Every Christopher Nolan movie ranked, including ‘The Odyssey’

In an era of entertainment increasingly dependent on franchises, Christopher Nolan has turned his name into one of them.

He turned a procedural about a scientist into a billion-dollar box office blockbuster. He’s built a career on creating crowd-pleasers that challenge, overwhelm and find a life of their own beyond the weekends or summers they debut and dominate.

His 13 films changed the ambitions of the blockbuster, from the indie ingenuity of “Memento” to the mythic, otherworldly scale of “The Odyssey,” releasing Friday to sold-out screenings.

For all his range, Nolan always returns to the obsessions and hubris of men who believe (often correctly) that they’re the smartest in the room. They chase memories, dreams, hidden universes and, very often, the women in their lives. Each work feels like part of an ongoing conversation on these themes.

Like Alfred Hitchcock before him, Nolan makes intellectually ambitious and beautiful films that serve as mass entertainment even as they push the limits of cinematic achievement. Today he is a singular talent.

Not every project lands perfectly. A few buckle under the weight of their own ambition. But few directors have assembled a filmography as diverse and endlessly debatable. Here’s how they stack up. (Friendly debate encouraged.)

13. “Following” (1998)

“Following” is Nolan’s Rosetta Stone in 70 minutes. His debut film is also a rough draft of the career to follow, every inclination already present. There’s the obsessed male protagonist, here as a writer stalking people for inspiration and eventually crossing lines. There’s the nonlinear storytelling fracturing time into a puzzle, the syncopated musical score (no coincidence Nolan’s production company is called Syncopy) and identity used as deadly performance art. The budget is tiny (he used friend’s houses as sets), the ambition is here — it’s just empty on characters and heart, yet another wrinkle that would persist throughout his career.

12. “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012)

Tom Hardy’s Bane is an indelible working-class villain defanged by a screenplay more interested in twists and shock than political coherence. A billionaire superhero was always a challenging vessel to fit in a story about class warfare and revolution, and Nolan’s initial reluctance to make a third Batman movie seeps through. Its marvelous first six minutes is the film in miniature: a sometimes clumsy script (“For you.”) overpowered by astonishing practical spectacle that only Nolan and his crew can conceive.

11. “Insomnia” (2002)

After bending the language of film in “Memento,” Nolan tackled a remake of a Norwegian thriller as a more straightforward detective story. Al Pacino delivers one of the quieter and sharper roles of his career, while Robin Williams weaponizes his warmth with menace. Wally Pfister’s cinematography uses Alaska’s endless daylight as an interrogation light, bleaching every shot until the guilt is impossible to hide.

10. “Batman Begins” (2005)

Its sequel casts such a long shadow that it’s easy to forget how influential “Batman Begins” has been. Nolan rebooted Batman but also the entire concept of reboots, ushering in an era where countless stories suddenly had to be darker, grittier and psychologically grounded. “Begins” is a slight tale busy with exposition, but it is a menacing, self-contained work even as it builds up to its legendary sequel.

9. “Oppenheimer” (2023)

In a procedural about one man’s nuclear-level guilt trip, Nolan transforms committee hearings, security clearances and theoretical physics into a taut thriller. Oscar-winning turns from Cillian Murphy and composer Ludwig Göransson breathe life into the structure. Göransson’s unnerving score narrates the emotional current that the clinical story sometimes withholds. Murphy disappears into Oppenheimer, a man so “troubled by visions of a hidden universe” that he created a new reality, the one we live in today.

8. “Tenet” (2020)

Another movie that’s all process, “Tenet” is Nolan’s most frustrating watch, a stubborn story that demands repeat viewings. Nolan has always written about obsessed men, but this time it’s his own obsession we confront, as he struggles mightily to prove this story, following timelines backward and forward at the same time in the same frame, can exist. It sacrifices character and emotion for architecture and structure. Absolutely frustrating, but once you see how the gears click into place, maybe “Tenet” becomes your obsession too.

7. “The Dark Knight” (2008)

Nolan’s Batman sequel was a showcase of the superhero as a crime epic — not exactly “The Godfather,” but there’s no Corleone quite like these characters, least of all Heath Ledger’s Joker, a performance that launched generations of memes and copycats. Here is evidence comic book movies can be a compelling morality play about institutional decay and post-9/11 anxieties and still break box office records. Almost two decades later, it is peerless in the genre.

6. “Dunkirk” (2017)

In his most beautiful film, Nolan strips away backstory, sentimentality and even dialogue in his take on the war movie. The pacing and nonlinear structure brings the audience into experiencing the terrifying elasticity of time when survival is the only objective.

5. “Memento” (2000)

It’s the movie that redefined the rewatch. Once you see it, you’ll have to see it again. “Tenet” tries this and does too much, but this Guy Pearce-led showcase is just disorienting and compelling enough. This is the first instance in which a Nolan film does more than just tell a story, it immerses the audience into the experience of living with incomplete fragments of memory. It would not be the last time he played such a trick.

4. “The Odyssey” (2026)

The most shocking thing about Nolan’s adaptation of this foundational Western fantasy tale is that it’s spiritually a prequel to “Oppenheimer.” Both films explore civilization at the brink of chaos. (Nolan confirmed on “The Daily Show” this week that connecting the two is watching the film “the way I intended.”) “The Odyssey” is the richest fantasy epic from Hollywood in at least a decade, with visuals that evoke the greatest epic films. Nolan’s architectural precision and emotional ambition move in lockstep, resulting in what feels like his most complete project with the most satisfying third act of his career.

3. “Interstellar” (2014)

Nolan is often criticized for treating emotion as a plot device (plenty of examples in this list). “Interstellar” is all about emotion. It’s still a puzzle box, but every paradox and equation, every beautiful, practical image of space and its mysteries, sits at the crossroads of faith and science. Nolan aimed for the heights of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” With “Interstellar” he distinguishes himself by filling the cold, dark vacuum of space with the warmest, most affirming story of his career.

2. “The Prestige” (2006)

Here is Nolan’s biggest success in immersing the audience into the narrative. The movie itself is a trick, deceiving you into thinking it’s about rival magicians. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale disappear into the lead roles, and every rewatch reveals another clue hidden in plain sight. Nolan’s talent for visual shorthand transforms his adaptations, like Homer’s epic, into economic distillations of themes and ideas. “The Prestige” is an even better adaptation, a tragedy about how obsessions can consume all in life, like a black hole.

1. “Inception” (2010)

In his defining film, Nolan’s hero bears the name of his first villain. “Inception” is a movie impossible to replicate because of how personal and original it is to Nolan. Once again, it’s a story about thieves: This time they steal (or incept) ideas in dreams. The result is a perfect balancing act for Nolan’s fixations, where breathtaking structure never overwhelms character, and where his love of James Bond is reimagined into a maze of memory and grief. There’s a bit of Nolan in each of these stories, but nowhere more than Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb, an architect of dreams whose obsessions haunt the impossibly beautiful and mythical fantasies he creates and can’t escape. Thankfully, neither can we.