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.

Interstellar: “The Loneliest Journey in Human History”

He wept to think that his dreamless slumber had spanned the entire lifetime of his first child.  When he could face the ordeal, he would summon the records that were waiting for him in the memory banks. He would watch his son grow to manhood and hear his voice calling across the centuries with greetings he could never answer…One day the pain would be gone, but never the memory.
           - Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth*

You don’t hear the word “subtle” tossed around much in discussions of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, but here’s something I found quite nuanced about its first hour: The sly hint of a smile that creeps on Cooper’s (Matthew McConaughey) face whenever he discusses the idea of going off into space. For all his insistence that he has a family he needs to care for, Coop can’t help but grin – ever so slightly – when Professor Brand (Michael Caine) tells him that he’s the right man for a daring new space mission. And watch his eyes as he tries later to justify leaving to his distraught daughter Murph: “They chose me, Murph,” he says, and he seems to be beaming – more a proud child than a regretful father.

Coop, whose very name suggests restlessness, and whose one previous attempt to go into space was aborted before he left the stratosphere, basically is a child. Early on, when Murph comes to the breakfast table with a broken lunar lander toy from her bookshelf, he says, “What’d you do to my lander?” Coop’s daughter walks around school with his old science textbooks. He’s a loving parent, but not a particularly attentive one. He forgets parent-teacher conferences; he doesn’t know how to deal with his daughter’s problems; he’s more excited about chasing stray Indian spy drones than he is about getting his kids to school on time. He’s a dreamer, out of his time and place.

“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.

Big Brother is Good People: Welcome to the New Paranoia

It’s a good time to be a paranoid moviegoer. The Adjustment Bureau, based on a story by Philip K. Dick, will no doubt provoke some comparisons to Inception, with its portrait of a world in which our actions and decisions are at the mercy of other people with mysterious powers of influence. Those aren’t the only ones either. Shutter Island, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, The International, and plenty of other movies indulge our certainty that there are those out there with almost absolute control over our fates.

This is Probably Not the Last Piece I'll Write About 'Inception'

Yes, I need to talk about Inception again. The Blu-Ray/DVD hits shelves this week and I’ve got a piece up at Vulture about some new “revelations” (not really) offered by the film’s home video iteration. And I wrote a lot about it earlier in the summer, when it came out, too. An earlier Vulture piece, "The Hidden Inception Within Inception," in which I offer my take on what might be the real twist at the end of the film, might be one of the most widely read things I’ve ever written. (I also wrote about when to take a bathroom break during the film. Oh, and this piece about how many times each character “dies” in the movie.)