Christopher Nolan Top Ten

With the release of Tenet, I thought I might rip off many film mags/websites and do a top ten of Nolan's films. For the sake of cleanliness, I've forgone his first feature, Following (assume it's 11th) and all his shorts. Let's go.

10. Insomnia (2002)

This is a remake of a 1997 Norwegian film starring Stellan Skarsgard in the Pacino role. Williams and Pacino are great and this is a pretty good film, but I prefer the others.

9. The Dark Knight (2008)

This might be an unpopular choice but, again, I actually liked this film, just not as much as the first or third in this Batman series. Ledger is spectacular and the set pieces are fantastic but it lost me with the Harvey Dent subplot and the ferry sequence was too portentous.

8. The Prestige (2006)

Clever, well-paced thriller, stacked with big names putting in sterling performances. I'm actually going to watch it again soon to try and figure out why so many people rate it as Nolan's best. It's very good but the best? Not for me.

7. Memento (2000)

This was Nolan's second feature after Following, and his first step into the US film industry, though he was still a few years off supreme leader type power. Memento is the beginning of Nolan's dalliance with time and his experiments to confuse his audience with fractured narratives and timelines. This works, as I needed to see it about three times to 'get it'. Pretty amazing stuff.

6. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Many folk have this as the weakest of Nolan's Batman trilogy but I quite liked the high stakes and the rug-pulls and the anarchic idea of forcing a city to sever itself from the rest of society. Tom Hardy's Bane was fun and an infinite amount of Marion Cotillard would still be scrimping.

5. Batman Begins (2005)

Never a fan of the Burton & Schumacher Batmans (Batmen?), nor the campy shite from the 60s, not to mention the latest DC crud, Nolan's first crack at the job was a gritty rejig, a rebirth of the character. Lashings of confident style and Christian Bale had an easy charm as well. Best of the bunch.

4. Tenet (2020)

See previous blog entry for thoughts on this gem. It's just about the most Nolany you can get, quite the melon-twister, but he pulls off the neat trick of not having it matter so much if you can't follow proceedings. Film-making summed up with this line - "Bold I'm fine with, I thought you were going to say nuts."

3. Interstellar (2014)

For all its faults (iffy dialogue, questionable politics and sentimentality) this packs a punch like none of Nolan's other work. I'm not on the best terms with McConaughey or Hathaway and yet, Interstellar had me in bits, weeping like an infant. Add a few magnificent set-pieces and you're onto a winner.

2. Inception (2010)

Career peaks galore here - DiCaprio, Page, Hardy, Gordon-Levitt - in the film that has become a throw-away term for inferior copies "Oh, it's kind of Inception-y." High stakes, complex set-ups and tension-building in spades, Inception is a ball-tearer of an experience. And a glorious, 'choose your own' final shot. Supreme film-making.

1. Dunkirk (2017)

When I left the cinema after seeing this I, maybe rashly, suggested to myself that Dunkirk was the best film I'd seen for around a decade. Still not sure I'd disagree with 2017 me. It's bloody amazing. The concentric story threads meeting at a pivot point in the ocean could be a gimmick in other hands, but Nolan barely brings our attention to this aspect, instead focussing on the lives of the desperate characters. Excellent work.

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Nosferatu

The best looking film of the year, this has a gorgeous array of visuals that elicited a number of quiet 'wows' and intakes of breath from yours truly. Big praise to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, production designer Craig Lathrop, art director Robert Cowper, set decorator Beatrice Brentnerova, and of course, director Robert Eggers for getting this crew together - he seems to use a lot of the same folk for his films, and fair enough, when this is the final product. Eggers has adapted the script from Henrik Galeen's original for F. W. Murnau's 1922 film, itself none too subtly ripped off from Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula . This is Eggers' fourth feature after The Witch , The Lighthouse , and The Northman and while I haven't yet seen the first two, I didn't care much for The Northman , typically wondrous images aside. He flirts with the pomposity that affected his previous film but here it matches the gothic tones and source text, that is until Aaron Tayl...

Best of 2024 - End of Year Report

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Anora

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Audrey

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The Monk and the Gun

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The Wolves Always Come at Night

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Ghost Cat Anzu (Me & Kid)

Here's a nice surprise. I find Japanese anime to be hit and miss, and the first look at this boof-headed feline didn't promise too much, but Ghost Cat Anzu knocked the bails off. It riffs on the Ghibli theme of children being forced to grow up quicker than they should, with 11 year-old Karin (Noa Gotô) as our focus. Her dad's a bit of a scally and he does a runner while visiting his father at his temple home in a sleepy town, leaving Karin alone with kindly grandad and huge, anthropomorphic cat, Anzu, voiced by Mirai Moriyama. Karin wanders the town, waiting for dad to return and meeting various locals, while being casually monitored by Anzu. The pace is a little pedestrian but the shenanigans make up for this. Anzu is pulled over by the police and told he needs a license to ride a scooter, though he protests that he's not actually a human, so surely these rules don't apply. He works as a masseur but also takes a gig to scare birds away from the river, roping Karin...

Bird

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Merchant Ivory

Here's the first of a few films I'm planning to catch at the British Film Festival so I'll attempt to keep the reviews relatively brief. This a documentary directed by Stephen Soucy about the legendary filmmaking team, Merchant Ivory Productions. The formidable ensemble consisted of producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory, writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and composer Richard Robbins. After meeting in 1961, Ivory and Merchant started a fruitful partnership, both professionally and romantically. The film shows us their somewhat ramshackle early films, made in India, moving on to marginally more assured productions in the US, and finally to the English period dramas they became known for in the 80s and onwards. Together, they made over 40 films, some absolute gems among them. A Room with a View , Howard's End , and The Remains of the Day are probably their best, though you could throw in Heat and Dust , Maurice , and The Golden Bowl as very strong examples of their...

Emilia Pérez

Jacques Audiard makes a feature film roughly every three or four years, and at the age of 72, at this rate, he may not have too many left. For me, this is one of the tragedies of modern cinema. This bloke can do almost no wrong (his first film, See How They Fall was his only misstep). So here he is with his tenth (!) feature, Emilia Pérez . It's a pretty bonkers story about a Mexican drug cartel boss who hires a young, marginalised lawyer to help him transition to a woman. The film tackles some important themes - the transitioning element, but also racism and the disappeared population of Mexico. The twist is that it's all performed as a musical, and the balance between fantastic and ludicrous is stretched throughout. Most musicals live or die by the music and luckily, there are some great numbers in this (one of them, El Mal , just took out best song at the Golden Globbies). On the other end of the scale is a song about the details of transition surgery, where a doctor warbl...

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