Unlocking Nolan’s Genius: The Ultimate Ranking That Will Change How You See Every Movie Forever
Christopher Nolan doesn’t just make movies — he crafts cinematic labyrinths that pull you in and refuse to let go. From the gritty indie roots of Following to the mind-bending realms of Inception and the thunderous spectacle of The Odyssey, Nolan has managed to fuse blockbuster spectacle with brainy storytelling like no one else. But here’s the kicker: how does a guy who started out making corporate videos in the UK become the maestro behind some of the most talked-about films of the 21st century — raking in $6 billion worldwide and commanding star-studded casts every few years? Is it the way he twists time, memory, and identity, or maybe just sheer pluck? Either way, with The Odyssey in theaters now — Nolan’s audacious Trojan horse — it’s the perfect moment for us to put on our critic’s hat and rank his films, from the “meh” to the awe-inspiring. And hey, is Cobb still stuck dreaming at the end of Inception? Let’s dive in and find out together.
8 min readAin’t nobody doing it like Christopher Nolan. The British-born, Chicago-raised director is one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of our time, yet his awards prestige is not mutually exclusive from his populist appeal. The release of his newest movie, The Odyssey, is a perfect excuse to retread and reevaluate his past work.
After his emergence in 1998 with the indie thriller Following, Christopher Nolan garnered his first taste of acclaim in 2000 with his twisty crime noir Memento. The guy has been on a hot streak ever since, with a string of blockbusters coming every two or three years in which megawatt A-listers line up to work with him.
Between entries in his Batman trilogy, which began with 2005’s Batman Begins, Nolan asserted his auteurship with hits like The Prestige (2006) and Inception (2010), the latter’s success cementing Nolan as more than an indie wunderkind turned comic-book director. With recurring story motifs of time, memory, and identity and a sleek style adhering to modernist aesthetics—to say nothing of his cumulative $6 billion in worldwide ticket sales—Nolan is one of the defining artists of the 21st century. Not bad for a guy who came up doing corporate videos in the UK.
With The Odyssey rolling into theaters like a Trojan horse, Esquire’s editors put their heads together to rank Christopher Nolan’s films from “worst” (in a relative manner) to greatest. Did we get it wrong? Did we place your favorite too low or the one Nolan movie you hate too high? And is Cobb still dreaming at the end of Inception?
Here’s Esquire’s current ranking of Christopher Nolan’s movies.
13. Following (1998)
A year before Christoper Nolan released his first feature film, the 1998 crime noir Following, the director made a surreal short titled Doodlebug. It follows a man trying to kill an insect with his shoe, until the man realizes that—spoilers!—he is the ant he’s trying to kill.
You can see echoes of this circular storytelling in Following, about an aspiring author who stalks strangers hoping to strike up creative inspiration only to wind up in a murder plot. Following is a remarkable little indie that punches above its weight class, and it’s as flawed as any picture from a first-time director would be. But true Nolan obsessives owe it to themselves to seek out Following if only to see a soon-to-be mastermind still figuring out his voice.
12. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Whether The Dark Knight Rises is a good movie, a bad movie, or something in between depends on you. The climax to Nolan’s Batman trilogy sees Christian Bale in his final bow as the Caped Crusader as he’s challenged by the beefy warlord Bane (Tom Hardy), who engineers a false revolution to finish an old mission. While The Dark Knight Rises is an imperfect film with confusing politics, it’s a satisfying conclusion to an era-defining series. It also marked the first collaboration between Nolan and Anne Hathaway (as Catwoman), who later starred in more Nolan masterworks like Interstellar and The Odyssey. And let’s fess up: We all did Bane impersonations that summer.
11. Tenet (2020)
In the summer of Covid-19, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet meditated on the fluidity and impermanence of time. In this beguiling spy-fi thriller, John David Washington stars as a nameless CIA agent tasked with preventing World War III. With Tenet, Nolan toys with novelty physics—primarily inverted entropy, or the reverse movement of objects in time—to stage some of the most ingenious set pieces of the decade. And Elizabeth Debicki is a formidable female lead whose character’s strength and resolve keep her from being a hollow “Bond Girl” caricature. Keeping Tenet from true greatness? The nonsense plot. But as one character phrases it: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” Solid advice.
10. Insomnia (2002)
It feels astonishing to say that Al Pacino and Robin Williams not only worked together but did so on a Nolan project. In this English-language remake of a 1997 Norwegian movie (which starred Stellan Skarsgård), a Los Angeles detective travels to frigid, always-sunny Alaska to aid in a murder case involving a teenage victim. Insomnia would be a standout film in any other director’s filmography, but in Christopher Nolan’s universe, it is almost drowned out by his bigger tentpoles—a dog-eared paperback novel dwarfed by leather-bound hardcovers. But Insomnia is a lean and mean movie that dwells in the same psychological subspace as David Fincher’s Se7en and Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners.
9. Dunkirk (2017)
Christopher Nolan’s preoccupation with time is at the heart of Dunkirk, a World War II nail-biter that eschews the sepia-tinted valorizing of the Allies’ victory. Instead, there’s only the suffocating pressure of time running out. A dramatization of the 1940 Miracle of Dunkirk, the film stars an ensemble cast playing British soldiers, sailors, and pilots amid the tense few days when hundreds of thousands of Allied troops were besieged by Nazi Germany.
Minimal dialogue and light character work keep Dunkirk from being as memorable as the next several films, but its portrait of down-to-the-wire survival is exhilarating. Composer Hans Zimmer cleverly weaponized the score to seed anxiety and dread through ticking escalation.
8. Batman Begins (2005)
The superhero boom was in full swing by 2005 with box-office hits like Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man. But the genre transformed forever with Batman Begins. Christopher Nolan’s mainstream breakout reimagined the Dark Knight for the 21st century, with the DC Comics icon grounded in a reality not unlike ours. Christian Bale embodies a young Bruce Wayne who returns to Gotham City as its new symbol of justice (and fear) to save it from an ancient evil. It’s the only Nolan film that can get away with a Nickelback TV commercial without losing aura. In 2026, it seems as if superheroes have fallen; we shall see if they learn to pick themselves up.
7. Memento (2000)
Nolan’s Batman movies made him a household name, but it was Memento in 2000 that first gave him critical buzz. In this ouroboros of a psychological noir, Guy Pearce plays an amnesiac who attempts to piece together the mystery of his wife’s murder. He just might solve it, if only he could remember what happens next. With its nonlinear narrative structure and seedy Los Angeles atmosphere, Memento was a small-budget miracle that earned Christopher Nolan (and his brother Jonathan) their first Oscar nominations with nods for Best Original Screenplay.
6. The Prestige (2006)
Are you watching closely? Look closer. Based on Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel, The Prestige tells of two rival magicians in Victorian London in a dangerous and harmful game of one-upmanship to pull off the greatest illusion. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman—with Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Andy Serkis, and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla—lead this period piece with an absolutely brilliant ending that needs to be seen to be believed.
Although The Prestige received modest reviews during its release, it has cultivated a passionate audience who’ve cemented it as a true favorite in the Nolan canon. With more time, it just might pull off the greatest trick and finally become number one.
5. The Dark Knight (2008)
Last summer, Esquire ranked The Dark Knight as the second-greatest superhero movie ever made. So it says something about Nolan that the movie ranks at number five in his own filmography. The sequel to Batman Begins sees the Caped Crusader pitted against a new, terrifying criminal mastermind known only as the Joker (Heath Ledger in a performance that won him a posthumous Oscar). Combining the best parts of Batman graphic novels like The Long Halloween and The Killing Joke with the scale and intensity of crime epics like Michael Mann’s Heat, The Dark Knight permanently raised the bar for superhero cinema and summer blockbusters to come.
4. Oppenheimer (2023)
Real life can resemble a Christopher Nolan movie too! In Nolan’s first biopic, he finds a subject—in J. Robert Oppenheimer—who is all the things he loves in a protagonist: brilliant, dashingly handsome, haunted, and undone by his own obsessions. Naturally, Nolan twists time and space to make Oppenheimer’s life move like a Christopher Nolan movie too. The result is an endlessly propulsive, awesomely explosive spectacle that places nuclear concerns back in the zeitgeist and interrogates one of history’s most nuanced figures. —Max Cea
3. The Odyssey (2026)
Deprive Christopher Nolan of an IMAX camera and an armada of artisans and he is little more than a bard telling tall tales around a fire. Greek oral traditions endure in oversize fashion in Nolan’s latest and genuinely one of his greatest, The Odyssey.
A retelling of Odysseus’ perilous journey home after the Trojan War, Nolan splits the difference between gritty realism, baroque operatics, and impossible cosmic horrors with an all-star cast including Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, John Leguizamo, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Zendaya, Elliot Page, and more. And who else but Matt “I Need to Get Home” Damon is Odysseus, the haunted king of Ithaca. The Odyssey is a spiritual sequel to Oppenheimer in that it’s another Nolan magnum opus about the dangers of hubris and the destructive power of creation. Except instead of giant bombs, it’s got giants.
In theaters now
2. Inception (2010)
A sci-fi thriller, a heist film, and an elaborate metaphor for filmmaking all rolled into one mesmerizing package. Inception cemented Nolan’s auteur status outside the confines of comic-book IP with a cerebral blockbuster set in the surreal, ever-shifting landscapes of dreams. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a wanted man who organizes a team to infiltrate the dreams of a high-value target to guarantee his own safe passage home. Inception was once Nolan’s biggest and most ambitious movie, with awe-inspiring set pieces and visual effects that even in a post-Avatar world made us pause to ask, “How?” Sure, Nolan has made bigger movies since Inception, but it’s hard to argue they’ve been better.
1. Interstellar (2014)
Love transcends space and time in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 masterpiece, Interstellar. Set on a near-future Earth on the brink of collapse, the films sees Matthew McConaughey playing a retired astronaut who returns to the stars to find a new home for humanity. More than just Nolan’s homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris, Interstellar stands on its own feet as a magnificent and majestic ode to love as the universal force that binds us all. McConaughey is operating at his highest levels as a leading man—his Coop is masculine but warm, in a manner we rarely see in onscreen men these days—while Hans Zimmer ditches the tribal drums for an ethereal 1926 Harrison & Harrison organ.
When Interstellar opened in November 2014, reception was divisive. In the years since, Interstellar has become one of Nolan’s most affecting pictures, proof that even an artist renowned for methodical craftsmanship can be wowed by the mysteries that make us human. After all, the man loves Fast & Furious.
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