Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan made a short called Doodlebug and a black-and-white first feature, Following, before Memento put him on the map in 2000 with a thriller told backwards. The reverse structure was not a gimmick, it was a working thesis about withholding information, and every film since has come out of the same instinct. Insomnia bought him studio credibility, Batman Begins bought him a franchise, and by The Dark Knight he was one of very few directors who could open a serious three-hour film on a holiday weekend and be trusted with the budget.

What he is good at is architecture. Nolan builds films whose structure is the suspense: the two timelines of The Prestige, the nested clocks of Inception, the three separate durations running simultaneously in Dunkirk, which is his most formally daring work and his least talkative. He shoots on film at enormous scale and prefers a real object to a rendered one, and audiences can tell, even when they cannot say why.

The standing criticisms are fair. His characters explain rules to each other, his women have historically been motivations rather than people, and his sound mixes bury dialogue under the score. Tenet is where those habits collapsed into incoherence. Oppenheimer is the correction, and the reason it finally won him Best Director and Best Picture: it is a film in which the talking is the action, three hours of men in rooms deciding things, so the elaborate structure at last has something worth holding up. He was appointed CBE in 2019 and knighted in 2024. The Odyssey is next, which is either the perfect subject for him or a trap.