The Best Christopher Nolan Movies, Definitively Ranked

Christopher Nolan is the biggest brand-name movie director since the days of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, which puts him in the running for biggest brand-name movie director of all time, at least in the realm of English-language cinema. (Although: His movies are overseas sensations, too. Tenet didn’t make $350 million worldwide off of a blockbuster U.S. release.) The strange thing about this is that Spielberg at his commercial peak was considered a populist, a director whose name became synonymous with big, mass-appeal hits and his ability to make them. Especially post-Batman, Nolan seems uniquely well-positioned to engineer those hits from his name, maintaining a perception that he’s an artsy auteur even as he makes billion-dollar smashes. He’s a fusion, then, of Spielberg-level monocultural ubiquity and dorm-room-poster quasi-alternative cool—which is to say, for hardcore film people, he’s probably come to seem more than a little square, a basic-bro cliché refreshed for the geek generation. (The James Cameron of Stanley Kubricks?)