From “Memento” to “The Odyssey,” here’s how every Christopher Nolan film ranks according to its original EW review.

Every Christopher Nolan film, ranked by EW grade

From “Memento” to “The Odyssey,” here’s how every Christopher Nolan film ranks according to its original EW review.

July 18, 2026 10:00 a.m. ET

‘Memento’; ‘The Dark Knight’; ‘The Odyssey’. Credit:

Newmarket Releasing/Courtesy Everett Collection; Warner Bros; Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker of a rare and increasingly vanishing breed: a director who has built so much trust with audiences over the past two decades that his name alone is often enough to get people into theaters.

What’s particularly remarkable about Nolan, however, is his consistency. Even his most divisive film, 2020’s *Tenet*, has its devoted defenders. And **‘s Wesley Stenzel was so impressed by Nolan’s latest effort — a star-studded adaptation of Homer’s *The Odyssey — *that he wondered whether, nearly 30 years into the filmmaker’s career, Nolan might just be hitting his peak.

As you ponder that question for yourself, join us as we rank Nolan’s films according to the grades they received from EW. The lone exception is his 1998 debut feature, *Following*, which we didn’t review. (Our bad.)

Tenet (2020): B-

Elizabeth Debicki and John David Washington in ‘Tenet’. Warner Bros. Pictures

“Because as much as *Tenet* succeeds at being visually and technologically dazzling, it is more often than not almost unbearably draining. Like most Nolan movies, it refuses to come up for air; even as the camera glides smoothly across the cliffs of Italy’s Amalfi Coast or the spare Nysted Wind Farm in Denmark, there’s a stressful tinge to the proceedings — and not just because ticking spots like these off your overseas vacation bucket list feels like it may now never happen.” —*Nicholas Fonseca* (read more)

Interstellar (2014): B-

Anne Hathaway in ‘Interstellar’.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Paramount Pictures/courtesy Everett

“Chastain, Hathaway, and McConaughey are authentic, emotive performers, and they cry enough in Interstellar to irrigate cornfields. The waterworks are not contagious. Especially in the pathos-drenched final section, Nolan, backed by Hans Zimmer’s hysterical score, tugs strenuously at our heartstrings. But all we feel is the tugging. For a brief moment in galactic time, our most brilliantly cold and clinical filmmaker forgets how to go gentle into that good night.” —*Joe McGovern* (read more)

The Dark Knight Rises (2012): B

Anne Hathaway as Catwoman in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’.

“The movie is built for greatness, not to mention a biggest-stakes-yet conclusion scaled to please fans who thought *The Dark Knight* was snubbed — *snubbed* — during the 2008 awards season. But this time the chief villain is a thuggish baldy named Bane (Tom Hardy) whose charisma pales in comparison with that of Heath Ledger’s Joker — the super-est supernemesis in recent comic-book-movie history. Bane is distinguished mostly by his baroque helmet, with a clawlike mouthguard that is a kid’s worst nightmare of orthodontic headgear.” —*Lisa Schwarzbaum* (read more)

Inception (2010): B+

Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Inception’.

Stephen Vaughan/Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection

“First time around, the movie — part sci-fi fantasy, part gun-toting heist pic, part mindfreak, all filmmaker brio — is dazzling and buzzy. It’s a rolling explosion of images as hypnotizing and sharply angled as any in a drawing by M.C. Escher or a state-of-the-biz video game; the backwards splicing of Nolan’s own *Memento* looks rudimentary by comparison. Only repeated exposure can clarify for each spectator not only what’s going on, but also whether the emotional payoff deepens enough to warrant the arbitrary complexity of the game.” —*L.S.* (read more)**

The Prestige (2006): B+

“Magic or technology? Either way, *The Prestige* wants to fool your senses by ripping a hole in reality. It does so with a busy, at times brutal, single-mindedness. Nolan unfurls the parallel stories of two magicians, the sleek showman Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and the brooding virtuoso of illusion Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), the two of whom start as young partners, but end up as fierce competitors, trying to top each other’s secrets in a fake-out to the death. *The Prestige* leaps around in time with dizzy abandon, a deliberate strategy to make magic seem like the most concrete, grounded thing in the movie. It works, though at the expense of giving the audience much room to breathe.” —*Owen Gleiberman *(read more)**

Insomnia (2002): A-

Robin Williams and Al Pacino in ‘Insomnia’.

Warner Brothers/Courtesy Everett Collection

“The link between the two is the directorial confidence of Christopher Nolan. Neither repeating nor losing touch with the keen trickiness of *Memento* or his feature debut, *Following*, he uses his first big Hollywood picture — a good, basic cop flick — to demonstrate that he’s the real deal. This is a filmmaker in full control of mood, tone, and pacing, to whom actors as wildly different as Pacino and Williams can entrust their best instincts, rather than their showiest.” —*L.S. *(read more)**

The Dark Knight (2008): A-

Heath Ledger as The Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’.

“Heath Ledger‘s mesmerizing, scary-funny performance begins with the creepiness of his image: the greasy long hair, the makeup that looks as if he’d drawn it on with crayons, then messed it with tears. That ghostly rotting paint job covers his scarred smile (explained by a backstory that gives you the willies, even if he just made it up), and the disturbing thing is that when Ledger’s Joker talks, with those “Ehhh, what’s up, Doc?” vowels that make him sound like Al Franken crossed with a nerdish [predator], you realize that the icky sloshing sound you hear is him sucking on his cheeks; he uses his attachment to those scars to fuel his sadistic (and masochistic) whims. This Joker may be a torture [oddity], but he also has a lost quality, a melancholy hidden within those black-circled eyes. He turns slaughter into a punchline; he’s a homicidal comedian with an audience of one — himself. In this, the last performance he completed before his death, Ledger had a maniacal gusto inspired enough to suggest that he might have lived to be as audacious an actor as Marlon Brando, and maybe as great.” —*O.G. *(read more)

Batman Begins (2005): A

Christian Bale in ‘Batman Begins’.

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

*“**Batman Begins*, directed by indie-oriented storyteller Christopher Nolan (*Memento*), is a triumph — a confidently original, engrossing interpretation, with a seriously thought-through (but never self-serious) aesthetic point of view that announces, from the get-go, someone who knows what he’s doing is running the show, and he’s modestly unafraid to do something new. The movie reenergizes Bruce Wayne and his winged mammalian disguise for a 21st-century relaunch, after the Hollywoodized Caped Crusader had giggled and vamped to a dead end with 1997’s *Batman & Robin*.” —*L.S. *(read more)**

Oppenheimer (2023): A

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in ‘Oppenheimer’.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

“As the title makes clear, this movie is about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” For most of the three-hour runtime, Nolan places the viewer *inside* Oppenheimer’s prodigious brain. We see the world as this theoretical physicist did, meaning the action is often interrupted by incredible visions of subatomic particles and cosmic fire. Yet *Oppenheimer* also has aspects of a memory play, or at least an exhaustive biography cut up and shuffled around. Even more than Nolan’s previous film, *Tenet*, *Oppenheimer* flits about in time, effortlessly moving in and out of different events that took place across several decades, drawing connections that are logical but far from linear.” —*Christian Holub* (read more)**

Dunkirk (2017): A

Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, and Fionn Whitehead in ‘Dunkirk’. Warner Bros. Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection

“Nolan has for all intents and purposes conjured the British response to Steven Spielberg‘s *Saving Private Ryan*. If you can imagine that film’s kinetic, nerve-wracking 29-minute opening D-Day invasion stretched out to feature length, this is what it would look like. It’s a towering achievement, not just of the sort of drum-tight storytelling we’ve come to expect from the director of *Memento*, *The Dark Knight*, and *Inception*, but also of old-school, handmade filmmaking.” —*Chris Nashawaty *(read more)

The Odyssey (2026): A

Matt Damon in ‘The Odyssey’.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

“Regardless of where you might place *The Odyssey* in your ranking of Nolan’s work, it feels basically undeniable that the film has four or five of the greatest sequences that the filmmaker has ever committed to celluloid. Within each of these sequences is a remarkable tonal balance: the director’s commitment to practical effects and grounded production design makes the film’s mythical world feel tactile and accessible, yet the disorienting scale of the image (especially on IMAX film) and Ludwig Göransson’s pulsing, ethereal score combine to make for an eerie, otherworldly atmosphere.” —*Wesley Stenzel *(read more)

Memento (2000): A

Guy Pearce in ‘Memento’.

Danny Rothenberg/Newmarket

“*Memento* has a spooky repetitive urgency that takes on the clarity of a dream; it’s like an Oliver Sacks case study played as malevolent film noir. Pearce, frantic and disheveled, lends even the smallest events the aura of a life-or-death search, a quest for meaning.” —*O.G. *(read more)**

- Movie Reviews & Recommendations

Original Article on Source

Source: “EW Movie”