The 12 Best Christopher Nolan Films, Ranked From Ludicrous To Legendary

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Graphic: Kotaku

Christopher Nolan is in the rarified air of directors like Steven Spielberg and James Cameron where his name alone is enough to get audiences to theaters.

Since his first feature film Following in 1998, the English-born, Chicago-raised director has successfully cultivated his own brand of cinematic auteurship. Whether it’s new ideas springing from the deep recesses of his dreams ( Inception ) to his own takes on comic book icons ( Batman trilogy) and figures from history, you can expect elite filmmaking. But that doesn’t mean the director isn’t capable of surprises.

Across his illustrious body of work that includes two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe, and billions at the box office, Nolan’s movies typically deal with damaged and haunted individuals who develop borderline unhealthy obsessions, and his stories encompass ideas like time, memory, perception, and sometimes most of all, guilt. These are often reflected in the meticulously methodical structure of his movies; most of Nolan’s movies are plotted all over the place, breathlessly zig-zagging between past and present. But, like the insides of a Swiss watch, every piece plays a part that contributes to a unified whole.

All of this results in a director who doesn’t seem to have a capital-B Bad movie in his career of two and a half decades. You can debate preferences and question his creative choices, but there aretsi few filmmakers alive whose output is as consistent as Nolan. With news of a new Nolan joint now in the works, let’s look back and rank the director’s movies from “worst” (a relative term, admittedly) to best.

Excluding his shorts, like the surreal Doodlebug, you’ll not find Christopher Nolan in a rawer state than his 1998 film Following. An impressive debut from an artist still finding his voice, Following centers on a nameless writer (Jeremy Theobald) whose habit of following strangers in London gets him dragged into a serial robber’s schemes. It is a lean and mean 70-minute neo-noir, one that “represents the peak” of what he could do “using [my] own resources,” according to Nolan in a 2014 VICE interview .

Following sees Nolan as his own cinematographer, relying on natural lighting and employing an abundance of close-ups and vérité movement – techniques evocative of the French New Wave than the studio formalism he’ll … Read More