For episode 6 we each ranked our top five Christopher Nolan movies, out of his thirteen films, without comparing notes beforehand. We've done five of these top-five lists now, and this is the first time our rankings matched this closely: the exact same top three, in the exact same order. See the full countdown.
Agreeing all the way to #1
Inception took the top spot for both of us. Matt's watched it something like twenty times and still finds the dream-heist premise as inventive as ever, especially the way the film builds out a different sense of time at each dream level. Jeff pointed to the same thing from the other direction: show him another movie with ideas this bold and a departure this complete from the usual heist formula. Both of us also landed on The Prestige at #2, which we rewatched for this episode and both still gave a perfect score. And both of us put Batman Begins at #3, Jeff for how it took Batman's origin to a new level of depth, Matt for how directly Bruce Wayne's self-imposed exile and search for his own way to fight crime spoke to him.
Splitting at #4 and #5
The lists broke apart after that. Jeff put Interstellar at #4, calling it extremely well made with one of Nolan's best endings, and Oppenheimer at #5, a compelling, emotional thought piece he still thought ran a little strange in the Florence Pugh scenes. Matt flipped that pairing: Oppenheimer took his #4 for the technical detail, the Los Alamos production design, and Cillian Murphy's performance, while The Dark Knight rounded out his #5. Matt's a fan of the performances in The Dark Knight across the board, but the stretched-out ending, especially the two-boats sequence, is what kept it out of his top three.
Interstellar only got an honorable mention from Matt, who loves the Miller's planet sequence but can't get past how selfish Matt Damon's character is to the plot. Neither of us ranked Memento, though we both agreed it deserves an honorable mention of its own, and Jeff gave a shoutout to The Odyssey as a filmmaking achievement he's still not sold on, even with its awards buzz.
What this says about Nolan
Jeff raised an interesting point mid-episode: the Nolan who made The Prestige and the Nolan who made The Odyssey are telling completely different kinds of stories, even though the craft is the same guy. Matt's take was that a bigger budget doesn't automatically make a better film, and The Prestige, made for a fraction of what Nolan spends now, is proof. We're both more interested in story and performance than in scale for its own sake, which might be why the three films that mean the most to us, Inception, The Prestige, and Batman Begins, lean on ideas and character work as much as spectacle.
Hear the full conversation, including our review of Sunset Boulevard, on episode 6.
