have the sense that at least some of the Manhattan Project team members are struggling to come to grips with the violence that they they’ve unleashed.

When Oppenheimer tries to articulate a sense of responsibility for those deaths in a conversation with President Harry Truman, Truman himself chides the scientists and says that he was the one who’ll be remembered as responsible for those casualties, not Oppenheimer.

A woman is briefly seen dead, her head submerged in a bathtub. She’s overdosed on pills and committed suicide by drowning herself. A man suggests torturing someone to death. Oppenheimer injects someone’s apple with potassium cyanide, but he intercepts it before a victim could eat it.

And, of course, we watch the test of the bomb go off.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word is used eight times, and the s-word is heard four times. We also hear the occasional uses of “a–,” “d–n,” “h—” and “crap.” God’s name is used in vain six times, three of which take the form of “g-dd–n.” Jesus’ name is abused three times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

People drink an assortment of alcoholic beverages. Oppenheimer smokes cigarettes almost continually, and there’s smoking by him and others throughout the movie. Someone notes that the bar at Los Alamos is “always running.”

Other Negative Elements

A man vomits. In a couple of scenes, Kitty and Oppenheimer neglect their children, who always seem to be crying. Both would say that they’re lousy parents; in fact, they ask a set of friends to care for their firstborn for several months so that Oppenheimer can focus exclusively on the Manhattan Project.

Robert Oppenheimer is a theoretical physicist. But, he admits, the problem with theory is that, until it’s tested, that’s all it’ll be.

The problem with actually testing an atomic weapon is that it risks the end of the world. Physicist Edward Teller suggested that such a weapon could (once again, in theory) cause a chain reaction that might destroy the world. His concern was that the bomb could produce temperatures so hot that it would cause the world’s hydrogen to fuse together into helium in an explosive way—similar to how our sun creates energy. This chain reaction would quickly envelop the whole world and end life as we know it.

Of course, we’re still here. Obviously, that theory didn’t immediately bear fruit. But Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan suggests that when the first atomic bomb exploded, it did ignite a chain reaction—but not the one Teller theorized. The movie grimly suggests that nuclear annihilation is still a possible outcome, and perhaps even an inescapable one. It just hasn’t come to pass … yet.

That chain reaction is illustrated by some early scenes that show Oppenheimer averting a tragic outcome at the last possible moment. In a moment of wrath, Oppenheimer poisons his professor’s apple, only snatching it away once he realizes what he’s done.

But Oppenheimer cannot snatch away the atomic bomb. Because, as one character explains, the bomb “isn’t a new weapon. It’s a new world.”

Oppenheimer paints a bleak picture of the future of humanity. But let’s be clear: A bleak worldview isn’t why Nolan’s latest drama has an R-rating. That’s where the content comes in.

For a film set primarily during World War II, the violence of the bomb is only hauntingly hinted at here. Jean Tatlock’s suicide by drowning should also be noted.

But Oppenheimer ’s biggest content issues arise from its sexual content and crude language, the latter of which is due to the film’s many uses of the f-word. A couple of scenes contain explicit sex and nudity—most prominently when Oppenheimer has a nude conversation with his ex-lover, the camera showing off the woman’s breasts and barely hiding the two’s lower bits.

That’s not to say that Oppenheimer doesn’t provide some interesting and important perspective into a monumentous moment in American history. It definitely does. But prospective viewers will need to prepare themselves for a film that, while not world-ending, certainly leans into content that easily could have been suggested far less graphically.

Kennedy Unthank

Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”

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OPPENHEIMER

"overwrought historical warnings".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality:   Villain is vindictive and manipulative.    

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 OPPENHEIMER tells the story of Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led America’s atomic bomb program during World War II in the 1940s, from his early scientific career to the development of the bomb that end ed the war with Japan, to the closed-door Congressional hearings in 1954 that stripped him of his security clearance in 1955 because he lied about some of his personal ties to communists. Though very well acted for the most part, OPPENHEIMER is overwrought in places, is sometimes confusing and strangely anti-climactic because Director Christopher Nolan tells the story in a nonlinear fashion, and has a strong Non-Christian, secular humanist worldview with excessive strong foul language, two sex scenes with explicit nudity and some unjust depictions of anti-communists who didn’t agree with Oppenheimer about military policy.  

The plot to OPPENHEIMER is divided into two main sections, with scenes from his private life. The two sections are intertwined throughout the movie, which leads to some confusion, even though one of the sections is shot in black and white.   

The first section, shot in color, involves the development of the atomic bomb and its aftermath, including Robert Oppenheimer’s early career where he became interested in nuclear physics. The movie goes on from there to show how Oppenheimer became more and more prominent in America. Robert had gone to Europe to learn from some of the great scientific geniuses in nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. He returns to America to bring the new theories about quantum mechanics to the United States. Along the way, however, he has an affair with another man’s wife and, later, resumes the affair, even though he has gotten married, and his wife has a baby boy.  

While working at Berkeley University in California in the late 1930s, Robert started dabbling in leftwing politics, including a union movement at the college that included overt communists. The young founder and head of a laboratory warns Oppenheimer about the union meetings, but Robert didn’t break off his other leftwing, communist ties. His own brother, Frank, was a member of the Communist Party. Like many at that time, Robert gave money to support the resistance to the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.   

Eventually, when America joins World War II after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Oppenheimer starts working with other scientists on how to construct a working atomic bomb. Then, in October 1942, Brigadier General Leslie Graves asks Robert to manage the Manhattan Project, the actual name for America’s program to develop the bomb. Robert convinces Graves to establish a team of top scientists and their families at Los Alamos, New Mexico, near a ranch Robert and his brother had leased and purchased in the late 1920s when Robert came down with a mild case of tuberculosis.  

This starts what is definitely the movie’s best part, which follows the progress of the development of the atomic bomb, the detonation of a test bomb and the decision by President Truman to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki with it. Robert becomes conflicted, however, about his part in developing the bomb and clashes with the brilliant Los Alamos scientist Edward Teller, a strong anti-communist from Hungary, who wants to develop a thermonuclear weapon called “The Super” or “The Hydrogen Bomb.” The American government becomes anxious to develop this bomb when the news breaks that the Soviet Union, led by the ruthless communist dictator Joseph Stalin, has just developed its own atomic bomb.  

The movie’s second part is shot in black and white. It mostly concerns a lengthy, closed door Congressional hearings in 1954 over whether Robert should retain his security clearance with the Atomic Energy Commission. The movie depicts the hearings as unfair and led by deceitful, unjust and even vindictive men who are strong anti-communists. Later, the scenes show the vindictive man who manipulated and engineered the month-long 1954 hearings getting his comeuppance in 1959 when the United States Senate votes to deny him a major cabinet post with President Eisenhower’s administration. Viewers are supposed to cheer when the movie informs them that John F. Kennedy was one of the Senators who voted no. Scenes from this second part are depicted throughout the rest of the movie, which begins in 1925.  

For the most part, acclaimed director Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER is very well acted. However, several scenes are annoyingly overwrought, especially a scene where the prosecutor starts angrily yelling questions at Oppenheimer, who starts to have an emotional breakdown. Also, the movie’s concluding, emotional images warning that nuclear weapons can destroy the Earth is also overwrought. Tell us something we didn’t know, Christopher.  

The movie is also sometimes a bit confusing. Much of that is due to the nonlinear way in which the movie’s story is revealed. Early, for instance, the movie introduces important people without letting viewers know who, exactly, these people are. Then, zip, the movie’s off to another time and place with some more new people.  

The movie’s most successful, most fascinating section is the one in Los Alamos leading up to the successful explosion of the test atomic bomb and its immediate aftermath. It makes one wish Christopher Nolan had just told his story in sequence, without all the flashbacks and flash forwards.  

Ultimately, OPPENHEIMER is making two points. First, it’s giving viewers a scary secular warning about the power of nuclear weapons to destroy the Earth in a fiery conflagration. Second, it’s giving viewers a warning about the dangers of the misuse of government power.  

The second point is sadly couched in the context of a politically correct attack against anti-communism. As a result, the anti-communist villains in the movie, scientist Edward Teller, the prosecutor and especially Oppenheimer’s Machiavellian nemesis come across as jerks. As a result, the movie’s anti anti-communism comes off as too pat, a contradictory ham-fisted setup. Earlier in the movie, it’s okay for Oppenheimer and everybody to hate Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, but, when the late 1940s roll around, it’s really bad to be so concerned about communist tyrant Joseph Stalin getting his grubby hands on nuclear weapons. Suddenly, mass destruction isn’t so popular, and leftists like Robert Oppenheimer grow a conscience. It’s especially annoying that the vindictiveness of Oppenheimer’s anti-communist nemesis is condemned, but the vindictiveness of Oppenheimer’s wife against Teller is lauded.  

The first point, about the power of nuclear weapons, comes across as silly utopian fear mongering. Such fear mongering didn’t work in the 1970s and 1980s. And, 60 years after Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece, DR. STRANGELOVE, which is titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” it seems terribly outdated and cliched.  

OPPENHEIMER also contains excessive foul language, including at least 10 “f” words and five strong profanities. It also has two lewd sex scenes with explicit nudity. Both kinds of content are a sure way to limit the potential audience for the movie. Don’t the filmmakers, producers and distributors want their movie to be seen by older children and teenagers? Guess not.  

In reality, more and more evidence of Robert Oppenheimer’s connections to communist agitators has been revealed. In fact, it now seems certain that Oppenheimer, though he didn’t actually spy for the Soviet Union, was part of a “closed unit” of the Communist Party’s professional section in Berkeley from 1937 to 1942. As we now know, the Communist Party in the United States got its marching orders directly from Moscow in the Soviet Union.  

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Critic’s Pick

‘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.

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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For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film's most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face. 

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) is a film about faces. They talk, a lot. They listen. They react to good and bad news. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads—none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan's primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico's desert panoramas but contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. Close-up after close-up shows star Cillian Murphy's face staring into the middle distance, off-screen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, and waking nightmares. "Oppenheimer" rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others. 

Sometimes the close-ups of people's faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven't happened, or already happened. There are recurring images of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don't just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer's team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer's life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The "fissile" cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer's career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact). 

The weight of the film's interests and meanings are carried by faces—not just Oppenheimer's, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon ), Los Alamos' military supervisor; Robert's suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer ( Emily Blunt ), whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey , Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer's post-Los Alamos career. The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer's Mozart, regularly and often pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, back in the day, and that he's a good person, unlike Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This film asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a third party who then wrote to the bureau's director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The film speaks quite often of one of the principles of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the results of this experiment. The editing illustrates it by constantly re-framing our perception of an event to change its meaning, and the script does it by adding new information that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a character did something, or whether they even knew why they did it. 

That, I believe, is really what "Oppenheimer" is about, much more so than the atom bomb itself, or even its impact on the war and the Japanese civilian population, which is talked about but never shown. The film does show what the atom bomb does to human flesh, but it's not recreations of the actual attacks on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines Americans going through it. This filmmaking decision is likely to antagonize both viewers who wanted a more direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those who have bought into the arguments advanced by Strauss and others that the bombs had to be dropped because Japan never would have surrendered otherwise. The movie doesn't indicate whether it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides more with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that point in World War II and would have eventually given up without atomic attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No, this is a film that permits itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we expect it to do: Dramatize the life of Oppenheimer and other historically significant people in his orbit in an aesthetically daring way while also letting all of the characters and all of the events be used metaphorically and symbolically as well, so that they become pointillistic elements in a much larger canvas that's about the mysteries of the human personality and the unforeseen impact of decisions made by individuals and societies.

This is another striking thing about "Oppenheimer." It's not entirely about Oppenheimer even though Murphy's baleful face and haunting yet opaque eyes dominate the movie. It's also about the effect of Oppenheimer's personality and decisions on other people, from the other strong-willed members of his atom bomb development team (including Benny Safdie's Edwin Teller, who wanted to skip ahead to create the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, and eventually did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer's mistress Jean Tatlock ( Florence Pugh , who has some of Gloria Grahame's self-immolating smolder); General Groves, who likes Oppenheimer in spite of his arrogance but isn't going to side with him over the United States government; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (played in a marvelous cameo by Gary Oldman ) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic "crybaby" who sees history mainly in terms of his own feelings.

Jennifer Lame's editing is prismatic and relentless, often in a faintly Terrence Malick -y way, skipping between three or more time periods within seconds. It's wedded to virtually nonstop music by  Ludwig Göransson  that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd but distinctive sort of scientifically expository aria that's probably what it would feel like to read American Prometheus  while listening to a playlist of  Philip Glass film scores. Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do, and they also capture what it's like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling). It also paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually. The mind stays anchored to the text. But it also jumps outside of it, connecting the text to other texts, to external knowledge, and to one's own experience and imaginings.

This review hasn't delved into the plot of the film or the real-world history that inspired it, not because it isn't important (of course it is) but because—as is always the case with Nolan—the main attraction is not the tale but the telling. Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stories. But whether that characterization was true (and I'm increasingly convinced it never entirely was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it's been applied to a biography of a real person. "Oppenheimer" could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director's filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he'd been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward.

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 man reading the list says that he just made an executive decision to delete Kyoto from it because he and his wife honeymooned there. (The Kubrick connection is cemented further by the presence of "Full Metal Jacket" star  Matthew Modine , who co-stars as American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush.) It’s an example of top-of-the-line, studio-produced popular art with a dash of swagger, variously evoking Michael Mann's " The Insider ," late-period Terrence Malick, nonlinearly-edited art cinema touchstones like "Hiroshima Mon Amour," "The Pawnbroker," "All That Jazz" and " Picnic at Hanging Rock "; and, inevitably, " Citizen Kane " (there's even a Rosebud-like mystery surrounding what Oppenheimer and his hero Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti , talked about on the banks of a Princeton pond). 

Most of the performances have a bit of an "old movie" feeling, with the actors snapping off their lines and not moving their faces as much as they would in a more modern story. A lot of the dialogue is delivered quickly, producing a screwball comedy energy. This comes through most strongly in the arguments between Robert and Kitty about his sexual indiscretions and refusal to listen to her mostly superb advice; the more abstract debates about power and responsibility between Robert and General Groves, and the scenes between Strauss and a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) who is advising him as he testifies before a committee that he hopes will approve him to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet.

But as a physical experience, "Oppenheimer" is something else entirely—it's hard to say exactly what, and that's what's so fascinating about it. I've already heard complaints that the movie is "too long," that it could've ended with the first bomb detonating, and could've done without the bits about Oppenheimer's sex life and the enmity of Strauss, and that it's perversely self-defeating to devote so much of the running time, including the most of the third hour, to a pair of governmental hearings: the one where Oppenheimer tries to get his security clearance renewed, and Strauss trying to get approved for Eisenhower's cabinet. But the film's furiously entropic tendencies complement the theoretical discussions of the how's and why's of the individual and collective personality. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are appearing before a tribunal and bring called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The tribunal is out there in the dark. We've been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Oppenheimer (2023)

Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language.

181 minutes

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt as Katherine 'Kitty' Oppenheimer

Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock

Benny Safdie as Edward Teller

Michael Angarano as Robert Serber

Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence

Rami Malek as David Hill

Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr

Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols

Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer

David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi

Alden Ehrenreich as Senate Aide

Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush

Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman

Alex Wolff as Luis Walter Alvarez

Casey Affleck as Boris Pash

Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman

Emma Dumont as Jackie Oppenheimer

Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg

David Dastmalchian as William L. Borden

Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs

Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge

Tony Goldwyn as Gordon Gray

Olivia Thirlby as Lilli Hornig

James Remar as Henry Stimson

• Christopher Nolan

Writer (based on the book by)

• Martin Sherwin

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Jennifer Lame
• Ludwig Göransson

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Film Review: Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' is the bomb

“Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.” An opening quote that haunting deserves an Oscar nomination in its own right. What follows after is quite possibly the number one candidate for the best film of 2023. 

For a film that is three hours long, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” feels like it could go on for ten hours and the audience will still not leave the edge of their seats. “Oppenheimer” is a masterfully crafted film that showcases the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in developing the atomic bomb. 

The man who plays the titular character is Cillian Murphy, and he gives a career-best playing Oppenheimer. No other actor in Hollywood right now could pull off what Murphy does with this role. For all three hours of runtime, the audience is never bored or impatient with the character of Oppenheimer. Murphy is undoubtedly a contender for the “Best Actor” category of the 2024 Academy Awards.  

Through Murphy’s superb acting and Nolan’s exquisite writing, Oppenheimer is depicted as a more complex protagonist than what other filmmakers would portray him as. He is neither a martyred saint nor a completely evil scientist looking to destroy the world. Oppenheimer is/was simply a flawed man who realized the horror he had created when he constructed the atomic bomb. 

There are a handful of scenes in the film where the audience sees Oppenheimer’s internal thoughts as realistic terrifying nightmares. This includes Oppenheimer stepping into a burnt corpse, a woman crying in grief, and the skin of a girl’s face beginning to peel off as the heat of the bomb gets closer and closer. 

The best part about an example of a scene like this is that there is zero music which amplifies the intensity of Oppenheimer’s anxiety in the given situation. This goes to show just how powerful a filmmaker like Christopher Nolan can be. Speaking of music, if there was any criticism I could find of the film it would be the overabundance of the score composed by Ludwig Goransson. 

Now don’t get me wrong, the soundtrack for this film is outstanding and is utilized extremely well in the final third act — it’s just that there are a lot of scenes in the first act of the film where the score seems inappropriate. 

There are scenes where Oppenheimer would be talking to other people or just one person and the music would be played up just a little too much. Thankfully this doesn’t ruin the film and maybe my opinion will change on another viewing. 

One thing that absolutely needs to be addressed is the cast for this film. Oh my goodness, the cast for this film is magnificent. Just for the main characters, we have Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh and Jason Clarke. 

Supporting actors include Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Tom Conti, David Dastmalchian, Dane DeHaan, Tony Goldwyn, Matthew Modine, Alex Wolff, Josh Peck (yes, that Josh Peck from “Drake and Josh”), Jack Quaid, Devon Bostick, Alden Ehrenreich and last, but certainly not least, Gary Oldman as President Harry S. Truman.  

Out of all the actors and actresses listed above, my personal favorite besides Murphy as Oppenheimer would be Gary Oldman as President Harry Truman. Oldman only has one scene in the film and he nails it as President Truman. Oldman is the definition of a class-act performer with the amount of passion he puts into a character that has less than ten minutes of screen time. It was a nice choice to bring back Oldman who hasn’t been in one of Nolan’s films since “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012) as Commissioner James Gordon. 

One of Nolan’s finest moments of filmmaking is the scene of the Trinity test of the bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This entire sequence is riveting from beginning to end and leaves the audience having the same reaction as the characters do on the screen: awe and wonder. The incorporation of Goransson’s score is at its best here from the slow build-up of preparing to drop the bomb until the bomb eventually drops. Man, this Christopher Nolan guy sure knows how to make movies, doesn’t he? 

One angle that was interesting for the film to explore was showing Oppenheimer’s life after the bomb was created and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see that many of Oppenheimer’s colleagues in the past eventually turned on him which led to Oppenheimer’s security clearance being revoked. 

We are also introduced to Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.), a chairman of the AEC, who resented Oppenheimer for many reasons. 

The reasons include Oppenheimer allegedly turning Albert Einstein against Strauss, Oppenheimer’s ties to the Communist Party, Oppenheimer dismissing Strauss’s concerns in regards to the export of radioisotopes and recommending arms talks with the Soviet Union. 

Strauss gets his comeuppance when his personal motives to destroy Oppenheimer’s reputation are revealed by David Hill (played by Rami Malek) in a testimony. The Senate then voted against Strauss’s nomination for Secretary of Commerce, leaving him to go back and be a traveling shoe salesman. 

It’s been a while since we’ve seen an awesome actor like Robert Downey Jr. be in a movie where he isn’t suiting up in an Iron Man suit and fighting world-ending threats like Thanos or Ultron. It’s refreshing that his acting talents are being used elsewhere in films like “Oppenheimer.” Good work, Mr. Downey Jr. 

Similar to Memento (2000), another one of Nolan’s masterpieces, “Oppenheimer” is told in a nonlinear way. In the first act of the film, Oppenheimer has a conversation with Albert Einstein near a pond. It is revealed at the end of the movie that the two discussed the use of nuclear weapons and how Oppenheimer believes he started a chain reaction that will ultimately destroy planet Earth. 

A scene between two legendary and award-winning scientists about how their creations can potentially lead to the entire world’s doom is chilling and leaves the audience feeling a little uneasy in their seats. What an incredible way to end an already incredible film. 

“Oppenheimer” is another home run for Christopher Nolan. It covers so much ground and history without being bombarded with too many characters and/or unnecessary scenes. Please go watch it if you can in a movie theater near you. Now, the real question is whether it’s better or worse than Greta Gerwig’s "Barbie."

Rating: 4.5/5 

@judethedudehannahs 

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Oppenheimer review: Christopher Nolan's powerful, timely masterpiece deserves the biggest screens

Surrounded by a deep cast of passionate actors, Cillian Murphy gives an astounding performance as the "father of the atomic bomb."

Christian Holub is a writer covering comics and other geeky pop culture. He's still mad about 'Firefly' getting canceled.

Like the brilliant scientist it takes as its subject, Oppenheimer arrives at a crucial moment in history. At a time when almost every big-budget Hollywood movie (including its opening weekend rival, Barbie ) is drawn from corporate intellectual property, Oppenheimer is an unapologetically brainy movie with great actors playing real people, a true story with important details many viewers will be learning for the first time, and which, despite its roots in reality, feels massive and worthy of director Christopher Nolan 's beloved IMAX screen.

As the title makes clear, this movie is about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb." For most of the three-hour runtime, Nolan places the viewer inside Oppenheimer's prodigious brain. We see the world as this theoretical physicist did, meaning the action is often interrupted by incredible visions of subatomic particles and cosmic fire. Yet Oppenheimer also has aspects of a memory play, or at least an exhaustive biography cut up and shuffled around. Even more than Nolan's previous film, Tenet , Oppenheimer flits about in time, effortlessly moving in and out of different events that took place across several decades, drawing connections that are logical but far from linear.

Embodying the man at the center of this universe, the constant in this shifting sea of science and history, is therefore no easy task — but Cillian Murphy rises to the challenge with an absolutely absorbing performance. Murphy has been working with Nolan for years, often in key supporting roles such as the villainous Scarecrow in Batman Begins and the primary target of Inception 's dream heist. But the actor has proved his leading-man bona fides elsewhere (most recently in the long-running Netflix crime series Peaky Blinders ) and finally brings that side of his skillset home to Nolan. No question, the close-ups on Murphy's face as Oppenheimer thinks through the 20th century's thorniest problems are as compelling as the film's atomic explosions, and as deserving of the biggest screen possible.

But just as Oppenheimer, for all his world-historical genius, could only accomplish his great feat because he was surrounded by many other brilliant thinkers, so is Murphy supported by a galaxy of top-notch actors. Matt Damon brings his movie-star charisma to General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project whose gruff charms obscures his ulterior motives.

Robert Downey Jr . plays Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer's rival for control over postwar nuclear policy, and uses his own considerable acting powers to carve out a sizable portion of the film for himself. Strauss' strategy meetings amidst contentious 1959 Senate hearings over his cabinet nomination are the only scenes not set from Oppenheimer's direct perspective, signified both by their black-and-white color grading and Downey's domination of the screen. Downey was one of the most popular and influential American movie stars of the 2010s, but through some mixture of pandemic-era delays and post-Marvel malaise, it's been years since we've seen him in top form. Watching Downey give such a meaty big-screen performance again is not an opportunity to be squandered — especially considering the meta resonance of Downey and Nolan, who each played foundational roles in the rise of the modern superhero blockbuster, collaborating on a film about an inventor feeling ambivalent about his great creation.

Other standouts from Oppenheimer 's deep bench include David Krumholtz, following up his recent heartbreaking Broadway performance in Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt with a key turn here as physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi. Krumholtz brings an important sense of Jewish experience to a movie whose protagonist (a Jewish person, played by an Irish actor) is constantly talking about the need to build the atomic bomb before the Nazis do. Rabi is more skeptical: "I don't want decades of physics to culminate in a bomb."

Another Jewish critic of the supposedly anti-Nazi atomic bomb is Albert Einstein, whom Tom Conti plays with the levity of an old legend who has seen the world transformed by his greatest accomplishment (the theory of relativity) in a way he does not care for. By the time the film ends, Oppenheimer will understand how he feels. After all, the atomic bomb was ultimately not used to defeat the Nazis, but to incinerate Japanese civilians.

The Manhattan Project was mostly a boys' club, as many of Nolan's past movies have been. Of all the criticisms the highly-successful director has attracted throughout his career, the stickiest is that his female characters are often "dead wives," whose ghostly after-images serve merely as motivation for the male protagonists. But Emily Blunt 's Kitty Oppenheimer is defiantly alive, in spite of the worldwide crises of the '30s and '40s. Far from the archetype of a "devoted wife," Kitty is not shy about expressing her frustrations with motherhood or her dissatisfaction with politics. Blunt is a great partner for Murphy in their scenes together: bringing him down to Earth when he's off in the clouds, reminding him to fight when he seems content to let history wash over him.

The other primary female character in the film, Jean Tatlock, is played by Florence Pugh . The rising star feels a bit out of place standing alongside her older and more experienced costars, but Pugh brings Oppenheimer a heaping helping of sex and politics — two sides of life that have often been missing from Nolan's earlier films. Tatlock was a committed communist, and attended several party meetings alongside Oppenheimer (who was disturbed by the rise of genocidal Nazism and wanted to support the anti-fascist Republicans in the Spanish Civil War).

The film's attention to political history contributes to its sense of timeliness. Here is a summer blockbuster whose characters vigorously discuss the importance of labor unions and anti-fascist organizing, arriving just as Hollywood's real-life unions are walking picket lines. (The stars even left the film's glitzy premiere as soon as the SAG-AFTRA strike began .) Though viewers might expect Oppenheimer to climax with the Trinity Test at Los Alamos (which is indeed spectacular ), the film spends a final hour exploring the 1954 closed-door hearing where Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked for his ties to communists. Standing in for the McCarthyite era at large, these scenes demonstrate how despite the Allied victory over the fascists, the use of Oppenheimer's atomic bomb empowered reactionaries at home to betray the very people who made their victory possible.

Content meets form here. Oppenheimer is full of heady topics like quantum mechanics and political history, which few viewers will consider themselves experts on. But the film explains these ideas in ways more creative than the exposition dumps of Inception or the just-roll-with-it chaos of Tenet . When Oppenheimer first meets Kitty, she asks him to explain quantum physics. He does so by saying that everything in existence is composed of individual atoms, strung together by forces that make matter seem solid to our eyes, even though it's essentially not. In their next scene, Kitty explains how her second husband was a union organizer who died fighting fascists in Spain. Her life, which seemed solid, was completely undone by a single tiny bullet. Oppenheimer gets to experience this firsthand in 1954, when people who he thought of as allies and friends betray him for their own personal gain.

The study of physics is bifurcated into two disciplines: theory (Oppenheimer's specialty) and practice (embodied by Josh Hartnett 's Ernest Lawrence). Communism, too, is often divided into theory and practice. Though they may seem disparate, the many elements of Oppenheimer refract and reflect each other, like a bunch of atoms creating a chain reaction or a group of scientists building off each other's ideas to forge something new. Grade: A

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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.

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
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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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Christopher Nolan

Cillian Murphy

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt

Kitty Oppenheimer

Robert Downey Jr.

Lewis Strauss

Leslie Groves Jr.

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‘oppenheimer’ review: christopher nolan’s epic is a scorching depiction of america’s ability to create and destroy its heroes.

Cillian Murphy stars as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” in a stacked ensemble that includes Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr. and Florence Pugh.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Taylor swift reacts to ryan gosling and emily blunt's cover of "all too well" on 'snl', ryan gosling makes emily blunt (jokingly) angry for singing about ken again during 'snl' monologue, oppenheimer.

It can feel like a talky thicket of scenes in which men in midcentury business attire stand around in offices and labs having animated discussions about quantum mechanics, which at times lack the elucidation to afford non-physicists much access. It’s a relief when, about an hour in, one of the ever-expanding lineup of theoreticians plops marbles into glass containers to demonstrate the difference between uranium and plutonium as fusion bomb components.

But there’s a method to Nolan’s approach, which becomes increasingly apparent as the two separate Washington hearings laced throughout the narrative intersect in the foreground and occupy the riveting final hour. And the emotionally affecting decision to close with an earlier private conversation between Cillian Murphy ’s J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) elegantly brings it all back to the personal views of two men looking at their branch of science from different perspectives.

Nolan expertly builds his dramatic crescendo by exposing the pain and humiliation of that hearing for Oppenheimer and his flinty wife, Kitty ( Emily Blunt ), and then reopening those wounds five years later, during the Eisenhower administration’s Senate confirmation hearings for the nomination of Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey Jr. ) as secretary of commerce.

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, whose political ambitions get tangled in his vindictiveness toward the arrogant Oppenheimer.

The actor makes him mild-mannered at first, playing up Strauss’ origins as a humble shoe salesman. The ruthlessness with which he pursues his goals is displayed only toward the end, when the stakes are at their highest, spilling out in a bitter torrent of rage. It’s a stunning moment of revelation and a reminder of skills that many of our best actors have put aside while they frolic around playing quippy superheroes for huge wads of cash.

As the central figure in this erudite saga of men and science, warfare and Washington opportunism, Murphy builds a fine-grained character portrait, making the soft-spoken Oppenheimer’s complexities no less evident for being a man of such outward restraint.

The actor’s piercing pale blue eyes are a window to the physicist’s lofty intellect, his dogged determination and, eventually, to his torment as he comes to acknowledge his naivety and face the ramifications of what he has set in motion. Rather than startle the world into playing nice, as he had ingenuously imagined, the Japanese bombings merely opened a door to the Cold War, and to the escalating threat of more powerful nuclear bombs — one that resonates louder than ever today.

Coverage of Oppenheimer’s early years feels somewhat cursory and his encounters with like-minded scientists initially tend to blur, though his studies at prestigious colleges in Europe — in addition to facilitating encounters with some of the field’s most influential figures — serve to show that his skills lay in theoretical physics, not lab work. But little by little, distinct personalities emerge.

Subtle notes of humor also come from the man that recruits Oppenheimer, Major Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon ), who oversees the secret research and development project and provides the liaison between the government and the scientists. A gruff career military man probably better suited to the battlefield than to War Department jobs, Groves has a stern manner but an underlying respect for Oppenheimer’s genius, a duality that Damon plays to moving effect in the 1954 hearing.

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 same hearing, disavowing her premarital affiliation to the American Communist Party without apologizing for it.

Kitty also shows her emotional resilience when confronted with her husband’s troubled romantic attachment to psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, a role brought to sensual but tortured life by Florence Pugh . Jean’s strong ties to Communism contribute to suspicions about Oppenheimer’s leftist leanings, as do those of his younger brother and fellow physicist, Frank (Dylan Arnold).

Aiding immeasurably in Nolan’s unfaltering control of tone and tension is Jennifer Lame’s nimble editing and especially Ludwig Göransson’s extraordinarily forceful, almost wall-to-wall score. The music combines with the bone-shaking sound design to give the movie a febrile energy that won’t quit, mirroring the nervous inner life of its title character.

The director deftly cranks up the suspense in the nail-biting countdown to the Trinity test, when even the sharpest minds haven’t ruled out the “near zero” chance of a chain reaction destroying the world; and even more so as each of the two hearings (shot in black and white) reaches its climax. The choice not to show the Japanese bombings, but to experience them exclusively via radio reports and through the jubilant reaction of the Los Alamos community — an entire township built expressly for the Manhattan Project — heightens the gut-punch impact, while images flashing through Oppenheimer’s mind only hint at the horror unleashed.

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 mindfuckery 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 .

This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios. It fully embraces the contradictions of an intellectual giant who was also a deeply flawed man, his legacy complicated by his own ambivalence toward the breakthrough achievement that secured his place in the history books.

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Oppenheimer

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

• Christopher Nolan
• Martin Sherwin
• Cillian Murphy
• Emily Blunt
• 4K User reviews
• 476 Critic reviews
• 90 Metascore
• 344 wins & 358 nominations total

• J. Robert Oppenheimer

• Kitty Oppenheimer

• Leslie Groves

• Lewis Strauss

• Senate Aide

• Thomas Morgan

• Gordon Gray

• Lloyd Garrison

• Patrick Blackett

• Senator McGee

• Chairman Magnuson

• Senator Bartlett

• Senator Pastore

• Senator Scott
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

What Is Christopher Nolan's Best Film?

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• Trivia In order for the black and white sections of the movie to be shot in the same quality as the rest of the film, Kodak produced a limited supply of its Double-X black and white film stock in 70mm. This film stock was chosen specifically for its heritage - it was originally sold to photographers as Super-XX during World War II and was very popular with photojournalists of the era.
• Goofs The stop signs are yellow in the film, which is accurate. The United States used yellow stop signs until 1954.

J. Robert Oppenheimer : Albert? When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world...

Albert Einstein : I remember it well. What of it?

J. Robert Oppenheimer : I believe we did.

• Alternate versions To get a U/A rating certification in India, the movie was edited to remove or censor all nudity using CGI. For example, the scene where Tatlock and Oppenheimer have a conversation and the former character was topless, the nudity was censored with a CGI black dress. Many Middle Eastern countries use this exact same censored version for release.
• Connections Featured in Louder with Crowder: Going Out with a Bang! (2022)

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• July 21, 2023 (United States)
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• Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA (only interiors, Los Alamos facilities interiors, including Oppenheimer's house, Fuller Lodge Interior and Exterior)
• Universal Pictures
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• $100,000,000 (estimated)
• $329,862,540
• $82,455,420
• Jul 23, 2023
• $970,159,540

Technical specs

• Runtime 3 hours
• Black and White
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Digital

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

"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.

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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'Oppenheimer' Review: Christopher Nolan Delivers His Most Colossal and Mature Film Yet

Cillian Murphy is remarkable in a film that feels like what Nolan's entire career has been building towards.

The Big Picture

• Christopher Nolan's twelfth film, Oppenheimer , is a culmination of his remarkable career, showcasing his talents and techniques in storytelling, editing, and building tension and anticipation.
• Cillian Murphy gives an incredible performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, portraying the complexities and emotions of the character through subtle mannerisms and expressions.
• Oppenheimer boasts an exceptional cast, with notable performances from Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh, although Nolan still struggles with providing substantial roles for female characters.

Few filmmakers have had the rapid, impressive rise to success that Christopher Nolan has had over the last 25 years. Out the gate, Nolan has been ambitious, making twisty, unique films like his debut Following and his breakthrough Memento despite extremely small budgets. Within a decade of making his first film, he would revitalize action movies, origin stories, and superhero films with both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight —still widely considered the greatest superhero film of all time. In his first dozen films, Nolan has taken us deep inside the mind ( Inception ), to the darkest reaches of space ( Interstellar ), and explored war in a way we’ve never seen before ( Dunkirk ). While his experiments haven’t always been entirely successful, like with his last film, 2020’s Tenet , it’s hard not to admire Nolan’s attempts to push the boundaries of what film and storytelling can do on such a large scale .

Nolan’s twelfth film, Oppenheimer , feels like the culmination of everything the director has done so far in his already remarkable career . From the multiple timelines of Memento and Dunkirk , and the staggering abstract footage in Interstellar , to his ability to build tension and anticipation through stunning scores and impeccable editing, Nolan uses all of the talents and techniques that have made him such a noteworthy auteur to bring to life the extraordinary accomplishments, pains, and life of J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ). In bringing this expansive and gargantuan true story to the screen, Nolan has created not just one of his best films, but easily the most mature film of his career.

Oppenheimer

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

In telling the story of Oppenheimer, Nolan returns to a technique he used in Memento , by showing one man’s experience through varying timelines. Like that film, one timeline is told in color, while the other uses black-and-white photography. In the color timeline, Oppenheimer explores his past through his perspective via a hearing where he must run down his years running The Manhattan Project and the creation of the first atomic bomb, his communist ties, and his affairs, all while the people from throughout his life come to testify about his actions. In the black-and-white segments, Nolan follows Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey Jr. ), as he discusses his involvement with Oppenheimer over the years, all during Strauss’ questioning to secure the nomination for Secretary of Commerce. Through these dueling timelines, each showing important moments from different perspectives, Oppenheimer peels back multiple layers of Oppenheimer, a man who did unbelievable things, and then feared the potential of what his research could eventually bring.

Cillian Murphy Gives One of the Best Performances Ever in a Nolan Film

Murphy, who has been a supporting player in five of Nolan’s previous films, finally gets the starring role here and the result is incredible . Oppenheimer is shown as a relatively quiet man, and despite that, Murphy allows us to see every moment of trepidation, every moment of fear for what his ideas could eventually mean, and every glimmer of joy at some new revelation, all through tiny mannerisms and the worry in his eyes. Murphy is beautifully restrained here, and even though his actions are world-changing, we can feel the implications of Oppenheimer’s achievements simply through a look in Murphy’s eyes, or the way he hesitates in a sentence. After years of working with Nolan, Murphy's take on Oppenheimer will go down as one of the best performances ever captured by Nolan’s camera.

'Oppenheimer' Boasts One of the Best Casts in Modern Film

While it might sound like hyperbole, Nolan has gathered one of the most unbelievable casts in modern film , a flabbergasting amount of talent that puts actors like Oscar-winners Rami Malek , Gary Oldman , and Kenneth Branagh in small supporting roles, but gives actors like Murphy who might often be put in more minor roles into greater positions. While there are too many exceptional performances to point out, it’s excellent to see actors like Alden Ehrenreich , Benny Safdie , and David Krumholtz get major positions in this film, and it’s wonderful to see Josh Hartnett and Jason Clarke in substantial roles. Even though there are plenty of great actors in blink-and-you-miss parts, Nolan does all he can to give as many of these performers at least one scene that will stick with the audience long after the movie is over.

But it’s Downey Jr. who makes the biggest impression of the entire cast , other than Murphy’s Oppenheimer. While Oppenheimer mostly wears his feelings on his sleeve, Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss keeps his secrets close to his chest, making him an absorbing counter to the title character. His more subjective take on Oppenheimer’s life and career gives us a perspective we rarely see in films about real-life personalities, and Downey Jr. gives one of his best performances as well, and it’s wonderful to see him explore this type of role after years in the MCU pipeline.

Also noteworthy is Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, who puts Oppenheimer in his position at The Manhattan Project. The relationship between Oppenheimer and Groves is one of the most complex in the film , and it’s fascinating to watch how it shifts over the years. Plus, if you’re making a film about an impossible goal that needs to be met in a shocking amount of time ( Ford v. Ferrari , The Martian , Air ), there’s no better person to call than Damon.

Alas, Nolan still has problems with substantial female roles , and that does continue in Oppenheimer . Like many of the male scientists, the apparently lone female scientist—played by Olivia Thirlby —doesn’t get as much screen time as she deserves. Similarly, the women in Oppenheimer’s life certainly should’ve received more attention, however, that doesn’t stop Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, and Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s on-again-off-again partner Jean Tatlock from making the most of their time onscreen. Pugh only gets a few scenes, but her impact resonates with Oppenheimer long after his last scene. Blunt’s role is far more substantive, as we see her beg Oppenheimer to fight back as he’s raked over the coals by his own government. It’s hard not to relate to her utter rage at his treatment, and her frustrations over her position in life show sides to Blunt that we’ve never seen before from her.

Christopher Nolan's Script and Directing Are Stunning

But beyond this embarrassment of riches that is this cast, it’s Nolan that truly makes Oppenheimer a gargantuan achievement , and how he’s able to find just the right people to work with—both in front of and behind the camera—to make this phenomenal vision come to life in all its glory. This all, naturally, begins with Nolan’s script, based on the book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin . In bringing this 700+ page book to the screen, 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. It’s almost akin to what Tony Kushner had to cram into Lincoln by adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin ’s “Team of Rivals.” There is so much life and story to be told here, and the fact that Nolan can navigate all of this succinctly and without getting in over his head is astounding.

Behind the camera, again, Nolan is returning to some of his old techniques and talents, but in a way that feels more refined and careful than ever before . He knows he can impress—he’s done that before—but now, he knows how to utilize these skills in a way that puts story first, not as a way to awe the audience. All of these tools come together to the point that it almost feels as if Nolan’s entire career has been building to this film. Oppenheimer allows Nolan to be bombastic, but never over-the-top in a manner that distracts from the narrative. The performances and Oppenheimer’s troubled story is more important than the technical achievements Nolan creates, and while he has frequently felt like he’s the true star of his own films, he knows how to stand aside here to let the story take precedence over bombast.

This, of course, doesn’t happen without an incredible team behind him, and Nolan has gathered remarkable support in telling this story. Hoyte van Hoytema , who Nolan has worked with since 2014’s Interstellar , knows exactly how to beautifully shoot every scenario Nolan throws at him, whether it’s New Mexico at dusk, two lovers having a conversation in a dark hotel room, or the explosion of bombs and stars in shocking fashion. 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 . The way the two build the tension leading up to the dropping of the first bomb is astonishing, but just as monumental is the way the camera shakes around Oppenheimer when the repercussions of his research become too much for him to handle, almost as if the world around him could come crashing down, as that could both literally and figuratively be happening at any moment.

Oppenheimer ’s ever-present score by Ludwig Göransson accompanies nearly every moment of the film, knowing exactly when to pull back, or when to provoke the audience with the sounds of a ticking clock or static underneath the onslaught of an orchestra fully enveloping the viewer in sound. Nolan and van Hoytema’s visuals are always impressive, but it’s Göransson’s score that takes Oppenheimer to another level , and continues to prove that he’s one of the most exciting composers working in film today.

But Oppenheimer ’s success since this summer has also been a welcome change for the box office landscape . As franchise films have waned in their popularity over the course of this year , it’s been exciting to see a film like Oppenheimer (currently the fifth highest-grossing film at the domestic box office in 2023), which relies on great filmmaking and excellent performances to gather a crowd. While Marvel and DC films have failed to meet expectations, Nolan has shown that all an audience really wants is to be told a fascinating story that they’ve never seen before on the screen, and hopefully, studios in the future will learn the right lessons from Oppenheimer ’s success.

Oppenheimer is a towering achievement not just for Nolan, but for everyone involved . It is the kind of film that makes you appreciative of every aspect of filmmaking, blowing you away with how it all comes together in such a fitting fashion. Even though Nolan is honing in on talents that have brought him to where he is today, this film takes this to a whole new level of which we've never seen him before. With Oppenheimer , Nolan is more mature as a filmmaker than ever before, and it feels like we may just now be beginning to see what incredible work he’s truly capable of making.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a tremendous accomplishment for the writer-director, a massive film that feels like Nolan's most mature work so far.

• Christopher Nolan brings a scope to the biopic that makes this story grander than other films in the genre.
• Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, and Robert Downey Jr. lead an incredible cast that brings this story to life.
• Everything from Nolan's directing to Ludwig Göransson's score are pitch perfect, making one of the best films of 2023.

Oppenheimer is now available to stream on VOD in the U.S.

WATCH ON VOD

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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.

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

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‘oppenheimer’ review: christopher nolan’s explosive, must-see movie.

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Director Christopher Nolan’s seismic “Oppenheimer” is that rarest of things: a sophisticated and bracing movie that’s made for adults and makes nobody say, “I’ll wait till it’s on streaming.” 

See it in IMAX on 70-millimeter film — you’ll be very glad you did.

Many unbelievable scenes fill the entire screen.

OPPENHEIMER

Running time: 180 minutes. Rated R (some sexuality, nudity and language.) In theaters July 21.

Only the brilliant mind behind “Memento,” “Inception” and the “Dark Knight” trilogy would conclude that a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, could be both a morally complex, informative, gripping drama and a mind-blowing visual feast.

Nolan pulls off the mash-up in characteristically unexpected ways. 

Of course, we anticipate that the first-ever nuclear bomb test, outside Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945, will justify the movie’s massive scale. And that paralyzing scene definitely does. But “Oppenheimer” is explosive well before and well after the actual explosion. 

What keeps all three hours of the film so breathlessly tense is the title physicist’s internal tug of war: Can the valiant quest for scientific advancement — his great passion — lead to the total destruction of the planet? 

And is he culpable for whatever happens, as the leader of the team who created the A-bomb over three years in secret in the Southwest? Or is it the person who decides to push the button, a k a the leader of the free world?

“Just because we’re building it doesn’t mean we get to decide how it’s used,” he tells his frightened colleagues rather unconvincingly.

As the chilly man considers these thorny questions — and also has moments of euphoric inspiration — Nolan throws in loud images from Oppenheimer’s mind, of atoms violently splitting, or of flames engulfing the screen.

The cacophony shown inside Oppenheimer’s head fascinatingly clashes with Murphy’s outwardly stoic, privately vulnerable performance. He mesmerizingly journeys from intellectual force of nature to a guilt-plagued, damaged shadow of a man.

Oppenheimer was a fascinating guy, as geniuses often are.

“You’re a dilettante, womanizer and suspected Communist!” says Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, a smart foil), the military director of the Manhattan Project. 

Like many of those on college campuses in the first half of the 20th century, Oppenheimer socialized with socialists, and the government attempted to use his past against him when he became outspoken against the hydrogen bomb after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that climaxed World War II.

Throughout the movie, we jump in and out of the infamous, behind-closed-doors kangaroo court to decide if he was a Communist who had been disloyal to the United States. 

Another part of the film, the relevance of which becomes clear in the end, involves the Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss to become President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce, shot in time-machine black and white. Playing the ambitious man who once served as chair of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Robert Downey Jr. sneakily does some of the best work of his career.  

Even history buffs who know every beat of what happened will be riveted by the inventive ways Nolan recounts it. 

But what separates the director from most of his fellow auteurs nowadays is he knows vision alone cannot make a great movie — you need terrific performances to carry it out. And every supporting turn here is a smash.

Emily Blunt is focused and biting as Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, who’s fiercely supportive even though he gives her plenty of reasons not to be, such as his Commie ex Jean, played with frayed wires by Florence Pugh. 

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.

The movie also marks a welcome return to form for its director, whose “Tenet” was, well, “Tenet.”

The three-hour runtime will scare off some people (even though that’s breezy these days if you’re James Cameron or Martin Scorsese), but the subject matter and artfulness of Nolan’s approach earn our attention every single second. 

“Oppenheimer” is a movie that makes you say “Oh, my God” over and over again — in awe and in terror. 

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‘Oppenheimer’: Christopher Nolan’s Starry Biopic Is Big, Loud, and a Must-See

• By David Fear

This is what Christopher Nolan does in Oppenheimer , a biopic on the “father of the atomic bomb,” and in terms of getting you into the mindset of its subject, these bursts of abstract imagery are a brilliant move on his part. It’s not the only ace the writer-director has up his well-tailored sleeve, mind you — there are somewhere between four to five timelines bumping against each other at any given moment, it’s shot in both saturated color and stark black & white, its sound design equally prizes dead silence and deafening booms, and the cast is comprised of seemingly every third actor with a SAG card. Not to mention a depth-charge performance by Cillian Murphy as the Man Who Would Be Destroyer of Worlds, one that allows the tiniest surface ripples to communicate the agony and the ecstasy of changing the world.

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Taking its cues from the exhaustive, Pulitzer-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer seeks to cram as much of the man’s life, his work, his elevation to national hero, his eventual persecution, and his personal demons into three hours. Just for good measure, Nolan throws in not one but two competing courtroom dramas as well. There’s a roll-the-dice sensation throughout: Scenes of people sitting in rooms talking can seem thrilling or plodding, clarify historical conflicts and complicated concepts or confuse the hell out of you. Set pieces feel sweeping one second, and like they’re sucking the oxygen out of the room the next. Then, suddenly, the movie cuts to a huge close-up of Murphy, his eyes suggesting a man wrestling for his soul, and you’re transfixed. As with so much of Nolan’s work, you can feel a truly great film peeking out in fits and spurts within a longer, slightly uneven one.

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So let us now praise movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. Oppenheimer is most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars alike. When Nolan is on, he is on , as evidenced by the early scenes of Oppenheimer and his military liaison, General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon , all mustache and bluster), assembling the eggheads. Their plan is to turn the small New Mexico burg of Los Alamos into a self-sufficient, family-friendly town for a group of scientists and a top-secret think tank for a weapon of mass destruction. The military need the end result of the Manhattan Project to win WWII, preferably before the Germans develop their own version of “the gadget.” Oppenheimer, both compelled by and wary of the opportunity, wants them to maintain the “moral advantage” after the world sees what this thing can do.

Concentrating on the mounting pressure to deliver, the miniature steps forward with each behind-the-scenes breakthrough, and the accountability factor causing friction between the project leader and his patrons, Oppenheimer becomes its own ticking time bomb. All the while, fractures are happening within the team, and the precariousness of the situation, along with Oppenheimer’s willingness to go through with opening this Pandora’s Box, brings things to a tipping point. These scenes remind you of how Nolan understands the use of sound and vision as a means of emotional engagement (helped in no small part by his regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and composer Ludwig Göransson ‘s score); how his ability to fold complex ideas into presentations of human behavior, and vice versa, comes through in his writing; how the timing of a cut and the framing of an image can transform a moment from grandiose or mundane to sublime. The gent is a genuine filmmaker. He’s a big-screen artist, the bigger the screens the better.

There’s Florence Pugh , and Emily Blunt , and Benny Safdie , Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek , Kenneth Branagh , Casey Affleck , Jason Clarke, Matthew Modine, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich … it’s actually quicker to list who’s not in Oppenheimer. Nolan has said he wanted to cast recognizable faces so that audiences could keep track of who’s who easier, but he also gives them opportunities to flex, whether it’s for a minute or the majority of the running time. And given that there are so many scenes of people conversing, reading, lecturing, interrogating, handwringing and musing over the morality of mass destruction, they have to keep things afloat as much as their ringmaster.

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As those two trials intertwine and paint a picture of Oppenheimer as both McCarthy-era martyr and, ultimately, the victor over Strauss’s smear campaign during the movie’s last act, there’s a slight sensation of listening to wind blowing through torn sails. In attempting to get a 360-degree picture of his subject’s life and times on as big a scale as possible, it feels as if Nolan occasionally loses sight of the big picture as a whole. Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens. Nolan has made what can sometimes feel like a maddeningly elusive attempt to make a grand statement about then and now, only to continually drown himself out in the technical equivalent of the Zimmer Honk . He’s also given us one of the only movies of the summer that you really have to see.

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Robert Downey Jr. Likens His Role in ‘Oppenheimer’ to ‘Picking Fly Sh*t Out of Pepper’

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Robert Downey Jr. is currently on one of the hottest runs of his four decade acting career, following his Oscar win for Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” with an unprecedented turn in Park Chan-wook’s new HBO series “ The Sympathizer ” that sees him playing four different characters.

In a recent interview with Esquire , Downey used a very colorful metaphor to explain that shooting “The Sympathizer” right after “Oppenheimer” allowed him to recover creatively from the precision that was required to work with Nolan.

“I knew that playing Strauss, in ‘Oppenheimer ,’  was going to be like picking fly shit out of pepper — that it was going to be extremely exacting, that it was going to be … not confining, but liberating by its varied implicit limitations of what my usual toolbox is,” Downey said. “So I had a feeling that, like a coiled spring, ‘Sympathizer’ would be my unwind.”

“The Sympathizer” stars Hoa Xuande as a Communist spy working undercover in the South Vietnamese military alongside American intelligence officers during the Vietnam War. Downey plays all of the major white men on the series, including a brash CIA operative and a Hollywood director, as a way of illustrating the way that their interests are fundamentally aligned no matter how superficially different they might seem.

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Screen Rant

8 recent movies & shows that christopher nolan gave great reviews of.

British director Christopher Nolan has created some incredible films but has also voiced his appreciation for other shows and movies in recent years.

• Nolan praised Matt Reeves for his interpretation of Bruce Wayne in The Batman, calling him "one of the greats."
• Nolan appreciated Dune's seamless visual effects and compared it to Star Wars, showing his love for sci-fi blockbusters.
• Nolan enjoyed Past Lives and Aftersun for their subtle storytelling, proving his diverse taste beyond superhero and sci-fi genres.

Established director Christopher Nolan has created so many incredible stories over the years, which has made him an ideal reviewer of other movies and TV shows. Christopher Nolan's movies have dominated the world of cinema over the years. His iconic filmography has included several hit titles, such as the 2002 thriller Insomnia, which starred the legendary actor's Robin Williams and Al Pacino. Most recently, Nolan achieved even more worldwide fame with the Academy Award recording breaking Oppenheimer, with Cillian Murphy as the titular character.

Christopher Nolan's Oscar wins have racked up over his career, and Oppenheimer earned him his first win for Best Director. However, as a good director and writer, Nolan has frequently expressed his opinions about projects other than his own. The world of cinema and streaming has produced some incredible stories, brilliant casts, and amazing cinematography, some of which made it into the list of Christopher Nolan's favorite movies and TV shows in recent years.

8 The Batman

Nolan praised director matt reeves for how he interpreted bruce wayne's story.

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The Batman is a part of the DC Elseworlds series of films and centers around a younger Bruce Wayne, who has taken up the mantle of Batman only two years prior. Batman finds himself stuck in a game concocted by a dangerous new foe known as the Riddler, a serial killer who targets elite members of Gotham's society. Working together with Lieutenant James Gordon, Batman will attempt to uncover the mystery surrounding the Riddler's killing spree.

Released in 2022, The Batman starred Robert Pattinson as the iconic superhero Bruce Wayne. The Batman was directed by Matt Reeves, who was also behind the 2014 movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and the 2017 sequel War for the Planet of the Apes . Christopher Nolan praised The Batman 's director as " one of the greats ” while discussing the film, which was a solid compliment from Nolan, who directed The Dark Knight trilogy: 2005's Batman Begins , 2008's The Dark Knight, and 2012's The Dark Knight Rises, all with Christian Bale as the titular character.

Superhero movies have always been a tender subject in cinema, especially because of their dedicated fan bases.

Superhero movies have always been a tender subject in cinema, especially because of their dedicated fan bases. Getting the smallest detail wrong has ruined these films in the past, but The Dark Knight trilogy was one of the few that stayed true to the source material. Both the trilogy and The Batman did a brilliant job of making Bruce Wayne a complex and layered character with a dark undertone, something Nolan's works have previously demonstrated. As the trio of movies was such a staple in the superhero movies genre, Nolan's appreciation was the highest honor that The Batman could receive.

Nolan's Appreciation Of Sci-Fi Blockbusters

Dune the big-screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal bestseller of the same name. A mythic and emotionally charged hero’s journey, Dune  tells the story of Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, who must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people. As malevolent forces explode into conflict over the planet’s exclusive supply of the most precious resource in existence—a commodity capable of unlocking humanity’s greatest potential—only those who can conquer their fear will survive.

2021's Dune, an adaptation of the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert, was a particular favorite of Christopher Nolan's. This version of the film wasn't the first, however. The first adaptation of Dune in the 1980s was initially met with mixed reviews but became a cult classic and is considered to be one of the most underrated sci-fi movies of all time. Nolan was enthusiastic that Dune would introduce a new generation of audiences to the concept, and deservedly so. Nolan also agreed that Dune 's cinematography was powerful, especially because of its picturesque, sweeping shots across the deserts.

Nolan specifically acknowledged this quality, stating that " [Dune is] one of the most seamless marriages of live-action photography and computer-generated visual effects that [he's] seen."

Nolan specifically acknowledged this quality, stating that " [Dune is] one of the most seamless marriages of live-action photography and computer-generated visual effects that [he's] seen. " Denis Villeneuve, who directed Dune , has proved that he and Nolan share similarities in terms of filmmaking. Both of them have famously created large-scale sci-fi movies with complex storylines – Villeneuve with Blade Runner 2049 and Nolan with Interstellar.

6 Dune: Part Two

Nolan compared dune's second half to the empire strikes back, dune: part two.

Dune: Part Two is the sequel to Denis Villeneuve's 2021 film that covers the novel's events by Frank Herbert. The movie continues the quest of Paul Atreides on a journey of revenge against those who slew his family. With insight into the future, Atreides may be forced to choose between his one true love and the universe's fate. 

Upon its release in 2024, Christopher Nolan's review of Dune: Part Two quickly followed. After Nolan saw an early viewing of the highly anticipated sequel, the Raiders of the Lost Podcast shared a video to X of the director's opinions of Dune: Part Two. Nolan compared the film to Star Wars , one of the most iconic sci-fi movie series in cinematic history. In the interview, Nolan made a comparison between the two franchises and referred to Dune as the equivalent of A New Hope, with Dune: Part Two being The Empire Strikes Back.

Nolan also claimed that Dune: Part Two was " an incredibly exciting expansion of all of the things you introduce in the first one, " a reference to the changes and improvements that were implemented since Dune. As Nolan was such a fan of Dune, it was no surprise to hear that he also enjoyed Dune: Part Two. Director Denis Villeneuve was once again praised for his world-building skills and cinematography skills, and was over the moon to hear Nolan's comments on his project, which proved just how strong a bond the two have behind the camera as friends.

5 Past Lives

A different kind of film compared to nolan's typical work.

In Past Lives, childhood sweethearts Na Young and Hae Sung lose contact when Na Young's family moves abroad. Twelve years later, they reconnect through social media, but their lives have diverged. As they meet again, unresolved feelings surface, leading to poignant reflections on love, choices, and the complexities of relationships.

When asked about his favorite recent films, Nolan mentioned Past Lives , the 2023 movie that marked Celine Song's directorial debut. Past Lives touched on themes of friendship, growing up, and love, following a story that spanned a 24-year period and was partially inspired by Song's own past. The romantic drama received critical acclaim and went on to receive an incredible number of award nominations in 2024, including five Golden Globes, along with Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture at the Oscars.

Although Past Lives differed greatly from some of Nolan's work, his comment proved that his own watching habits are diverse and that he was able to appreciate various forms of cinema.

Nolan referred to Past Lives as " subtle in a beautiful sort of way ” (via Time ). Although Past Lives differed greatly from some of Nolan's work, his comment proved that his own watching habits are diverse and that he was able to appreciate various forms of cinema. In this interview, he also added that he was " drawn to working at a large scale. " The titles he spoke about showed that Nolan was a fan of smaller-scaled dramas like Past Lives , and although he hadn't made any himself, Past Lives ' use of time could be considered similar to his own filmmaking style.

Nolan Believed That Audiences Deserved A Cinematic Experience For Aftersun

In his interview with Time, Christopher Nolan also shared his appreciation for the 2022 movie Aftersun. Like Past Lives, Aftersun followed a story that was very different from a typical Nolan film. The coming-of-age drama Aftersun delved into the lives of a father and daughter, mostly shown through 11-year-old Sophie's (Frankie Corio) footage while on vacation with her father, Calum (Paul Mescal). Aftersun received critical acclaim and did well during awards season, with director Charlotte Wells winning Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer at the BAFTAs and Mescal being nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars.

Aftersun could be compared to Nolan's work because of how it played with time and memory, two staple factors in his filmmaking style.

Nolan has praised Aftersun on multiple occasions. To Time, Nolan simply referred to Aftersun as “ a beautiful film ,” but when speaking to the Telegraph, he expanded upon why he was so passionate about it. In July 2023, Nolan said that Aftersun was a great example of an intimate movie and one that very much deserved to be seen in cinemas, stating that " it also [played] wonderfully on TV, but that [wasn't] the point " (via The Telegraph ). However, Aftersun could be compared to Nolan's work because of how it played with time and memory, two staple factors in his filmmaking style.

3 The Curse

A tv show like no other in christopher nolan's eyes.

Showtime presents The Curse, a dark comedy series Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie created. The series follows newly married couple Whitney and Asher while filming their new reality show, Fliplanthrophy, which started with the intention of helping those less fortunate and establishing new communities. However, in true behind-the-scenes fashion, not all is well behind the camera, and personal troubles and comedic chaos begin to bubble to the surface.

Christopher Nolan's review of The Curse , which starred absurdist comedian Nathan Fielder and Academy Award winner Emma Stone as married couple Asher and Whitney, was overwhelmingly positive. The hilarious show followed the pair as they hosted a fictional home renovation show while Asher lived in fear of a strange curse that followed him throughout the season. In a Q&A with Showtime, Nolan moderated the panel and discussed the show with Fielder and his co-creator Benny Safdie, who also portrayed Dougie in The Curse and Edward Teller in Oppenheimer.

Nolan said that The Curse was " unlike anything [he'd] ever seen on television before ” and praised Fielder and Safdie's brilliant merging of the thriller and comedy genres. He also compared the show to the titles Twin Peaks and The Prisoner, especially noting that The Curse stood on its own, with a unique premise and engaging storyline. Nolan praised Emma Stone's performance, specifically how she portrayed such an unlikeable character and still killed it. The Curse was something Nolan could surely relate to, having been behind Inception, a movie that leaned on the absurd and confusing audiences to draw them in.

2 First Man

Nolan has a notable appreciation for movies set in the past.

The 2018 biographical drama First Man starred Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, the first person to step foot on the Moon, and the years leading up to Apollo 11's 1969 mission. Nolan claimed that First Man was one of his favorite films, and in a piece for Variety, he was quick to jump to its defense (via Variety ). A common conversation among critics was that there was a lack of American flags on-screen, but Nolan defended director Damien Chazelle, claiming that the focus should have been on Armstrong's feelings when he " step[ped] onto the farthest point of mankind’s reach. "

Several of Nolan's films have focused on themes of personal identity, something First Man tackled brilliantly, delving into Armstrong's mind and the pressures he faces throughout his journey.

Nolan also referred to Chazella as one of the " finest storytellers " around and offered specific praise for his " commit[ment] and the intimacy of his interpretation " in First Man. Several of Nolan's films have focused on themes of personal identity, something First Man tackled brilliantly, delving into Armstrong's mind and the pressures he faces throughout his journey. First Man 's distinct tone of anxiety and anticipation could also be compared to some of Nolan's projects, such as Dunkirk, another piece set in the past with combined elements of historical accuracy and fictional details.

1 Godzilla Minus One

Oppenheimer's academy award rival, godzilla minus one.

Godzilla Minus One is the first Godzilla film released by Toho since 2016's Shin Godzilla. Minus One is a reimagining of the original 1954 Godzilla and takes the franchise back to its roots by exploring the harsh life of post-war Japan. The story follows Koichi Shikishima, a failed kamikaze pilot, who struggles with survivor guilt as a giant monster attacks the city.

Godzilla Minus One was a rival of Oppenheimer at the 2024 Academy Awards, but this didn't stop Nolan from offering his opinions on the film. Godzilla Minus One was yet another installment in the Godzilla franchise, number 37 overall, and the movie's director, Takashi Yamazaki, took inspiration from several other films from the series. Godzilla Minus One received hugely positive reviews, especially for its visual elements, which earned the film the Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 2024, the first non-English-language title to receive the award. In an interview with Takashi Yamazaki, Nolan gave his review of the film.

Nolan found Godzilla Minus One to be " tremendous " and " exciting. " He also compared it to Yamazaki's film The Eternal Zero and said that the two titles shared a similar " spirit ." Christopher Nolan believed that Godzilla Minus One had a " wonderful sense of history that [he] really appreciated, " which made a lot of sense, considering his affection and enthusiasm for creating historical projects like Dunkirk and Oppenheimer. Naturally, he also praised Yamazaki's use of imagery in Godzilla Minus One, acknowledging that the film " was beautifully made ."

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This is “a polarizing film. Some don’t want to get it. Some people see its brilliance,” Davies says. Bleecker has hopes for the latter group as the film expands to more arthouses and into smarthouses, and multiplexes in big markets.

Stars Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek and Nathan Zellner are unrecognizable as the hairy tribe of Sasquatch that had Sundance buzzing as filmmakers imagined the creatures’ daily life – hanging around, eating, fighting, grunting and more. It’s comedic and poignant, despite being dialogue free. Written by David Zellner, executive produced by Ari Aster.

The film has no recent comps although some have mentioned Swiss Army Man (2016) or Quest For Fire (1982). “We learned over the last few years it’s important to embrace new and different, and that’s what this movie is,” says Davies.

We Grown Now from Sony Pictures Classics debuts in NY, LA and Chicago. The-coming-of-age drama from writer-director  Minhal Baig   ( Hal a) nabbed the Toronto Film Festival’s Changemaker Award  Expands nationwide May 10. Set in 1992 Chicago, wide-eyed and imaginative best friends, Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) traverse the city, looking to escape the boredom of school and the hardships public housing. Their unbreakable bond is challenged when tragedy shakes their community. Also starring S. Epatha Merkerson, Lil Rel Howery and Jurnee Smollett, the film is produced by Baig and Joe Pirro. Exec producers include Jeff Skoll and Anikah McLaren for Participant, James Schamus for Symbolic Exchange, Carrie Holt de Lama, and Smollett.

Egoist from Strand Releasing opens in New York at the IFC Center. Based on Makoto Takayama’s semi-autobiographical novel, director Daishi Matsunaga’s film is a sexy and heartfelt drama about family. Kosuke, a fashion magazine editor in his mid-30s, revels in the blessings of his comfortable lifestyle. When he hires Ryuta, a personal trainer, he gets more than he bargained for. Stars Ryohei Suzuki and Hiyo Miazawa.

Moderate releases: Cycling drama Hard Miles from Blue Fox Entertainment, on 480 screens. Directed by RJ Daniel Hanna, who co-wrote with producer Christian Sander. Stars Matthew Modine ( Oppenheimer, Stranger Things ), Sean Astin ( Lord of the Rings , Rud y), Leslie David Baker ( The Office ), Cynthia Kaye McWilliams ( Average Joe, Bosch ).

The uplifting true story of the bicycling team at Rite of Passage’s RidgeView Academy, a medium-security correctional school in Colorado. Film follows beleaguered coach Greg Townsend (Modine) as he rounds up an unlikely crew of incarcerated students for a seemingly impossible bike ride from Denver to the Grand Canyon. The young leads are Jahking Guillory, Jackson Kelly, Damien Diaz and Zachary T. Robbins.

Comedy Villains Inc. from Purdie Distribution debuts on 290 screens. After the death of their super powerful villain boss, Beatrix, Cain and Harold are left destitute living in an abandoned grocery store. Beatrix is determined to strike out on her owns and take on the world by any means necessary. Directed by Jeremy Warner, who co-wrote with Jason Grey and Matt Moen. Starring Mallory Everton, Colin Mochrie and Jason Grey.

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Variety’s ‘Actors on Actors’ Earns Third Daytime Emmy Nomination

By Jack Dunn

• Variety’s ‘Actors on Actors’ Earns Third Daytime Emmy Nomination 8 hours ago
• Vashon Island Film Festival Sets Date for Third Event – Film News in Brief 11 hours ago
• Dick Wolf Honors Ziffren Brittenham’s Cliff Gilbert-Lurie at Variety’s Power of Law Breakfast 11 hours ago

Variety has earned its third Daytime Emmy nomination for the “ Actors on Actors ” series, with the first coming in 2019.

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“Actors on Actors” has previously won a Daytime Emmy and a Los Angeles Area Emmy Award.

The 51st Daytime Emmy Awards will air live on June 7 at 8 p.m. ET, delayed PT, on CBS, and will be available to stream live and on-demand on Paramount+.

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