Here's Everything I've Written About Christopher Nolan (So Far)

I've written a lot about this fellow Nolan over the years, and people will occasionally ask me if there's a place where they can find links to all my pieces on him. So with Dunkirk opening, it seems like it might be a good idea to collect it all here. And while it seems fairly certain that I will write more about this guy in the future, for now, here's pretty much all of it:


-"Dunkirk Is the Movie Christopher Nolan Was Born to Make." My review of Dunkirk for The Village Voice.

 - "All 10 Christopher Nolan Films, Ranked." For Vulture.

-"Interstellar: The Loneliest Journey in Human History." My lengthy essay about Nolan's much-maligned by some, beloved-by-others sci-fi epic.

"Christopher Nolan and the Brothers Quay Hold Court at Film Forum." A report from a screening and Q&A at Film Forum, where the Quays and Nolan screened some of the brothers' most daring animated works, alongside a short documentary Nolan made about them.

-"You Must Become a Terrible Thought: Nolan, Batman, and Hope." An exploration of The Dark Knight Rises and how its theme of hope fits into Nolan's work.

-"Knight Falls on Gotham." My review of The Dark Knight Rises for the Nashville Scene.

-"What Is Christopher Nolan's Big Idea in The Dark Knight Rises?" This is, I think, the first piece where I lay out my theory that each Nolan film is a fugue built around a specific idea. Written before The Dark Knight Rises came out, I go from discussing the big ideas in his previous films to speculating on what the new film might be about. (I'm wrong.)

-"The Hidden Inception Within Inception." My slightly-deranged, personal theory, written for Vulture, about what's really going on in Inception. (I'm right.)

-"When It's Safe to Hit the Bathroom During Inception." Service journalism at its nerdiest. You need to take a leak. But you also don't want to miss any key information in a movie packed with data. Again for Vulture, I identify two brief moments in the film when you can run out and run back.

-"The Number of Times Each Character Dies in Inception." It's, like, a lot.

-"Six New Things We Learned from the Inception Blu-ray." I don't know if you noticed, but I was kind of obsessed with Inception once upon a time. Luckily, Vulture was there to enable me.

-"This is Probably Not the Last Piece I'll Write About Inception." Hilariously, it sort of was. (At least for now.) But this is also probably the closest thing I wrote to a review of Inception.

-"Christopher Nolan Opens Up at Tribeca." About a live 2015 filmmaker talk that Nolan gave at the Tribeca Film Festival.

“You Must Become a Terrible Thought”: Nolan, Batman, and Hope

I’ve written quite a bit about Christopher Nolan over the years. (Again, go here read my review of The Dark Knight Rises for the Nashville Scene, or go here for some of the pieces I’ve written about Inception.) A couple of months ago, I wrote something for Vulture about the way that Nolan seems to weave his films around individual ideas, in which I also speculated about the potential themes in The Dark Knight Rises – which, needless to say, I hadn’t seen at the time. Having now seen the new film a couple of times, I’d like to talk a bit more about the ideas – or rather, the one main idea – behind it, and how Nolan presents it.

Some context: I said in that Vulture piece that “each of Nolan’s films is built around a single idea that eventually seizes control of the characters and, eventually, the film itself.” In Memento and The Prestige, for example, that idea seems to be identity. In Inception, it’s regret. In Batman Begins, it’s fear. And in Insomnia and The Dark Knight, it appears to be guilt.

Of course, the problem many writers have with Nolan isn’t so much that his films are devoid of ideas or themes, but that said ideas and themes tend to be blunt and inartfully stated. (For some very smart and very critical writing on Nolan's films, you should check out some of Jim Emerson's work.) Needless to say, I disagree. True, Nolan’s dialogue is often quite matter-of-fact about such things: He has Stanley Kubrick’s precision but lacks Kubrick’s talent for the glancing blow, the subtle gesture. What Nolan does have, though, is a unique ability to make sure that everything in his films – not just dialogue, but performance, music, visual style, editing…everything -- whirrs around these central ideas. It’s a single-mindedness, a totality that, for me at least, can be awe-inspiring to watch.