oppenheimer movie review focus on the family

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• DVD & Streaming

Oppenheimer

• Biography/History , Drama

Content Caution

In Theaters

• July 13, 2023
• Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer; Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer; Matt Damon as Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves; Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss; Macon Blair as Lloyd Garrison; Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence; Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock; Jefferson Hall as Haakon Chevalier; Josh Zuckerman as Rossi Lomanitz; David Krumholtz as Isidor Rabi; Guy Burnet as George Eltenton; Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr; James D’Arcy as Patrick Blackett; Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer; Tom Conti as Albert Einstein; David Dastmalchian as William Borden; Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols; Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs; Benny Safdie as Edward Teller; Casey Affleck as Boris Pash; Gary Oldman as Harry Truman

Home Release Date

• November 21, 2023
• Christopher Nolan

Distributor

• Universal Pictures

Positive Elements   |   Spiritual Elements   |   Sexual & Romantic Content   |   Violent Content   |   Crude or Profane Language   |   Drug & Alcohol Content   |   Other Noteworthy Elements   | Conclusion

Movie Review

“Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown,”Jesus said in Luke 4:24

That can certainly be said of J. Robert Oppenheimer, too. The theoretical physicist is called a prophet among physicists in the field. But despite his advancements in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, very few people in America seem to like him.

In fact, when Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves comes to Oppenheimer’s classroom, looking to recruit him for a secret experiment called the Manhattan Project, Groves tells him as much: People around him see Oppenheimer as a “dilettante, womanizer, suspected communist.”

“Oppenheimer couldn’t run a hamburger stand,” Grove quotes.

Oppenheimer smirks. “I couldn’t,” he admits. “But I can run the Manhattan Project.”

From a technical standpoint, Oppenheimer’s selection as the director of the Project was an obvious choice. His awards and accolades made him the perfect man for the job.

But from a political standpoint, Oppenheimer garners a lot of suspicion.

That’s because while Oppenheimer might never say that he’s a Communist sympathizer, he’s sure got a lot of friends and family who are. And sure , maybe the Russians are technically fighting on the same side of World War II as the Americans, but that doesn’t mean the two superpowers truly see each other as allies.

So when someone leaks information to the communist-dominated country, it’s not long until the finger points at Oppenheimer. And that’s only the tip on an iceberg of evidence against the man.

And those accusations about his character and conduct will threaten to sink the father of the atomic bomb professionally in the years to come.

Positive Elements

The dropping of an atomic bomb is not an easy topic. Characters debate the morality of such an action. Someone warns that the creation of the atomic bomb will result in the deaths of many innocent people. “You drop a bomb,” he says, “and it falls on the just and the unjust.”

In one scene, officials argue about whether the bomb would result in fewer deaths on both sides of the conflict than a ground invasion of Japan. And so those involved continue to press forward with their grim “gadget” because they believe an invasion would be deadlier for all.

Characters furthermore debate the morality of creating a bomb itself. Some feel that such a weapon will force countries to get along, since people will finally realize that a future war could now end the human race with a single button push. And when physicists theorize that the bomb could ignite the world’s atmosphere in a chain reaction, some push to share the findings with Russia and the Nazis in order to warn them about that potentially world-ending consequence.

Though the film’s depiction of Oppenheimer tends to sit more towards the middle of the political spectrum, unwilling to fully commit one way or another, such a mentality makes him a prime suspect during the Red Scare. Indeed, many of Oppenheimer’s family members and friends sympathized with the Communist party, and the government fears that Oppenheimer might leak information to the Russians. But when Oppenheimer comes under fire for his alleged beliefs, many people, including those who disagree with him, stick up for him, expressing that they believe he’s loyal to the country.

Early in the movie, Oppenheimer and many of the scientists he recruits to his team seem particularly motivated by the plight of the Jews in Germany. Oppenheimer himself is Jewish, though not particularly devout. But he and many of his peers are primarily motivated not just by the desire to beat Germany in the production of the atomic bomb, but to save Jews and to keep Hitler from potentially using the invention upon them should his scientists succeed first (which they don’t).

Not all of those German scientists, we learn, want to serve Hitler’s research, and at least one of them is liberated from Nazi-held territory and then encourages Oppenheimer’s team.

Spiritual Elements

Oppenheimer is compared to an Old Testament prophet by another Jewish man, and the man warns Oppenheimer that such a title means he can’t be wrong—not once. He’s also compared to Prometheus, a Greek deity who stole fire from the gods to give it to humanity.

Oppenheimer also has a few visions or hallucinations. While some of these visions are depicted as something like traumatic moments of PTSD for the physicist, others show Oppenheimer seemingly looking into the cosmos to divine deeper meaning.

We additionally hear some other brief mentions of spirituality. Oppenheimer’s famous quote, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” comes from the Hindu sacred writing the Bhagavad Gita and is spoken there by the Hindu god Vishnu.

A passing comment references Albert Einstein’s objection to quantum physics: “God does not play dice.” A man is described as the “son of a Russian Orthodox priest.” When thinking about the code name for the nuclear test, Oppenheimer offers “Trinity,” referencing a poem by John Donne. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” Oppenheimer recites.

After Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, learns of one of her husband’s affair, she tells him that he doesn’t “get to commit a sin and have us all feel sorry” for him. A thermonuclear reaction is described as “a terrible revelation of divine power.”

Sexual & Romantic Content

Oppenheimer is described as a “womanizer,” and we endure some scenes of his escapades. In several scenes, Oppenheimer has sex with a woman. They’re both naked, and her breasts are visible, as are sexual movements. There’s also post-coital conversation afterward in which the woman’s breasts are again visible.

In one case, when a board questions Oppenheimer’s visits to a woman who was a known member of the Communist party, he suddenly appears naked in the room as the woman has sex with him there in front of everyone. The scene is meant to artistically symbolize how Kitty feels betrayed while she listens to Oppenheimer discuss the moment.

And on the subject of Kitty, the two initially meet at a party, and Oppenheimer continues to flirt with her despite discovering that she’s already married. The two engage in an affair (something we’ll hear is a relatively common thing for Oppenheimer). Kitty soon reveals that she’s pregnant, and she resolves to divorce her husband and marry Oppenheimer before the pregnancy begins to show. And even after Oppenheimer marries Kitty, we see him have an affair with another woman, and we hear of another that is spoken about during the testimony against him.

Someone crudely and sarcastically references doing violence to a man’s male anatomy. When a male scientist argues with a female scientist regarding how radiation exposure might affect her reproductive system, she quips, “Your reproductive system is more exposed than mine.” Two people kiss in celebration of the bomb’s success. Oppenheimer and Kitty kiss as well.

Violent Content

As Oppenheimer and his team cheerfully celebrate the successful dropping of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer has a disturbing vision of sorts in which he imagines the people in the audience suffering the effects of the bomb: One woman’s skin begins peeling from her face, and Oppenheimer accidentally steps into the chest cavity of a charred corpse. We later hear reports of the bomb’s gruesome effect on the Japanese people. We’re also told of a firebombing which killed an estimated 100,000 people, “mostly civilians.”

The number of casualties ultimately reported by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are perhaps bigger than what had been estimated, and we have the sense that at least some of the Manhattan Project team members are struggling to come to grips with the violence that they they’ve unleashed.

When Oppenheimer tries to articulate a sense of responsibility for those deaths in a conversation with President Harry Truman, Truman himself chides the scientists and says that he was the one who’ll be remembered as responsible for those casualties, not Oppenheimer.

A woman is briefly seen dead, her head submerged in a bathtub. She’s overdosed on pills and committed suicide by drowning herself. A man suggests torturing someone to death. Oppenheimer injects someone’s apple with potassium cyanide, but he intercepts it before a victim could eat it.

And, of course, we watch the test of the bomb go off.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word is used eight times, and the s-word is heard four times. We also hear the occasional uses of “a–,” “d–n,” “h—” and “crap.” God’s name is used in vain six times, three of which take the form of “g-dd–n.” Jesus’ name is abused three times.

Drug & Alcohol Content

People drink an assortment of alcoholic beverages. Oppenheimer smokes cigarettes almost continually, and there’s smoking by him and others throughout the movie. Someone notes that the bar at Los Alamos is “always running.”

Other Noteworthy Elements

A man vomits. In a couple of scenes, Kitty and Oppenheimer neglect their children, who always seem to be crying. Both would say that they’re lousy parents; in fact, they ask a set of friends to care for their firstborn for several months so that Oppenheimer can focus exclusively on the Manhattan Project.

Robert Oppenheimer is a theoretical physicist. But, he admits, the problem with theory is that, until it’s tested, that’s all it’ll be.

The problem with actually testing an atomic weapon is that it risks the end of the world. Physicist Edward Teller suggested that such a weapon could (once again, in theory) cause a chain reaction that might destroy the world. His concern was that the bomb could produce temperatures so hot that it would cause the world’s hydrogen to fuse together into helium in an explosive way—similar to how our sun creates energy. This chain reaction would quickly envelop the whole world and end life as we know it.

Of course, we’re still here. Obviously, that theory didn’t immediately bear fruit. But Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan suggests that when the first atomic bomb exploded, it did ignite a chain reaction—but not the one Teller theorized. The movie grimly suggests that nuclear annihilation is still a possible outcome, and perhaps even an inescapable one. It just hasn’t come to pass … yet.

That chain reaction is illustrated by some early scenes that show Oppenheimer averting a tragic outcome at the last possible moment. In a moment of wrath, Oppenheimer poisons his professor’s apple, only snatching it away once he realizes what he’s done.

But Oppenheimer cannot snatch away the atomic bomb. Because, as one character explains, the bomb “isn’t a new weapon. It’s a new world.”

Oppenheimer paints a bleak picture of the future of humanity. But let’s be clear: A bleak worldview isn’t why Nolan’s latest drama has an R-rating. That’s where the content comes in.

For a film set primarily during World War II, the violence of the bomb is only hauntingly hinted at here. Jean Tatlock’s suicide by drowning should also be noted.

But Oppenheimer ’s biggest content issues arise from its sexual content and crude language, the latter of which is due to the film’s many uses of the f-word. A couple of scenes contain explicit sex and nudity—most prominently when Oppenheimer has a nude conversation with his ex-lover, the camera showing off the woman’s breasts and barely hiding the two’s lower bits.

That’s not to say that Oppenheimer doesn’t provide some interesting and important perspective into a monumentous moment in American history. It definitely does. But prospective viewers will need to prepare themselves for a film that, while not world-ending, certainly leans into content that easily could have been suggested far less graphically.

Kennedy Unthank

Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”

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Oppenheimer

For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film’s most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face. 

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) is a film about faces. They talk, a lot. They listen. They react to good and bad news. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads—none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan’s primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico’s desert panoramas but contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. Close-up after close-up shows star Cillian Murphy’s face staring into the middle distance, off-screen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, and waking nightmares. “Oppenheimer” rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people’s faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they’ve done to themselves and others. 

Sometimes the close-ups of people’s faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven’t happened, or already happened. There are recurring images of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don’t just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer’s team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer’s life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The “fissile” cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer’s career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact). 

The weight of the film’s interests and meanings are carried by faces—not just Oppenheimer’s, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon ), Los Alamos’ military supervisor; Robert’s suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer ( Emily Blunt ), whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey , Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer’s post-Los Alamos career. The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer’s Mozart, regularly and often pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, back in the day, and that he’s a good person, unlike Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This film asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a third party who then wrote to the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The film speaks quite often of one of the principles of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the results of this experiment. The editing illustrates it by constantly re-framing our perception of an event to change its meaning, and the script does it by adding new information that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a character did something, or whether they even knew why they did it. 

That, I believe, is really what “Oppenheimer” is about, much more so than the atom bomb itself, or even its impact on the war and the Japanese civilian population, which is talked about but never shown. The film does show what the atom bomb does to human flesh, but it’s not recreations of the actual attacks on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines Americans going through it. This filmmaking decision is likely to antagonize both viewers who wanted a more direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those who have bought into the arguments advanced by Strauss and others that the bombs had to be dropped because Japan never would have surrendered otherwise. The movie doesn’t indicate whether it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides more with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that point in World War II and would have eventually given up without atomic attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No, this is a film that permits itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we expect it to do: Dramatize the life of Oppenheimer and other historically significant people in his orbit in an aesthetically daring way while also letting all of the characters and all of the events be used metaphorically and symbolically as well, so that they become pointillistic elements in a much larger canvas that’s about the mysteries of the human personality and the unforeseen impact of decisions made by individuals and societies.

This is another striking thing about “Oppenheimer.” It’s not entirely about Oppenheimer even though Murphy’s baleful face and haunting yet opaque eyes dominate the movie. It’s also about the effect of Oppenheimer’s personality and decisions on other people, from the other strong-willed members of his atom bomb development team (including Benny Safdie’s Edwin Teller, who wanted to skip ahead to create the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, and eventually did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock ( Florence Pugh , who has some of Gloria Grahame’s self-immolating smolder); General Groves, who likes Oppenheimer in spite of his arrogance but isn’t going to side with him over the United States government; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (played in a marvelous cameo by Gary Oldman ) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic “crybaby” who sees history mainly in terms of his own feelings.

Jennifer Lame’s editing is prismatic and relentless, often in a faintly Terrence Malick -y way, skipping between three or more time periods within seconds. It’s wedded to virtually nonstop music by  Ludwig Göransson  that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd but distinctive sort of scientifically expository aria that’s probably what it would feel like to read American Prometheus  while listening to a playlist of  Philip Glass film scores. Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do, and they also capture what it’s like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling). It also paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually. The mind stays anchored to the text. But it also jumps outside of it, connecting the text to other texts, to external knowledge, and to one’s own experience and imaginings.

This review hasn’t delved into the plot of the film or the real-world history that inspired it, not because it isn’t important (of course it is) but because—as is always the case with Nolan—the main attraction is not the tale but the telling. Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stories. But whether that characterization was true (and I’m increasingly convinced it never entirely was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it’s been applied to a biography of a real person. “Oppenheimer” could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director’s filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he’d been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward.

The movie is an academic-psychedelic biography in the vein of those 1990s Oliver Stone films that were edited within an inch of their lives (at times it’s as if the park bench scene in “ JFK “ had been expanded to three hours). There’s also a strain of pitch-black humor, in a Stanley Kubrick  mode, as when top government officials meet to go over a list of possible Japanese cities to bomb, and the man reading the list says that he just made an executive decision to delete Kyoto from it because he and his wife honeymooned there. (The Kubrick connection is cemented further by the presence of “Full Metal Jacket” star  Matthew Modine , who co-stars as American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush.) It’s an example of top-of-the-line, studio-produced popular art with a dash of swagger, variously evoking Michael Mann’s “ The Insider ,” late-period Terrence Malick, nonlinearly-edited art cinema touchstones like “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” “The Pawnbroker,” “All That Jazz” and “ Picnic at Hanging Rock “; and, inevitably, “ Citizen Kane ” (there’s even a Rosebud-like mystery surrounding what Oppenheimer and his hero Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti , talked about on the banks of a Princeton pond). 

Most of the performances have a bit of an “old movie” feeling, with the actors snapping off their lines and not moving their faces as much as they would in a more modern story. A lot of the dialogue is delivered quickly, producing a screwball comedy energy. This comes through most strongly in the arguments between Robert and Kitty about his sexual indiscretions and refusal to listen to her mostly superb advice; the more abstract debates about power and responsibility between Robert and General Groves, and the scenes between Strauss and a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) who is advising him as he testifies before a committee that he hopes will approve him to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinet.

But as a physical experience, “Oppenheimer” is something else entirely—it’s hard to say exactly what, and that’s what’s so fascinating about it. I’ve already heard complaints that the movie is “too long,” that it could’ve ended with the first bomb detonating, and could’ve done without the bits about Oppenheimer’s sex life and the enmity of Strauss, and that it’s perversely self-defeating to devote so much of the running time, including the most of the third hour, to a pair of governmental hearings: the one where Oppenheimer tries to get his security clearance renewed, and Strauss trying to get approved for Eisenhower’s cabinet. But the film’s furiously entropic tendencies complement the theoretical discussions of the how’s and why’s of the individual and collective personality. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are appearing before a tribunal and bring called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The tribunal is out there in the dark. We’ve been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer
• Emily Blunt as Katherine 'Kitty' Oppenheimer
• Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves Jr.
• Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss
• Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock
• Benny Safdie as Edward Teller
• Michael Angarano as Robert Serber
• Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence
• Rami Malek as David Hill
• Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr
• Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols
• Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer
• David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi
• Alden Ehrenreich as Senate Aide
• Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush
• Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman
• Alex Wolff as Luis Walter Alvarez
• Casey Affleck as Boris Pash
• Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman
• Emma Dumont as Jackie Oppenheimer
• Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg
• David Dastmalchian as William L. Borden
• Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs
• Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge
• Tony Goldwyn as Gordon Gray
• Olivia Thirlby as Lilli Hornig
• James Remar as Henry Stimson
• Christopher Nolan

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Jennifer Lame

Writer (based on the book by)

• Martin Sherwin
• Ludwig Göransson

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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.

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‘Oppenheimer’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director christopher nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film, starring cillian murphy..

Hi, I’m Christopher Nolan director, writer, and co-producer of “Oppenheimer.” Opening with the raindrops on the water came late to myself and Jen Lane in the edit suite. But ultimately, it became a motif that runs the whole way through the film. Became very important. These opening images of the detonation at Trinity are based on the real footage. Andrew Jackson, our visual effects supervisor, put them together using analog methods to try and reproduce the incredible frame rates that their technology allowed at the time, superior to what we have today. Adapting Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus,” I fully embraced the Prometheun theme, but ultimately chose to change the title to “Oppenheimer” to give a more direct idea of what the film was going to be about and whose point of view we’re seeing. And here we have Cillian Murphy with an IMAX camera inches from his nose. Hoyte van Hoytema was incredible. IMAX camera revealing everything. And I think, to some degree, applying the pressure to Cillian as Oppenheimer that this hearing was applying. “Yes, your honor.” “We’re not judges, Doctor.” “Oh.” And behind him, out of focus, the great Emily Blunt who’s going to become so important to the film as Kitty Oppenheimer, who gradually comes more into focus over the course of the first reel. We divided the two timelines into fission and fusion, the two different approaches to releasing nuclear energy in this devastating form to try and suggest to the audience the two different timelines. And then embraced black-and-white shooting here. Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss being shot on IMAX black-and-white film. The first time anyone’s ever shot that film. Made especially for us. And he’s here talking to Alden Ehrenreich who is absolutely indicative of the incredible ensemble that our casting director John Papsidera put together. Robert Downey Jr. utterly transformed, I think, not just in terms of appearance, but also in terms of approach to character, stripping away years of very well-developed charisma to just try and inhabit the skin of a somewhat awkward, sometimes venal, but also charismatic individual, and losing himself in this utterly. And then as we come up to this door, we go into the Senate hearing rooms. And we try to give that as much visibility, grandeur, and glamour to contrast with the security hearing that’s so claustrophobic. And takes Oppenheimer completely out of the limelight. [CROWD SHOUTING]

By Manohla Dargis

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.

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The movie is based on “ American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.

The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.

The story tracks Oppenheimer — played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy — across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child.

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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: Christopher Nolan Makes a Riveting Historical Psychodrama, but It Doesn’t Build to a Big Bang

Cillian Murphy gives a phenomenal performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw creation of the atomic bomb, in a film that's ruthlessly authentic and, for much of its three hours, gripping.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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In the early scenes of “ Oppenheimer ,” J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ), an American physics student attending graduate school in England and Germany in the 1920s, with bright blue marble eyes and a curly wedge of hair that stands up like Charlie Chaplin’s, keeps having visions of particles and waves. We see the images that are disrupting his mind, the particles pulsating, the waves aglow in vibratory bands of light. Oppenheimer can see the brave new world of quantum physics, and the visual razzmatazz is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a biopic written and directed by Christopher Nolan : a molecular light show as a reflection of the hero’s inner spirit.

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The film opens with a flash forward to the 1954 hearing of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that ultimately resulted in Oppenheimer, accused (among other things) of having hidden Communist ties, being stripped of his security clearance. This was the government’s way of silencing him, since in the postwar world he’d become something of a dove on the issue of nuclear weapons, a view that didn’t mesh with America’s Cold War stance of aggression. The hearing was the darkest chapter of Oppenheimer’s life, and using it as a framing device feels, at first, like a very standard thing to do.

Except that the film keeps returning to the hearing, weaving it deep into the fabric of its three-hour running time. Lewis Strauss, played with a captivating bureaucratic terseness by Robert Downey Jr. , is the A.E.C. chairman who became Oppenheimer’s ideological and personal enemy (after Oppenheimer humiliated him during a congressional testimonial), and he’s the secret force behind the hearing, which takes place in a back room hidden away from the press. As Oppenheimer defends himself in front of a committee of hanging judges, the movie uses his anecdotes to flash back in time, and Nolan creates a hypnotic multi-tiered storytelling structure, using it to tease out the hidden continuities that shaped Oppenheimer’s life and his creation of the bomb.

We see how the Cold War really started before World War II was over — it was always there, shaping the rapt paranoia of atom-bomb politics. We see that Oppenheimer the ruthless nuclear zealot and Oppenheimer the mystic idealist were one and the same. And we see that the race to complete the Manhattan Project, rooted in the makeshift creation of a small desert city that Oppenheimer presides over in Los Alamos, New Mexico, meant that the momentum of the nuclear age was already taking on a life of its own.      

In the ’30s, Oppenheimer, already a legend in his own mind, brings quantum mechanics to the U.S., even as his field of passion encompasses Picasso, Freud, and Marx, not to mention the absorbing of half a dozen languages (from Dutch to Sanskrit), all to soak up the revolutionary energy field that’s sweeping the world, influencing everything from physics to workers’ liberation. Oppenheimer isn’t a Communist, but he’s a devoted leftist with many Communists in his life, from his brother and sister-and-law to his doleful bohemian mistress, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). What really makes his eyes go bright is when the atom gets split by two German scientists, in 1938. He at first insists it’s not possible, but then his colleagues at Berkeley, led by Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), demonstrate that it is, and he realizes in an instant where all this points: to the possibility of a bomb.

“Oppenheimer” has a mesmerizing first half, encompassing everything from Oppenheimer’s mysterious Princeton encounter with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) to his far from utopian marriage to the alcoholic Kitty (played with scalding force by Emily Blunt ). Just about everything we see is stunning in its accuracy. “Oppenheimer” isn’t a movie that traffics in composite characters or audience-friendly arcs; Nolan channels the grain of reality, the fervor and detail of what really happened. And the buildup to the creation of the first atomic bomb just about ticks with cosmic suspense. There are Soviet spies at Los Alamos, as well as a sinister comic grace note: the possibility (“a little more than zero”) that the chain reaction begun by the nuclear explosion could spread to the earth’s atmosphere and never stop, an apocalypse that theoretical physics can’t totally rule out.

But the big bang itself, when it finally arrives, as the bomb is tested in the wee hours of that fateful day code-named Trinity, is, I have to say, a letdown. Nolan shows it impressionistically — the sound cutting out, images of what look like radioactive hellfire. But the terrifying awesomeness, the nightmare bigness of it all, does not come across. Nor does it evoke the descriptions of witnesses who say that the blast was streaked with purple and gray and was many times brighter than the noonday sun.

And once Oppenheimer shoots past that nuclear climax, a certain humming intensity leaks out of the movie. We’re still at the damn A.E.C. hearing (after two hours), and the film turns into a woeful meditation on what the bomb meant, whether it should have been dropped, our rivalry with the Soviets, and how Oppenheimer figured into all of that, including his relegation to the status of defrocked Cold War scapegoat. What happened to Oppenheimer, at the height of the McCarthy era, was nothing less than egregious (though it’s relevant that he was never officially convicted of disloyalty). At the same time, there are scenes in which characters take him to task for his vanity, for making the bomb all about him . In one of them, he’s dressed down by no less than President Harry Truman (an unbilled Gary Oldman). Is Truman right?

The most radically authentic line in the movie may be the one where Oppenheimer, just after the Nazis have been defeated, explains to a room full of young Los Alamos scientists why he feels it’s still justifiable to use the bomb on Japan. We all know the dogmatic lesson we learned in high school: that dropping those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war and saved the lives of countless U.S. soldiers. From the age of 15, I’ve never bought the rationale of that argument. But I buy what Oppenheimer says here: that by using a nuclear weapon, we would create a horrific demonstration of why it could never, ever be used again. (It’s not that that’s a justification . It’s that it’s an explanation of why it happened.)

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, July 17, 2023. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 180 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release of a Syncopy production, in association with Atlas Entertainment. Producers: Emma Thomas, Charles Roven, Christopher Nolan. Executive producers: J. David Wargo, James Woods, Thomas Hayslip.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Christopher Nolan. Camera: Hoyt van Hoytema. Editor: Jennifer Lame. Music: Ludwig Göransson.
• With: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh.

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Oppenheimer review: Christopher Nolan's powerful, timely masterpiece deserves the biggest screens

Surrounded by a deep cast of passionate actors, Cillian Murphy gives an astounding performance as the "father of the atomic bomb."

Christian Holub is a writer covering comics and other geeky pop culture. He's still mad about 'Firefly' getting canceled.

Like the brilliant scientist it takes as its subject, Oppenheimer arrives at a crucial moment in history. At a time when almost every big-budget Hollywood movie (including its opening weekend rival, Barbie ) is drawn from corporate intellectual property, Oppenheimer is an unapologetically brainy movie with great actors playing real people, a true story with important details many viewers will be learning for the first time, and which, despite its roots in reality, feels massive and worthy of director Christopher Nolan 's beloved IMAX screen.

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.

Embodying the man at the center of this universe, the constant in this shifting sea of science and history, is therefore no easy task — but Cillian Murphy rises to the challenge with an absolutely absorbing performance. Murphy has been working with Nolan for years, often in key supporting roles such as the villainous Scarecrow in Batman Begins and the primary target of Inception 's dream heist. But the actor has proved his leading-man bona fides elsewhere (most recently in the long-running Netflix crime series Peaky Blinders ) and finally brings that side of his skillset home to Nolan. No question, the close-ups on Murphy's face as Oppenheimer thinks through the 20th century's thorniest problems are as compelling as the film's atomic explosions, and as deserving of the biggest screen possible.

But just as Oppenheimer, for all his world-historical genius, could only accomplish his great feat because he was surrounded by many other brilliant thinkers, so is Murphy supported by a galaxy of top-notch actors. Matt Damon brings his movie-star charisma to General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project whose gruff charms obscures his ulterior motives.

Robert Downey Jr . plays Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer's rival for control over postwar nuclear policy, and uses his own considerable acting powers to carve out a sizable portion of the film for himself. Strauss' strategy meetings amidst contentious 1959 Senate hearings over his cabinet nomination are the only scenes not set from Oppenheimer's direct perspective, signified both by their black-and-white color grading and Downey's domination of the screen. Downey was one of the most popular and influential American movie stars of the 2010s, but through some mixture of pandemic-era delays and post-Marvel malaise, it's been years since we've seen him in top form. Watching Downey give such a meaty big-screen performance again is not an opportunity to be squandered — especially considering the meta resonance of Downey and Nolan, who each played foundational roles in the rise of the modern superhero blockbuster, collaborating on a film about an inventor feeling ambivalent about his great creation.

Other standouts from Oppenheimer 's deep bench include David Krumholtz, following up his recent heartbreaking Broadway performance in Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt with a key turn here as physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi. Krumholtz brings an important sense of Jewish experience to a movie whose protagonist (a Jewish person, played by an Irish actor) is constantly talking about the need to build the atomic bomb before the Nazis do. Rabi is more skeptical: "I don't want decades of physics to culminate in a bomb."

Another Jewish critic of the supposedly anti-Nazi atomic bomb is Albert Einstein, whom Tom Conti plays with the levity of an old legend who has seen the world transformed by his greatest accomplishment (the theory of relativity) in a way he does not care for. By the time the film ends, Oppenheimer will understand how he feels. After all, the atomic bomb was ultimately not used to defeat the Nazis, but to incinerate Japanese civilians.

The Manhattan Project was mostly a boys' club, as many of Nolan's past movies have been. Of all the criticisms the highly-successful director has attracted throughout his career, the stickiest is that his female characters are often "dead wives," whose ghostly after-images serve merely as motivation for the male protagonists. But Emily Blunt 's Kitty Oppenheimer is defiantly alive, in spite of the worldwide crises of the '30s and '40s. Far from the archetype of a "devoted wife," Kitty is not shy about expressing her frustrations with motherhood or her dissatisfaction with politics. Blunt is a great partner for Murphy in their scenes together: bringing him down to Earth when he's off in the clouds, reminding him to fight when he seems content to let history wash over him.

The other primary female character in the film, Jean Tatlock, is played by Florence Pugh . The rising star feels a bit out of place standing alongside her older and more experienced costars, but Pugh brings Oppenheimer a heaping helping of sex and politics — two sides of life that have often been missing from Nolan's earlier films. Tatlock was a committed communist, and attended several party meetings alongside Oppenheimer (who was disturbed by the rise of genocidal Nazism and wanted to support the anti-fascist Republicans in the Spanish Civil War).

The film's attention to political history contributes to its sense of timeliness. Here is a summer blockbuster whose characters vigorously discuss the importance of labor unions and anti-fascist organizing, arriving just as Hollywood's real-life unions are walking picket lines. (The stars even left the film's glitzy premiere as soon as the SAG-AFTRA strike began .) Though viewers might expect Oppenheimer to climax with the Trinity Test at Los Alamos (which is indeed spectacular ), the film spends a final hour exploring the 1954 closed-door hearing where Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked for his ties to communists. Standing in for the McCarthyite era at large, these scenes demonstrate how despite the Allied victory over the fascists, the use of Oppenheimer's atomic bomb empowered reactionaries at home to betray the very people who made their victory possible.

Content meets form here. Oppenheimer is full of heady topics like quantum mechanics and political history, which few viewers will consider themselves experts on. But the film explains these ideas in ways more creative than the exposition dumps of Inception or the just-roll-with-it chaos of Tenet . When Oppenheimer first meets Kitty, she asks him to explain quantum physics. He does so by saying that everything in existence is composed of individual atoms, strung together by forces that make matter seem solid to our eyes, even though it's essentially not. In their next scene, Kitty explains how her second husband was a union organizer who died fighting fascists in Spain. Her life, which seemed solid, was completely undone by a single tiny bullet. Oppenheimer gets to experience this firsthand in 1954, when people who he thought of as allies and friends betray him for their own personal gain.

The study of physics is bifurcated into two disciplines: theory (Oppenheimer's specialty) and practice (embodied by Josh Hartnett 's Ernest Lawrence). Communism, too, is often divided into theory and practice. Though they may seem disparate, the many elements of Oppenheimer refract and reflect each other, like a bunch of atoms creating a chain reaction or a group of scientists building off each other's ideas to forge something new. Grade: A

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Review: 'Oppenheimer' emerges as a monumental achievement on the march into screen history

"It's kind of a horror movie," understates director Christopher Nolan of "Oppenheimer,"

his brilliant, bruising take on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the dark knight of the atomic age. Murphy's pale blue eyes become a path into a tortured soul as Nolan—a true film artist in works as diverse as "Memento" and "Dunkirk," creates a new film classic.

Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman's 2005 biography, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," Nolan's three-hour-plus masterpiece fills up our senses with the details of quantum mechanics to ignite the story of an American theoretical physicist who helped invent the ultimate weapon of mass destruction and lived to regret it.

Murphy's performance, flawless in every detail, encompasses how Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project team relocated to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to accelerate development of the weapon that would help end WW2 through the cataclysmic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and usher in the threat of nuclear annihilation that's only escalated over time.

Nolan uses radio reports to detail the effects of those bombs, saving the eye-searing visuals for the 1945 Trinity test in the New Mexico desert to bring home the destruction being unleashed. The superb sound design in which silence alternates with waves of reverberation to bring the unthinkable to devastating life is unmissable, unforgettable and scary as hell.

Shot with Imax cameras by the great Hoyte van Hoytema, "Oppenheimer" deserves to be seen on the biggest screen with a state-of-the-art sound system. This despite the fact that the film is often a series of debates among scientists arguing in close-ups that find endless fascination in the geography of the human face.

The actors in "Oppenheimer could not be better. They include Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, the blustering military supervisor at Los Alamos, Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, who pushed to develop the even more dangerous hydrogen bomb, and Gary Oldman in a sensational cameo as Harry Truman, the president who ordered the use of the bomb on Japan and dismissed Oppenheimer as a "crybaby" for objecting.

Oppy, as intimates called him, had a personal life that mirrored his professional turbulence. Though he mingled with such greats as Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), and Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Oppy's sexual entanglements, notably with psychologist Jean Tatlock (a mesmerizing Florence Pugh) made the wrong kind of headlines.

His marriage to biologist Katherine "Kitty" Puening (Emily Blunt), an alcoholic suffering from postpartum depression, added to the chaos. Kudos to Blunt for building the role with a fierce independence as Kitty defended Oppy from the political gamesmanship that plagued him.

In the riveting last section of the film, Nolan shows us Oppenheimer fighting against those eager to discredit him, first in the Sen. Joseph McCarthy commie witch-hunts of 1954 and five years later during the Senate confirmation hearings for the nomination of former  Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) as secretary of commerce.

Nolan shoots both these sections in a vivid black-and-white to underscore the resentment Strauss feels for Oppenheimer for hiding his Jewish roots, communist proclivities and fears about government backed nuclear energy.

In a film of standout performances, Downey delivers a tour de force of festering animosity that blows the doors off. All his time in the Marvel universe might lead you to forget that Downey is one of the best actors on the planet. Here's a reminder. Prepare to be wowed.

"Oppenheimer," set to Ludwig Göransson's thundering orchestral score, is one of the best movies you'll see anywhere. With Nolan's extraordinary talent shining on its highest beams, the film emerges as a monumental achievement on the march into screen history.

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Review: Christopher Nolan’s gripping, despairing ‘Oppenheimer’ ponders history and the future

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You know a Christopher Nolan protagonist when you see him. Sleuth or showman , conquerer of space or invader of dreams , he is a man caught in a trap of his own intricate construction, lost in the maelstrom of a guilty obsession. He may not wear that obsession on his skin like Leonard Shelby, the amnesia-stricken avenger in “Memento,” or parade his demons in as symbolic a fashion as Bruce Wayne does in the “Dark Knight” trilogy . But whether he skulks about in film-noir shadows or blasts forth into dimensions unknown, every Nolan antihero risks becoming the architect of his own obliteration, a cruel fate that may well consume others in its wake.

None of which is to suggest that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the pioneering theoretical physicist who became known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” was ever an obvious choice of subject for this filmmaker. Much as Nolan may enjoy contemplating the end of the world, it’s telling that his past flirtations with the apocalypse — the uninhabitable Earth of “Interstellar,” the nuclear climax of “The Dark Knight Rises” — have been consigned to the relatively safe terrain (for now) of blockbuster fiction. With the exception of “Dunkirk,” his bravura thriller about a pivotal early chapter of World War II, Nolan has largely steered clear of historical events and famous figures. He practices a cinema of heady ideas, mind-churning metaphysics and rug-pulling narrative gamesmanship — not an intuitive fit with the more traditional conventions of the Hollywood biopic.

For the record:

8:30 a.m. July 21, 2023 An earlier version of this review stated that J. Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project. He was the director of the laboratory at Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were designed and built. Leslie R. Groves led the Manhattan Project.

One of the many satisfactions of “Oppenheimer,” Nolan’s intellectually thrilling and morally despairing new film, is that it succeeds in locating some of those conventions within another of his ingeniously constructed narrative labyrinths. At first glance, Oppenheimer’s story would appear to follow an obvious rise-and-fall trajectory — an arc embedded in the very title of its source material, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography. A straightforward adaptation might begin with the man’s meteoric ascent into the top ranks of American physicists, build to his involvement with the four-year, $2-billion Manhattan Project and climax with the horrific conflagrations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would end, perhaps, with the bitter, disillusioning coda of Oppenheimer’s postwar career, during which he would speak out against nuclear proliferation but never express public regret for the bomb’s Japanese casualties.

But Nolan, once again bending narrative and chronology to his will, is after something more elusive than a simple three-act trajectory. He is also less interested in reenacting scenes of mass death and devastation, none of which are depicted here, than in sifting through the bomb’s lingering geopolitical and psychic residue. For much of its three-hour running time, this swift and supercharged movie keeps its designs largely hidden beneath a series of formal eruptions. It leaps between time frames and perspectives, color and black-and-white, crowded classrooms and wide-open desert vistas, and even between aspect ratios, if you’re fortunate enough to see it in Imax. (Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan’s longtime cinematographer, shot “Oppenheimer” on large-format 65-millimeter film and Imax 65-millimeter film; it’s the first picture to make use of black-and-white Imax stock.)

The point of these convulsions is hardly to confuse or overwhelm the viewer, as Nolan is often accused of doing, but rather to suggest something of its subject’s sweeping intellectual grandeur and complicated, often contradictory essence. Oppenheimer, played over four decades by a superbly restrained yet intensely expressive Cillian Murphy, is a polymath and a polyglot, a lover of art and literature as well as science. He is visionary and short-sighted, arrogant and convivial, an academic and an outdoorsman, a family man and a womanizer, a defender of the working class and a man of undisguised privilege. Trying to unpack a tricky quantum mechanics concept for a Berkeley student, he notes, “It’s a paradox, but it works,” an assessment that might just as well describe himself and this movie.

He is less a character to be dramatized, in short, than a series of equations to be continually rebalanced, if never fully solved. To that end, Nolan filters Oppenheimer’s mostly linear personal narrative through two framing devices, both set well after World War II. One is a private 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearing where a somber Oppenheimer faces a tough interrogator (Jason Clarke) and the imminent revocation of his government security clearance. The other, shot in black-and-white and set in 1959, follows the former AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss (an outstanding Robert Downey Jr.), who’s waiting to be confirmed as President Eisenhower’s secretary of Commerce — a contentious process that becomes overshadowed by Strauss’ own past associations with Oppenheimer at Princeton.

All this narrative fragmentation, plus the jumble of names, titles and government acronyms, can be overwhelming at first, but Nolan and his editor, Jennifer Lame (“Hereditary”), intercut their threads with extraordinary propulsiveness and lucidity. Those who go in knowing the outcomes of the AEC proceedings and Strauss’ Cabinet bid will see past the red herrings that Nolan occasionally strews across the path of history. But even they may be held rapt by the coolly understated animus that binds Oppenheimer and Strauss — a tension to which Nolan keeps returning, and which Downey unpacks in a performance of beautifully coiled serpentine layers. Crucial to the characters’ adversarial dynamic is an enchantingly mysterious early interaction with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), a moment that establishes Oppenheimer’s easy collegiality with his fellow great minds.

Soon we’re back in the exciting if tumultuous early days of his career, which take him across a great swath of 1920s Europe, where he hobnobs with field pioneers such as Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and befriends a fellow Jewish American physicist, Isidor Rabi (David Krumholtz), who foreshadows the rising tide of antisemitism worldwide. In one alarming episode from his time as a lost, wild-haired student at Cambridge, Oppenheimer reveals a capacity for irrational, intensely personal violence — a darkness that is being either tempered or triggered by his stunning visions of the subatomic world. In these wondrously transporting images of juddering waves and swirling particles, accompanied by the rumbling, surging, keening strains of Ludwig Göransson’s magnificent score, Nolan makes a rare leap into realms of pure cinematic abstraction.

In time, Oppenheimer has been ensconced as a professor at both Berkeley and Caltech, a corner of 1930s academia that turns out to be a hothouse of scientific discovery and political intrigue. Neat, fastidious and charming, he turns the heads of more than a few women, especially within the trendy Communist Party circles he frequents, and Murphy’s enigmatic reserve suggests a spirit of sexual and ideological promiscuity. Before Oppenheimer marries a thrice-divorced woman, Kitty (Emily Blunt, fierce), he is drawn to the self-destructive flame of a troubled paramour, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, also fierce), generating flashes of erotic heat never before approached by Nolan’s cinema. Oppenheimer’s romantic indecision echoes his own refusal to put out politically, as he declines to join the Party despite his own avowed left-wing sympathies — a pose of high-minded neutrality that will prove his success and his undoing.

He is, to paraphrase one of the script’s heavier-handed thematic contrasts, a theorist rather than a practitioner, hopeless in a lab but commanding in the classrooms where much of the movie’s paper-waving, blackboard-scrawling action unfolds. But it’s precisely Oppenheimer’s ability to envision the bigger picture that makes him singularly qualified for a significant role with the government’s top-secret Manhattan Project, aimed at building a weapon powerful enough to end the war and possibly all wars. And it’s Oppenheimer who will successfully propose moving his family and many others to Los Alamos, N.M., where a top-secret laboratory and soon an entire town is built to accommodate a closely-monitored staff of thousands.

Some sly military-industrial complex humor creeps in as Oppenheimer, clad in his signature gray waistcoat and rumpled porkpie hat, leads this massively complicated undertaking at the surly behest of Col. Leslie R. Groves (a gruffly amusing Matt Damon). These two characters’ odd-couple head-buttings (previously dramatized to lesser effect in the 1989 movie “Fat Man and Little Boy”) here set the tone and rhythm for a project that thrives on a spirit of scholarly disagreement and tetchy troubleshooting.

“Oppenheimer” is both an unerringly focused character study and, somehow, one of the year’s most sprawling ensemble pieces, with vivid turns from Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Olivia Thirlby, Casey Affleck and Dylan Arnold, among many others. Benny Safdie makes a memorably sweaty and argumentative Edward Teller, an early proponent of the hydrogen bomb who has his own shifty role to play in Oppenheimer’s postwar tribulations. And while this is a primarily male-driven story, which speaks as much to the inequities of history as it does to Nolan’s dramatic predilections, Blunt brings startling force to the role of a woman who shames her faithless husband with a loyalty that surpasses all reason.

Through it all, Nolan remains the consummate Hollywood theorist and practitioner, someone who realizes his grandiose conceptual ambitions with a stubbornly hands-on, ground-level command of cinematic craft. He and his production designer, Ruth De Jong (“Nope”), seem energized by their physical re-creation of the Los Alamos site, which we see being constructed from the ground up as barbed-wire fences roll out and military vehicles roll in. There’s palpable urgency and mounting dread to this world-building, and also a striking contrast with Van Hoytema’s interior-dominated visuals, which turn human faces and confined spaces into giant-screen landscapes. There’s also a splash of “There Will Be Blood” in Nolan’s vision of an indelible American darkness taking root in western soil, especially when a 100-foot tower springs from the earth, soon to be engulfed by the fiery cloud of the world’s first plutonium implosion device.

That fateful 1945 “Trinity” test, dramatized with a mix of queasy suspense, seat-rattling spectacle and fascinating logistical details, tears a hole in the fabric of the movie — a rupture that it’s both prepared and unprepared to fill. As Oppenheimer is confronted with the gravest consequences of theory becoming practice, a story of human intelligence and enterprise becomes one of monstrous, clockwork-like betrayals, some sweepingly systemic and some intimately personal. Part of the subtle greatness of Murphy’s performance is the way his character seems to empty out in the story’s later passages, as though succumbing to a kind of moral and psychological paralysis. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he murmurs after the Trinity explosion, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita. The real Oppenheimer may have never expressed remorse over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the movie never lets its Oppenheimer forget them, especially in one shuddering, blood-chilling sequence that transforms a public moment of triumph into an indictment.

Nor can Oppenheimer forget the still greater destruction that may yet be unleashed, a prospect that his typically naive and high-minded insistence on “international cooperation” will do nothing to dispel. Nolan conveys that warning with somber gravity, if not, finally, the cathartic force that our current headlines, full of war and nuclear portent, would seem to demand. Not for the first time, the demonstrative cleverness of his storytelling can seem too precise, too hermetically sealed and engineered, for a sense of raw collective devastation to fully take hold.

That might be a rare failing of this extraordinarily gripping and resonant movie, or it could be a minor mercy. Whatever you feel for Oppenheimer at movie’s end — and I felt a great deal — his tragedy may still be easier to contemplate than our own.

'Oppenheimer'

Running time: 3 hours Rating: R, for some sexuality, nudity and language Playing: Starts July 21 in general release

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Oppenheimer review: Clever, imaginative and Christopher Nolan at his best

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Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan ’s best and most revealing work. It’s a profoundly unnerving story told with a traditionalist’s eye towards craftsmanship and muscular, cinematic imagination. Here, Nolan treats one of the most contested legacies of the 20th century – that of J Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy ), the “father of the atomic bomb” – as a mathematical puzzle to be solved.

In 1943, at the behest of Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Oppenheimer became director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Manhattan Project’s New Mexico site for attempting to successfully build an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer, at first, was driven by moral imperative: he feared deeply, as a Jewish man, about what would happen if the Nazis were to develop a weapon of such deadly capability (that a non-Jewish actor has taken on a role in which identity plays such a central role is, in this light, somewhat strange).

Following Hitler’s defeat, Oppenheimer continued to support the bomb’s deployment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, convinced that such hellish destruction would not only bring an end to the war in the Pacific, but to all wars. Historians have since disputed the idea that the bombs were in any way necessary for Japan’s surrender (the real turning point, it seems, was the threat of Soviet invasion). And Oppenheimer’s own utopian vision was swiftly dismantled by fellow scientist Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) and the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), who pushed forward with the creation of the H-bomb, a thousand times deadlier in its scope.

Oppenheimer attempted, in vain, to halt the subsequent nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. He was promptly silenced using one of America’s most cherished tools of political oppression – anti-Communist hysteria. He was attacked for his personal associations with the Communist Party, through his brother Frank (Dylan Arnold), wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), and ex-lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). It was an act of pure, public humiliation.

Nolan observes each of these chapters with sickly wonder, as Jennifer Lame’s editing work and Ludwig Göransson’s clattering score lend Oppenheimer a frightening momentum. The film is constructed in a way that allows its audience to comprehend, on an intellectual level, the profound power and chaos that led its central character to see himself as the “Death, destroyer of worlds” of Hindu scripture. I’m not sure, however, that it burrows deeper than that – into that profound, emotional space that can be both overwhelming and difficult to verbalise. It’s a little too conscious of itself, and the ways cinema crafts its own reality. Throughout, the film teases an unheard conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), its inevitable reveal delivered in the same tone as the solution to the teleportation trick in Nolan’s own The Prestige .

But the prioritisation of cleverness in Oppenheimer isn’t necessarily a criticism of Nolan – more a testament to who he is as an artist. The detonation of the A-bomb, during its first test in the New Mexico desert, is depicted as booming tufts of flame in extreme close-up, coupled with enraptured onlookers. You sense its primal force, the kind of untapped power that led Oppenheimer to view himself as a kind of American Prometheus (also the title of a 2005 biography Nolan drew heavily from). But contrast that, perhaps, with how David Lynch approached the same A-bomb test in his 2017 limited series Twin Peaks: The Return . Lynch drew the camera in, slowly, confronting us with the full-scale of the weapon’s destruction, while sucking us into its very centre, damning us through its inescapability. Nolan’s A-bomb is wondrous until we consider its context; Lynch’s A-bomb is pure nightmare.

The film’s non-linear structure (de rigueur for the Tenet and Inception filmmaker), with each timeline beautifully lensed by Hoyte van Hoytema in either colour or black and white, lends a little more focus to Oppenheimer’s post-war betrayal than it does to the blossoming of his guilt. Large swathes of the film play out as political thriller, the fuel in its engine being Downey Jr’s titanic colouring of Strauss, all boorishness and manipulative charm.

But Nolan is still committed to understanding the innerworkings of his subject. Here’s a man deep in denial. When confronted with photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he averts his gaze. Its horrors rumble (literally) in his peripheral vision, only clear to him when he imagines such brutality inflicted on the white Americans celebrating his “victory” in Los Alamos. Murphy creates his own devastating fission: brilliance torn apart by arrogance. Scene by scene, the light behind his eyes starts to dim. He even has sex the same way he builds bombs. After his extramarital affair turns sour, his wife Kitty chastises him: “You don’t get to commit a sin and then make us all feel sorry when there are consequences.” In Oppenheimer , a man’s private, internal, and political lives are strung together, each a component of the great equation that defines a man’s soul.

Dir: Christopher Nolan. Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Tom Conti, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh. 15, 180 minutes.

‘Oppenheimer’ is in cinemas from 21 July

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Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan at his most complex, powerful, and human

His three-hour historical epic dives into yet another scary universal mystery: people

by Oli Welsh

Christopher Nolan loves to make movies about the vast forces and abstract concepts that shape our understanding of the world: time, gravity, perception. Even when he turns his gaze inward on the human mind, in films like the psychologically scrambled Memento or the dream-state thriller Inception , his explorations of the metaphysical realm have strict, architectural designs that tend to trap and dwarf the characters within them — like figures on one of Inception ’s Escher staircases.

He’s often accused of coldness, I think unfairly. This is a director who takes pains to find a relatable, emotional, sometimes even sentimental way into all that awestruck bigness. But those emotional hooks often feel more like the on-ramp for his stories than the destination. In Interstellar , Matthew McConaughey journeys to the center of a black hole to find that the secret of the universe is love — but is it really, or is it the implacable gravity, capable of bending time itself, that sucks him in? In Nolanworld, we humans can attempt to find meaning in the forces of the universe, or to bend them to our will, but they ultimately rule us. The bigness wins.

Until Oppenheimer . The paradox of this film — a three-hour historical epic about the theoretical physicist who unleashed the terrible forces of the quantum realm and became the “ father of the atomic bomb ” — is that it’s a lot less interested in science and mechanics than most of Nolan’s previous movies, and a lot more interested in people. It’s still vast in scope and meticulous in design. But this is the film in which Nolan ponders the scary proposition that the most powerful force in the universe might be us .

The film has a different texture and tempo than Nolan’s previous work, likely because he’s working from an extremely rich source text: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer , Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s acclaimed biography of the scientist who led America’s development of atomic weapons during World War II. There’s an enormous amount of material for Nolan to unpack: pivotal scientific concepts, political and military machinations, huge moral questions, and the not-so-small matter of one man’s complex life.

As a screenwriter, Nolan rises to this intimidating task, and the work of adaptation inspires some of his best writing to date. Broadly, Oppenheimer ’s running time is divided into three clear acts. The first is a whirlwind biography of the mercurial physicist, as played by Cillian Murphy. The second is a gripping science procedural following the construction and first test of the A-bomb at the Manhattan Project’s remote facility in New Mexico. And the third, woven throughout the first two, is a political and legal thriller about an attempt to dismantle Oppenheimer’s reputation and legacy in the postwar years.

It wouldn’t be like Nolan to tell this story straight; he establishes multiple time frames from the start. Ostensibly, there are two tracks: a full-color chronology of Oppenheimer’s life, and a black-and-white framing device featuring Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a nuclear-power broker whose relationship with Oppenheimer comes under scrutiny as Strauss seeks a U.S. cabinet post in Washington in the 1950s. Even this isn’t enough intricacy for Nolan, who regularly blurs the lines, flitting between multiple narrative layers, film stocks, and screen ratios as he tries to organize the torrent of information. It’s a testament to his structural fluency that all of this isn’t more confusing — and to his storytelling that it all works in service of the story, rather than drawing attention to its own tricksy ingenuity, as his scripts sometimes do.

More remarkable is the extent to which the characters and the mess of their lives force their way to the surface through Nolan’s grand design. Nolan has a habit of overexplaining everything — if Dunkirk is still his best movie , it’s because it’s the only one where he lets his awesome imagery do the talking. Oppenheimer is a very talky movie, with more than its fair share of scenes where people hold forth while pointing at equations on blackboards. But there’s simply too much complexity here to rely on imagery or sit with any particular moment for long, which forces Nolan to keep moving. Between the cracks, a very human strain of warmth, anxiety, and even wit finds its way out. (If you like a good physicist joke or two, you’re in for a treat.)

Credit to the cast for finding and emphasizing that humanity — particularly Murphy, who is hypnotic in the extremely challenging role of a charismatic, aloof egotist whose hunger for mastery carries him to a moral breaking point he dare not express. His gaunt, sculptural face fills the frame for much of the movie, those translucent, icy eyes staring through reality and out the other side. Oppenheimer sees everything, but also fails to see what’s right in front of him.

Among the vast, starry cast, Downey is a revelation in a subtle, elusive, but pivotal character part. Matt Damon, peppery of hair and sensible of mustache, helps ground the movie as Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer’s pragmatic military boss. Benny Safdie adds a striking note of sweaty unease as Edward Teller, a younger physicist on the project who went on to father the even more destructive hydrogen bomb . Gary Oldman has a startling, chilling cameo as President Harry Truman. And Tom Conti makes for an avuncular Albert Einstein, although Nolan’s script reduces the great thinker to a rather basic, symbolic role: the angel on Oppenheimer’s shoulder, or perhaps a one-man Greek chorus, shaking his head at the folly of man.

The women, predictably for Nolan , fare less well. Florence Pugh labors through some awfully embarrassing conceptual sex scenes and an inevitable fridging as Oppenheimer’s lover Jean Tatlock, who was central to the physicist’s arm’s-length involvement with the Communist Party in the prewar years, which would eventually be used against him. And Emily Blunt, as Kitty Oppenheimer, has too much fire and resolve to be playing a Great Man’s miserable, alcoholic wife — though Nolan at least has the good grace to hand her a late peach of a scene featuring some of the best dialogue he’s ever written, which she rips through with relish.

For all his intellectualism, Nolan is also a broad-brush populist, and as ever, the clash of these instincts leads to some gauche, goofy moments, like the early scenes of Oppenheimer studiously reading T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and pondering a Picasso. Sometimes Nolan seems insecure working outside of his usual thriller mode. Ludwig Göransson’s insistent, nervy score is overused throughout, harrying the dizzying montage of Oppenheimer’s life into an almost comical blur when it would be better to let the drama breathe.

a very human strain of warmth, anxiety, and even wit finds its way out

But once the film reaches the secret Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bomb was developed and tested, Nolan and his team are in their element. Hoyte van Hoytema’s majestic photography drinks in the pitiless desert as the stage is set for the bomb test: a wartime triumph and a terrible human tragedy. There may never have been a more consequential explosion, and while Nolan perhaps assembles the set-piece and films the blast with a touch too much excitement, he makes up for that in what follows, emphasizing the disorienting, dehumanizing haste with which the atomic bombs were subsequently dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nolan wisely averts the camera’s gaze from that atrocity, staging it instead as a horrifying, metaphorical hallucination, in which Oppenheimer’s inner world turns to ash.

In its final stretch, Oppenheimer uses the political campaign to discredit the physicist and unpick his legacy as a way to get under the skin of a man whose stance on his awful creation remained contradictory and enigmatic . After the overpowering bomb sequences, that’s a surprisingly subtle and complex tack for Nolan to take, but it works because the story is driven by the historical record and the characters, rather than by dogma, with the appalling moral consequences emerging naturally from the details. Nolan is not one to let any member of the audience miss his point, and the film’s final scene does ram it home. But first, he builds out the web of ambition, compromise, dreams, politics, jealousy, and inspiration — in a word, humanity — that unleashed the forces he stands in awe of. In Oppenheimer , man is the most dreadful machine of all.

Oppenheimer debuts in theaters on July 21.

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'Oppenheimer' Review: Christopher Nolan Delivers His Most Colossal and Mature Film Yet

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The Big Picture

• Christopher Nolan's twelfth film, Oppenheimer , is a culmination of his remarkable career, showcasing his talents and techniques in storytelling, editing, and building tension and anticipation.
• Cillian Murphy gives an incredible performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, portraying the complexities and emotions of the character through subtle mannerisms and expressions.
• Oppenheimer boasts an exceptional cast, with notable performances from Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh, although Nolan still struggles with providing substantial roles for female characters.

Few filmmakers have had the rapid, impressive rise to success that Christopher Nolan has had over the last 25 years. Out the gate, Nolan has been ambitious, making twisty, unique films like his debut Following and his breakthrough Memento despite extremely small budgets. Within a decade of making his first film, he would revitalize action movies, origin stories, and superhero films with both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight —still widely considered the greatest superhero film of all time. In his first dozen films, Nolan has taken us deep inside the mind ( Inception ), to the darkest reaches of space ( Interstellar ), and explored war in a way we’ve never seen before ( Dunkirk ). While his experiments haven’t always been entirely successful, like with his last film, 2020’s Tenet , it’s hard not to admire Nolan’s attempts to push the boundaries of what film and storytelling can do on such a large scale .

Nolan’s twelfth film, Oppenheimer , feels like the culmination of everything the director has done so far in his already remarkable career . From the multiple timelines of Memento and Dunkirk , and the staggering abstract footage in Interstellar , to his ability to build tension and anticipation through stunning scores and impeccable editing, Nolan uses all of the talents and techniques that have made him such a noteworthy auteur to bring to life the extraordinary accomplishments, pains, and life of J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ). In bringing this expansive and gargantuan true story to the screen, Nolan has created not just one of his best films, but easily the most mature film of his career.

Oppenheimer

The story of American scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

In telling the story of Oppenheimer, Nolan returns to a technique he used in Memento , by showing one man’s experience through varying timelines. Like that film, one timeline is told in color, while the other uses black-and-white photography. In the color timeline, Oppenheimer explores his past through his perspective via a hearing where he must run down his years running The Manhattan Project and the creation of the first atomic bomb, his communist ties, and his affairs, all while the people from throughout his life come to testify about his actions. In the black-and-white segments, Nolan follows Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey Jr. ), as he discusses his involvement with Oppenheimer over the years, all during Strauss’ questioning to secure the nomination for Secretary of Commerce. Through these dueling timelines, each showing important moments from different perspectives, Oppenheimer peels back multiple layers of Oppenheimer, a man who did unbelievable things, and then feared the potential of what his research could eventually bring.

Cillian Murphy Gives One of the Best Performances Ever in a Nolan Film

Murphy, who has been a supporting player in five of Nolan’s previous films, finally gets the starring role here and the result is incredible . Oppenheimer is shown as a relatively quiet man, and despite that, Murphy allows us to see every moment of trepidation, every moment of fear for what his ideas could eventually mean, and every glimmer of joy at some new revelation, all through tiny mannerisms and the worry in his eyes. Murphy is beautifully restrained here, and even though his actions are world-changing, we can feel the implications of Oppenheimer’s achievements simply through a look in Murphy’s eyes, or the way he hesitates in a sentence. After years of working with Nolan, Murphy's take on Oppenheimer will go down as one of the best performances ever captured by Nolan’s camera.

'Oppenheimer' Boasts One of the Best Casts in Modern Film

While it might sound like hyperbole, Nolan has gathered one of the most unbelievable casts in modern film , a flabbergasting amount of talent that puts actors like Oscar-winners Rami Malek , Gary Oldman , and Kenneth Branagh in small supporting roles, but gives actors like Murphy who might often be put in more minor roles into greater positions. While there are too many exceptional performances to point out, it’s excellent to see actors like Alden Ehrenreich , Benny Safdie , and David Krumholtz get major positions in this film, and it’s wonderful to see Josh Hartnett and Jason Clarke in substantial roles. Even though there are plenty of great actors in blink-and-you-miss parts, Nolan does all he can to give as many of these performers at least one scene that will stick with the audience long after the movie is over.

But it’s Downey Jr. who makes the biggest impression of the entire cast , other than Murphy’s Oppenheimer. While Oppenheimer mostly wears his feelings on his sleeve, Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss keeps his secrets close to his chest, making him an absorbing counter to the title character. His more subjective take on Oppenheimer’s life and career gives us a perspective we rarely see in films about real-life personalities, and Downey Jr. gives one of his best performances as well, and it’s wonderful to see him explore this type of role after years in the MCU pipeline.

Also noteworthy is Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, who puts Oppenheimer in his position at The Manhattan Project. The relationship between Oppenheimer and Groves is one of the most complex in the film , and it’s fascinating to watch how it shifts over the years. Plus, if you’re making a film about an impossible goal that needs to be met in a shocking amount of time ( Ford v. Ferrari , The Martian , Air ), there’s no better person to call than Damon.

Alas, Nolan still has problems with substantial female roles , and that does continue in Oppenheimer . Like many of the male scientists, the apparently lone female scientist—played by Olivia Thirlby —doesn’t get as much screen time as she deserves. Similarly, the women in Oppenheimer’s life certainly should’ve received more attention, however, that doesn’t stop Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, and Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s on-again-off-again partner Jean Tatlock from making the most of their time onscreen. Pugh only gets a few scenes, but her impact resonates with Oppenheimer long after his last scene. Blunt’s role is far more substantive, as we see her beg Oppenheimer to fight back as he’s raked over the coals by his own government. It’s hard not to relate to her utter rage at his treatment, and her frustrations over her position in life show sides to Blunt that we’ve never seen before from her.

Christopher Nolan's Script and Directing Are Stunning

But beyond this embarrassment of riches that is this cast, it’s Nolan that truly makes Oppenheimer a gargantuan achievement , and how he’s able to find just the right people to work with—both in front of and behind the camera—to make this phenomenal vision come to life in all its glory. This all, naturally, begins with Nolan’s script, based on the book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin . In bringing this 700+ page book to the screen, Nolan has crafted an incredibly dense script that never manages to feel too convoluted or overwhelming—a feat in itself, considering how many timelines and characters are thrown into the mix. It’s almost akin to what Tony Kushner had to cram into Lincoln by adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin ’s “Team of Rivals.” There is so much life and story to be told here, and the fact that Nolan can navigate all of this succinctly and without getting in over his head is astounding.

Behind the camera, again, Nolan is returning to some of his old techniques and talents, but in a way that feels more refined and careful than ever before . He knows he can impress—he’s done that before—but now, he knows how to utilize these skills in a way that puts story first, not as a way to awe the audience. All of these tools come together to the point that it almost feels as if Nolan’s entire career has been building to this film. Oppenheimer allows Nolan to be bombastic, but never over-the-top in a manner that distracts from the narrative. The performances and Oppenheimer’s troubled story is more important than the technical achievements Nolan creates, and while he has frequently felt like he’s the true star of his own films, he knows how to stand aside here to let the story take precedence over bombast.

This, of course, doesn’t happen without an incredible team behind him, and Nolan has gathered remarkable support in telling this story. Hoyte van Hoytema , who Nolan has worked with since 2014’s Interstellar , knows exactly how to beautifully shoot every scenario Nolan throws at him, whether it’s New Mexico at dusk, two lovers having a conversation in a dark hotel room, or the explosion of bombs and stars in shocking fashion. Every frame is breathtaking, and just when you think you’ve seen all the tricks Nolan and van Hoytema have up their sleeves, they shock with another . The way the two build the tension leading up to the dropping of the first bomb is astonishing, but just as monumental is the way the camera shakes around Oppenheimer when the repercussions of his research become too much for him to handle, almost as if the world around him could come crashing down, as that could both literally and figuratively be happening at any moment.

Oppenheimer ’s ever-present score by Ludwig Göransson accompanies nearly every moment of the film, knowing exactly when to pull back, or when to provoke the audience with the sounds of a ticking clock or static underneath the onslaught of an orchestra fully enveloping the viewer in sound. Nolan and van Hoytema’s visuals are always impressive, but it’s Göransson’s score that takes Oppenheimer to another level , and continues to prove that he’s one of the most exciting composers working in film today.

But Oppenheimer ’s success since this summer has also been a welcome change for the box office landscape . As franchise films have waned in their popularity over the course of this year , it’s been exciting to see a film like Oppenheimer (currently the fifth highest-grossing film at the domestic box office in 2023), which relies on great filmmaking and excellent performances to gather a crowd. While Marvel and DC films have failed to meet expectations, Nolan has shown that all an audience really wants is to be told a fascinating story that they’ve never seen before on the screen, and hopefully, studios in the future will learn the right lessons from Oppenheimer ’s success.

Oppenheimer is a towering achievement not just for Nolan, but for everyone involved . It is the kind of film that makes you appreciative of every aspect of filmmaking, blowing you away with how it all comes together in such a fitting fashion. Even though Nolan is honing in on talents that have brought him to where he is today, this film takes this to a whole new level of which we've never seen him before. With Oppenheimer , Nolan is more mature as a filmmaker than ever before, and it feels like we may just now be beginning to see what incredible work he’s truly capable of making.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a tremendous accomplishment for the writer-director, a massive film that feels like Nolan's most mature work so far.

• Christopher Nolan brings a scope to the biopic that makes this story grander than other films in the genre.
• Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, and Robert Downey Jr. lead an incredible cast that brings this story to life.
• Everything from Nolan's directing to Ludwig Göransson's score are pitch perfect, making one of the best films of 2023.

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Oppenheimer Review: A Technical Feat That Felt Like A Chore

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer is an IMAX®-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Oscar® winner Matt Damon portrays General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

Academy Award® nominee Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie plays theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano plays Robert Serber and Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence. Oppenheimer also stars Oscar® winner Rami Malek and reunites Nolan with eight-time Oscar® nominated actor, writer and filmmaker Kenneth Branagh. The cast includes Dane DeHaan (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets), Dylan Arnold (Halloween franchise), David Krumholtz (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) and Matthew Modine (The Dark Knight Rises).

The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. The film is produced by Emma Thomas, Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer is filmed in a combination of IMAX® 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX® black and white analogue photography.

Oppenheimer Trailer :

One of the strongest elements of Oppenheimer lies in the acting of the cast. Cillian Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer is a tour de force. He convincingly portrays the brilliance, internal conflicts, and moral dilemmas of the renowned physicist. Murphy’s ability to embody Oppenheimer’s complex persona elevates the film, making it an engaging character study. Emily Blunt was probably one of my favorites in the film. She had some key moments where she simply shined and probably seemed the most relatable out of all the characters. Matt Damon was solid as well given his role as Gen. Groves Jr. Additionally, the witty dialogue and banter between Matt Damon, who plays General Leslie Groves Jr., and Cillian Murphy enhance the film’s entertainment value.  However, the one potential scene-stealer might have been Robert Downey Jr. He completely disappeared into the role of Lewis Stauss, and his delivery was so good that it would be no surprise to have him be considered for Best Supporting Actor.

OPPENHEIMER

Nolan’s signature cinematography is at its finest in Oppenheimer . The best part was the artistic visuals used to convey the mental duress faced by Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project. The visuals captured the weight of the decisions he had to make and the profound implications of his work.  I appreciated the sections shot in black-and-white analog photography, which created a visually striking contrast and added depth to crucial scenes.

Other technical feats were well executed too such as the sound production. I was really impressed with how both the sound design and score played such a significant role in enhancing key moments in the film. From the deafening sounds of the testing ground to the hauntingly atmospheric musical compositions, the audio elements contribute to the film’s emotional impact. The tension and build-up leading to the moment of the atomic bomb’s creation are masterfully handled. I thought it was a brilliant decision by Nolan to mute all sound during some key moments. As a viewer, it almost felt like after so much suspense was built up you still had a moment where you were holding your breath in anticipation for what was still to come. Nolan navigated the ethical dilemmas faced by Oppenheimer and his team, crafting an immersive experience that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats.

Oppenheimer  is not without its flaws and I personally wasn’t the biggest fan of the editing. I thought that it made the plot feel a bit cumbersome and challenging to follow.  Given the 3 hour runtime, the editing and writing made the pacing of the movie noticeable. Just when you think this movie was all about the making of the bomb, it swerves into another direction about Oppenheimer’s personal life, and then another swerve into the political drama. Essentially, it felt like multiple movies crammed into one.

To make matters a bit more difficult, in true Nolan fashion, much of the exposition felt heavy-handed. There seemed to be a presumption in the film that viewers should already be aware of the politics during the 1940s and have a physics degree of some sort. The issue I think this may pose is that while some people are learning many of the historical or scientific facts for the first time, it takes away the opportunity to really engage with the plot. It would be like studying for a test and listening to a friend tell you a story at the same time. Moreover, the film’s political and legal drama may feel heavy-handed to some viewers. While it is essential to depict the socio-political context of the era accurately, a more subtle approach could have balanced the film’s focus better.

Another aspect that draws criticism is the portrayal of female characters in the film. While Florence Pugh’s performance as Jean Tatlock is commendable, the writing of her characters may come across as lacking an authentic appeal. I think this also trickled down into an over-arching issue in the writing which was that I didn’t feel much of an emotional anchor was present. When I talk about an emotional anchor, that usually comes from the main protagonist in the film to help create a relational point for the audience. While it was demonstrated that Oppenheimer did have some trying times, my issue with the editing of the story came back into play. Right when I started to connect with Oppenheimer, we immediately jumped into some science experiment, legal drama, or historical event that snapped me out of it. A bit more of a focus might have been helpful in that case.

The Verdict:

Oppenheimer is an enthralling deep dive into the life and choices of J. Robert Oppenheimer. With outstanding performances, impressive cinematography, and gripping tension, it offers a captivating experience for audiences. I do believe that the marketing of Oppenheimer was a bit misleading because it initially gives the impression that it’s about Oppenheimer and the lead-up to the A-bomb. If you’re going into this thinking that you’re going to get some crazy explosion and massive casualties and such, then you’re going to be disappointed. This is a biopic that has a lot of story to tell. Too much story in some instances.

L to R: Cillian Murphy (as J. Robert Oppenheimer) and writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan on the set of OPPENHEIMER.

While I did enjoy Oppenheimer overall, I can’t say I’d ever want to watch this movie again. Out of the previous categories I mentioned, I’m a Nolan fan, but I didn’t particularly care for Dunkirk . I have a general understanding of physics from school, but this movie felt like I walked into a pop quiz. I also wasn’t fully aware, nor interested, of the politics of the time. So for me, this movie felt like a chore to get through. I feel like Nolan does so many things technically right in his movies that it’s really hard for him to make a bad movie. With that said, I wouldn’t say Oppenheimer is one of Nolan’s best films, but his worst films are still better than most. I’d say Oppenheimer probably ranks in the bottom three of Nolan films along with Dark Knight Returns and Dunkirk.

One thing I noticed in my observations with people who have seen the movie is that there are factors that might depend based on the viewer. For those of you who are history buffs, that are remotely familiar with the communist party, WWII, and the politics of the 1940s, then this movie is for you. For those of you who have a general understanding of physics, then this movie is for you. If you’re a Nolan fan and love movies like Tenet or Dunkirk , then this movie is really for you. If you don’t fall into any of those categories, then I wouldn’t say this movie isn’t for you. I’d just say to prepare for more than what was advertised. Nevertheless, be sure to see Oppenheimer  in theaters when you can. 

Director: Christopher Nolan Writer(s): Christopher Nolan Stars: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey, Jr., Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Josh Hartnett and Kenneth Branagh Oppenheimer   hits theaters July 21, 2023. Be sure to follow E-Man’s Movie Reviews on Facebook, Subscribe on YouTube , or follow me on Twitter/IG @EmansReviews for even more movie news and reviews !

• Acting - 10/10 10/10
• Cinematography/Visual Effects - 9/10 9/10
• Plot/Screenplay - 6/10 6/10
• Setting/Theme - 7/10 7/10
• Watchability - 8/10 8/10
• Rewatchability - 5/10 5/10

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‘Oppenheimer’ a momentous achievement, at times pensive, at times explosive

Four stars from richard roeper for christopher nolan’s historical biopic of the complex scientist, which he says is magnificent and the best movie of the year..

Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer in “Oppenheimer.”

Universal Pictures

Magnificent.

Christopher Nolan’s three-hour historical biopic “Oppenheimer” is a gorgeously photographed, brilliantly acted, masterfully edited and thoroughly engrossing epic that instantly takes its place among the finest films of this decade — an old-fashioned yet cutting-edge work that should resonate with film scholars and popcorn-toting mainstream movie lovers for years and decades to come.

At the risk of sounding like Nicole Kidman: This is why we still go to the cinema, to settle into our seats and slip into the darkness when the lights go down, to immerse ourselves in visual and aural storytelling at its finest. From the moment the closing credits begin to roll, we’re already looking forward to the next time we see “Oppenheimer.”

And the next.

Adapted by Nolan from the book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, “Oppenheimer” is a sprawling story that hops along the timeline and introduces so many characters I’ll admit I wouldn’t have minded some title cards introducing them as they come and go. Nolan, however, opts to plunge us into events in sometimes chaotic fashion and invites us to hold on for the ride, mirroring the thrilling and yet terrifying and politically charged atmosphere of the world of physics in the early and mid-20th century, when some of the brightest scientific minds in history were making discoveries and advancements that would change the world forever — and possibly end the world as we know it.

With frequent Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy delivering subtly powerful work as Oppenheimer and an astonishingly deep supporting cast led by Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Florence Pugh (with more than a dozen additional huge talents popping in for a scene or two), “Oppenheimer” is a massively ambitious undertaking, with Nolan (“Inception,” “Dunkirk”) further solidifying his standing as one of the dominant filmmakers of his generation.

Writer-director Nolan tells much of the story in the context of the complicated and eventually contentious relationship between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss (Downey), the naval officer and politician and self-styled amateur physicist who was in awe of Oppenheimer’s intellect but came to resent him for his hubris and his politics.

When Strauss welcomes Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1947 to offer him the directorship of the Institute, Oppenheimer is a world-famous war hero known as the father of the atomic bomb, and Strauss is practically a fanboy. By the 1950s, everything had changed, as we see in two primary framing devices that Nolan returns to again and again: the 1954 Atomic Energy Personnel Security Board hearings to determine whether Oppenheimer would retain his security clearance, which were held in secret in a claustrophobic conference room; and the 1959 Senate floor hearings on President Eisenhower’s appointment of Strauss to Secretary of Commerce, which became something of a public spectacle, as Strauss found himself at peril of becoming the first Cabinet appointee rejected by the Senate in decades. (Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema deftly toggle back and forth between vibrant color and stunning black-and-white to depict the different eras.)

Politician Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) hires Oppenheimer but later comes to resent him.

“Oppenheimer” marvels at the titular subject’s incredible mind, with Nolan depicting Oppy’s genius through subtle notes such as the plinking of raindrops in a pond, and ferocious tones, as when we see Oppenheimer pinned awake in his bed at night, terrified by his visions. As Oppenheimer becomes a superstar in the world of physics and rubs shoulders with the likes of Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), he’s borderline reckless in his personal life, whether he’s attending Communist Party USA meetings (his brother was a party member, as were several close friends) or engaging in multiple affairs, most notably his longtime entanglement with the troubled and volatile Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh).

When Oppenheimer marries Katherine “Kitty” Puening (Emily Blunt), his life becomes even more complicated, with Kitty experiencing post-partum depression and becoming an alcoholic. Just because you’re a genius doesn’t mean you’re immune from coming home to a wailing child and a wife who is sitting in the dark with a bottle.

The borderline reckless scientist (Murphy) marries Katherine “Kitty” Puening (Emily Blunt), who becomes an alcoholic.

In 1942, Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) appoints Oppenheimer to head the secret weapons lab, and they literally build a town in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to house the collection of scientists and support staff and their families. In one of the most impressively staged sequences you’ll ever see, Nolan re-creates the world’s first nuclear explosion at the site known as Trinity in July of 1945. The teeth-rattling power of the explosion, the symphony of orange in the sky, the reactions of a number of key players as they look on in wonder, the expert use of sound (and in some frames, the lack thereof) — it all adds up to a stunning achievement in filmmaking. And in the midst of it all, we see how Oppenheimer is equal parts thrilled and horrified by what has been wrought.

“Oppenheimer” is a great war movie without a single scene of war. It is neither a hagiography nor an indictment of Oppenheimer, as it celebrates his genius and his achievements, while never shying away from his vulnerabilities and failings. This is a film deserving of double-digit Oscar nominations, from best picture to best director to a number of technical categories to the performances of Murphy, Blunt, Downey, Damon and Pugh. It is the best movie of the year so far and one of the best films of the 21st century.

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Oppenheimer First Reviews: Breathtaking, Ballsy, and One of the Best Biopics Ever Made

Critics say this may be not only christopher nolan's most impressive film but one of the best of the year, period, anchored by an award-worthy performance from cillian murphy..

TAGGED AS: blockbusters , First Reviews , movies

Here’s what critics are saying about Oppenheimer :

Is this possibly the best movie of the year?

“ Oppenheimer isn’t just an epic masterpiece but one of the most important films of the year.” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

“The most breathtaking film of the year.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Unless Hollywood has a sleeper hit waiting in the wings, Oppenheimer is primed to be 2023’s best film.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

“The film stands as the best of 2023.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“2023’s best.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“The best film of 2023 and one of the greatest biopics ever.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

(Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/©Universal Pictures)

Will Christopher Nolan fans enjoy it?

“It’s hard to know how the Nolan fanboys will respond to a movie as heady, historically curious, and grounded in gravitas as Oppenheimer which has little in common with the brooding majesty of his Batman movies or the tricky mindf–kery of films like Inception or Tenet . In terms of its stirring solemnity, it’s perhaps closest to Dunkirk , while its melding of science and emotion recalls Interstellar .” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“ Oppenheimer feels like the culmination of everything the director has done so far in his already remarkable career.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“ Oppenheimer is nothing if not a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make one. Indeed, it would seem like the ideal vehicle for Nolan’s career-long exploration into the black holes of the human condition — the last riddles of a terrifyingly understandable world.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Is it one of his most impressive films?

“ Oppenheimer —a film of endless contrasts and contradictions—is the fullest expression of the writer/director’s artistry to date… surely the finest and most inspired film of Nolan’s career.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“Nolan has created not just one of his best films, but easily the most mature film of his career.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“With Oppenheimer , Nolan might just be at his most experimental… [He] is now in the conversation for the greatest director of all time.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“It may just be Nolan’s magnum opus… [his] most profound and career-defining film to date.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

How is the screenplay?

“In what could be Christopher Nolan’s best screenplay thus far, Oppenheimer weaves through a three-act structure that can be divided into these unique entities; a rich character-driven deconstruction, a tense-filled thriller, and a politically laced courtroom drama.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“It is undoubtedly his strongest script and most cohesive plot.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

“Nolan has crafted an incredibly dense script that never manages to feel too convoluted or overwhelming—a feat in itself, considering how many timelines and characters are thrown into the mix.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Is it difficult to understand?

“While the four-act structure asks a lot of the film’s audience, our patience and concentration are amply rewarded.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Considering the subject of Oppenheimer involves quantum mechanics, the film does a reasonable job explaining scientific concepts for laymen.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

How is Cillian Murphy in the title role?

“Cillian Murphy leads the ensemble for Oppenheimer with a career-defining performance… a tour de force, encapsulating the complexities of the man with a haunting intensity and continuous dead look in the eye.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“A tour de force… It’s a performance that demands his name to be called on Oscar nomination morning.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Murphy’s performance is every bit as inspired as his casting.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“Murphy’s take on Oppenheimer will go down as one of the best performances ever captured by Nolan’s camera.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Cillian Murphy, with a thousand-yard beam, the half-smile of an intellectual rake, and a way of keeping everything close to the vest, gives a phenomenal performance as Oppenheimer, making him fascinating and multi-layered.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“It’s a magnificent marquee turn from the Peaky Blinders star (and frequent Nolan collaborator), providing a micro and macro concept of the physicist’s internal and external battles.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

Do any of his co-stars particularly stand out?

“In a mighty ensemble of heavy-hitters, Downey gives the drama’s standout performance as Strauss, a founding member, and later chair, of the Atomic Energy Commission.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Downey should be a shoo-in for the awards circuit. A Best Supporting Actor nomination might just be a lock.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“Downey offers a thunderous, Oscar-worthy performance that is one of his career’s best.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Special mention goes to David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“David Krumholtz is extraordinary…[and] in one of his best roles in years, there’s Matt Damon as Leslie Groves.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“It speaks to the caliber of this cast that there’s not enough room to praise the excellent Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck and Rami Malek, all of whom make a porterhouse out of a slice of roast beef.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

How is the movie’s representation of women characters?

“Though efforts were made, one can’t deny this movie ignores the women characters.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“Despite attempts to include three significant female characters in a male-dominated story, all three women fare poorly enough to suggest it might have been less glaring to stick to the military story.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

“Nolan still has problems with substantial female roles, and that does continue in Oppenheimer .” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Emily Blunt’s role at first seems limited to the supportive wife, urging her husband to fight harder for his reputation. But she has a knockout scene in the hearing.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

How does it look and sound?

“The major draw for hardcore film geeks will be the visuals… DP Hoyte van Hoytema brings visceral intensity to the Trinity sequence and extraordinary texture and depth of field to the many dialogue-driven scenes.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Hoyte van Hoytema continues to impress as one of the best cinematographers. The film, shot with 70mm IMAX cameras, stands as one of the crowning achievements of IMAX with astonishing visuals that are set to leave with cinephiles upon the film’s conclusion.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Every frame is breathtaking, and just when you think you’ve seen all the tricks Nolan and van Hoytema have up their sleeves, they shock with another.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Shot with grandeur by regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the film is sensorially overwhelming, its titanic visuals matched by Ludwig Göransson’s bellowing score of anxious ticking, thunderous foot-stomping, discordant buzzing, and strident Psycho-esque strings.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“Ludwig Göransson wrote a good score, but the constant use of it is exhausting… Nolan may have taken criticisms about his films’ inaudible dialogue to heart and strove to keep dialogue at least as audible as the music.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

What about the pacing?

“Nolan begins with a flurry of borderline avant-garde cutting between spaces, places, and faces (courtesy of stellar editor Jennifer Lame), and he never lets his foot off the gas… I can recall no biopic ever hurtling forward at such a scorching clip” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“At no point did this film ever feel slow because it had my attention for every single minute.” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

“It’s more slow-burn than explosive.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Does it have any surprises?

“Perhaps the most surprising element of this audacious epic is that the scramble for atomic armament ends up secondary to the scathing depiction of political gamesmanship.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Many unbelievable scenes fill the entire screen.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

Do we need to see it in IMAX?

“If you’re lucky enough to be near one of the 30 screens worldwide showing the film in IMAX 70mm, you’ll experience a movie that, even at its talkiest, exerts an immersive hold, pulling you in to absorb the molecular detail of every shot.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“See it in IMAX on 70-millimeter film — you’ll be very glad you did.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

“It’s a film that must be experienced on the biggest screen possible!” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

Oppenheimer opens in theaters everywhere on July 21, 2023.

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Oppenheimer Movie Review: One Of Christopher Nolan’s Finest Yet

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writer:  Christopher Nolan

Cast:  Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Jack Quaid, Dane DeHaan, Robert Downey Jr, Josh Peck

Runtime: 182 minutes

Available in: Theatres

Oppenheimer Movie Review

A bomb explodes, the death toll is in the thousands and there’s a chance the planet might catch on fire, but in  Oppenheimer  (2023), director-writer Christopher Nolan ’s screenplay traces destruction at a smaller, more subatomic level — the systematic ruination of a single man. For all its shots of sprawling landscapes, this is a movie that largely plays out in a series of rooms, moving from rooms in which scientists achieve greatness, to one lonely room in which a scientist falls from grace. Emulating the fission reaction that triggered the atomic bomb’s explosion, this is a screenplay that traces a cascading chain of consequences – a proposal made at a dinner party, a humiliating public remark, a critical action delayed too long – and the ripples of their aftermath.

Oppenheimer  is one of Christopher Nolan’s most staggering achievements – a thudding, thrilling, tremendously intimate story about a scientist who sometimes can’t see his own greatness, often can’t see past it, and tragically, can’t persuade people to believe him when he does. The director’s films have, in some way or the other, been about men attempting to exert control over vast cosmic forces so much greater than they are – time, science, space – and reckoning with the repercussions of their actions. Over his past few films, he’s broadened his focus, moving from individual obsession to widespread planetary destruction – climate change in  Interstellar  (2014) and  Tenet  (2020) . Oppenheimer  fuses both his thematic preoccupations, the end result an alchemy of one man’s quest for scientific advancement, and the wielding of a power he can’t control, holding the Earth to a lit match.

The Trinity of Three Tracks

The film plays out in three major parallel tracks. The first chronicles J. Robert Oppenheimer’s evolution from stifled student to superlative scientist and director of the Manhattan Project. The second, set in the future, has him having to answer questions about his past ties to Communists. The third, filmed in black-and-white, follows Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) during his hearing to become the US Secretary of Commerce. The film flits between an event, a retelling of the event, and the aftermath of the years into the future. We get the bomb. And the fallout. At the same time. 

Questions posed in the future are answered in the past. The same sentence uttered to different people at different points in time is both, a promise and an accusation. Events are revisited and recontextualized with striking clarity.

The first half plays out like a series of rapid, choppy vignettes, each scene driving home a certain point about Oppenheimer's character or his circumstances. It’s effective, if a little unmooring. But this compressing of time and information also has its casualties. To read American Prometheus , on which the film is based, is to know that Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), was never really able to bond with their son through his life. To watch the movie, particularly a scene soundtracked by a child crying as Kitty drinks in the kitchen alone, is to just see a harried mother overwhelmed by the demands of domesticity.

How Oppenheimer Drops the Bomb

If the first half of the film is propulsive and urgent, the second is deeply sad. Having built up to the Trinity Test, the bomb trial before it’s dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the result is oddly anti-climactic. Frantic violins give way to silence and then a shockwave like a clap of thunder. There’s a large column of fire. On the whole, however, it’s less evocative than the worlds of light and fire that Oppenheimer envisions quantum physics to be like when he shuts his eyes. 

But maybe that’s the point – Nolan isn’t interested in using the full scope of his technical prowess to bring fire and fury to the screen, to have the audience gaze in wonder at the sight before them, to present it as any sort of heroic spectacle or scientific achievement at all. It’s telling that the film’s most compelling stretches are those set in small rooms, in which conversations that determine who lives and who dies play out with a casualness that only reinforces their cruelty.

Having dispatched with the bomb test, the film turns its attentions to the impact it has on the physicist. The movie externalizes much of his torment. Is that clanging coming from inside Oppenheimer’s head? Is the thudding we hear the sound of his heart? A speech he gives later unfolds like a horror movie, his jubilant words at odds with his inner rumblings, his monologue interrupted by a piercing scream.

However, for a filmmaker so fond of playing with perception, there are limits to what Nolan lets the audience see. The actual Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are never depicted, and it’s the scientist’s face the camera focuses instead on as he’s faced with the aftermath. It’s a complicated endeavour – to evoke pity for Oppenheimer and his guilt over the bombings, instead of pity for the bombings themselves. Murphy, skeletal, is a haunted paradox of a man who made a choice and must now live with the consequences. The film spends just as much time in the crags and ridges of his face as it does on the plains of Los Alamos.

American Prometheus  

How a scientist absorbed in splitting things down to their minutest elements could be so blind to everything else is a maddening mystery and the screenplay does a fine job of pointing out the blinkers around Oppenheimer’s piercing blue eyes. The film undercuts his self-sacrificial schtick by framing him as a man who says it’s too late to continue going down a road despite him having picked the path in the first place. Still, it induces pity for the scientist who is eventually subjected to a rigorous questioning of his loyalty to the country and his reputation is shredded down to its last atom. “The bigger the star, the more violent its demise,” a character says of the astronomical body, and the same is true of Oppenheimer.

So much of Nolan’s filmography is about time lost, moments left unseized, opportunities that have slipped by, but not  Oppenheimer . In presenting events and then flashing forwards, the director reveals truths that weren’t evident at the time. He reaches into the future to wring absolution and justice for his protagonist. He makes things right. Then, in one of his finest climactic sequences yet, he underlines how all it took was for one man to get it horribly, horribly wrong. 

Oppenheimer Movie Review by Gayle

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‘Oppenheimer’ review: A grandiloquent saga about a grand folly

Christopher nolan’s biopic traces the rise and fall of american theoretical physicist j robert oppenheimer..

Towards the end of Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist is asked about why his views on the atomic bomb that he helped create changed in a span of a few years. Oppenheimer’s reply is vague, unsatisfactory even. In the same way, the film about him dances around the question that has fascinated as well as plagued Oppenheimer’s admirers.

Nolan’s most political film plays out like a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller, in which unfounded suspicions about Communism combine with a narrow definition of nationalism to make a villain out of a hero. A sprawling cast, led by Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, lines up for a movie that is grand in vision and grandiloquent in its staging.

Oppenheimer takes off from America’s nuclear bomb programme, codenamed the Manhattan Project, in the early 1940s. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, meant to bring a brutal end to Japan’s continued opposition to the Allied forces during World War II, had tremendous moral consequences, most of all for the man who came to be known as the “father of the bomb”.

The 190-minute film has been adapted by Nolan from the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. Rather than following a linear narrative that might have more effectively explained Oppenheimer’s fall from grace, Nolan opts for the mangled timelines, breakneck editing pattern and operatic sweep that mark his cinema.

The fragmented approach results in brilliant individual scenes that don’t add up to a composite picture. The extremely busy plot includes Oppenheimer’s formative years, his flirtation with Communism, his leadership of the Manhattan Project, the debates about the proper use of a destructive technology and Oppenheimer’s fraught ties with his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) and lover Jean (Florence Pugh).

Uniting these discrete elements is Oppenheimer’s persecution by the American government. Significant portions play out in a small room where a kangaroo court, instigated by the vengeful nuclear policy administrator Leslie Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) and led by an aggressive lawyer (Jason Clarke), decides whether Oppenheimer is a Russian spy and therefore needs to be stripped of his security clearance.

Nolan works overtime to make a talk-heavy narrative engaging at the intellectual and visual level. Characters are constantly on the move, striding through corridors and in and out of rooms where plans to make life-destroying weapons are pored over with Boy Scout-level glee.

Hoyte van Hoytema’s unnerving close-ups depict the paranoia building up around Oppenheimer. Surreal dream sequences reveal Oppenheimer’s growing disquiet over his choices. In the most effective of them, the laudatory stamping of feet after the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings have the sonic effect of a firing squad. The faces of Oppenheimer’s fans are twisted in a terrible display of misguided patriotism.

(Indian censors have ensured that an explicit scene is trimmed to the point of being unintelligible. In a hilarious instance of bowdlerising, Pugh’s Jean gets a family-friendly makeover in a decidedly family-unfriendly moment.)

Among the more pointed scenes is a conversation between Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) and Oppenheimer. Like all the other actors, Conti makes his mark very fast in a film that has Cillian Murphy in nearly every other frame.

The star-studded cast includes Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Gary Oldman, Benny Safdie, and Kenneth Branagh. Matt Damon winningly plays Leslie Groves, the Army officer who recruits Oppenheimer for the Manhattan Project. Emily Blunt, as Oppenheimer’s long-suffering wife Kitty, delivers a grammar lesson with brittle-edged precision. Also Kitty: “You are being too goddamn gentlemanly!”

The increasingly enervating focus on Oppenheimer’s vilification sidesteps bigger questions about the inner life of a brilliant man who was both opportunist and dissenter, warmonger and conscientious objector. By approaching Oppenheimer from the outside, through his actions or the reactions of people to him, the film takes the easy way out from confronting the paradoxes that defined one of the greatest scientific minds of our times. While it is impossible to fully know a person over the course of a movie, a better understanding of Oppenheimer’s contradictions remains out of reach.

Cillian Murphy’s performance is accordingly incomplete. Murphy is excellent in portraying Oppenheimer’s nervous energy, ambivalence, and self-doubt. But the charisma that drew scores of scientists towards Oppenheimer or contributed to his personal relationships is missing.

The horrific destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is conveyed in words. The visual centrepiece is the first bomb test. Stripped of Ludwig Goransson’s onerous score, this sequence conveys the film’s major ideas so effectively that whatever follows seems like needless padding.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagwad Gita , says more than the rest of the verbiage. As clouds of fire reach the corners of the screen – the impact is especially terrifying on IMAX – we hear only Oppenheimer’s laboured breathing at the beauty and the bloodshed he has wrought.

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• Christopher Nolan
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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Historical Epic Is as Brilliant and Short-Sighted as Its Subject

David ehrlich.

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Which isn’t to overstate the degree to which Nolan’s first biopic feels like some kind of grandiose self-portrait (even if the Manhattan Project sequences can seem broadly analogous to the filmmaking process, as large swaths of “Inception” and “The Prestige” did before them), nor to suggest that the director sees himself in the same regard as the man he describes in the “Oppenheimer” press notes as “the most important person who ever lived.” It’s also not to glibly conflate one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century with one of the most controversial figures on the r/Movies subreddit, even if the industry-changing success of “Batman Begins” surely inspired a “now I am become death” moment of Nolan’s very own. 

It’s just to say that Nolan has always been fascinated by characters who are torn between the subatomic particles of personal agency and the vast cosmic forces of our universe, and J. Robert Oppenheimer was perhaps the first person who actually lived a version of the only story that Nolan has ever wanted to tell. So while Nolan’s first biopic may not be a self-portrait, it is an origin story of sorts, and also a devastating statement of purpose. It’s his “Empire of Light.” It’s his “Roma.” Most uncomfortably — and most unfavorably — it’s his “The Wind Rises.” 

That turns out to be very, very close, indeed, and yet also never quite close enough. While “Oppenheimer” invites you to stare at Cillian Murphy’s face in shallow-focus IMAX-sized close-ups for much of its three-hour running time, it seldom offers serious insight as to what’s happening behind his marble-blue eyes, let alone the opportunity to see through them. The result is a movie that’s both singularly propulsive and frustratingly obtuse; an overwritten chamber piece that’s powered by the energy of a super-collider. 

Paced like it was designed for interstellar travel, scripted with a degree of density that scientists once thought purely theoretical in nature, and shot with such large-format bombast that repetitive scenes (or at least Nolan-esque slices ) of old politicians yelling at each other about expired security clearances hit with the same visceral impact as the 747 explosion in “Tenet,” “Oppenheimer” is nothing if not a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make one. Indeed, it would seem like the ideal vehicle for Nolan’s career-long exploration into the black holes of the human condition — the last riddles of a terrifyingly understandable world.

Per the director’s signature approach, the film’s relentless narrative swerves between different timelines, aspect ratios, color schemes, and perspectives. In truth, however, the conceit essentially boils down to two clear aesthetics spread across three distinct moments in history. 

The first, labeled “Fission” and shot in the closest equivalent this drab-as-death movie has to full color, follows Oppenheimer (Murphy) on a forward path from his days as a rakish autodidact and world-traveling dilettante to his eventual selection as the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project. Also presented in color, or at least striking a dank compromise between “DMV green” and “middle-management white,” are long and increasingly agitated glimpses into Oppenheimer’s secret 1954 security hearing, in which a clutch of hawkish politicians who resented Oppenheimer’s resistance to the H-bomb program attempted to strip him of his top-secret clearance by playing up his pre-war connections to the Communist Party. 

Fission and Fusion. Nolan has never come up with a cleaner way of framing the chemical reaction that galvanizes so many of his films. From “Inception” to “Dunkirk,” Nolan’s symphonic movies don’t hinge on linear cause-and-effect so much as they split themselves into a series of discrete atomic parts that eventually slam into each other with enough excitement to create a hyper-combustible chain reaction, and that’s exactly what happens in “Oppenheimer.” Here, Nolan’s non-chronological approach allows us to experience the bomb and its fallout all at once, thus making discovery inextricable from devastation, creation inextricable from destruction, and the innocent joy of theory inextricable from the unfathomable horror of practice.

It’s 1936, and Oppenheimer is introduced to a socially progressive young psychiatrist named Jean Tatlock at a party in Berkeley; they have sex while he reads her the “Bhagavad Gita” in the original Sanskrit (we’ve all done it). Tatlock is played by a flushed-cheeked Florence Pugh, whose “be here now” earthiness adds a necessary edge to one of the Mal-est female characters Nolan’s written in a minute. Emily Blunt has no such luck in the role of Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife, whose diminishment feels particularly egregious in a movie that hardly bothers to express what Oppenheimer thinks of her, or if he thinks of her at all.

It’s the following year, and buttoned-up physicist Ernest Lawrence is pleading with Oppenheimer to keep leftist politics out of the classroom. Lawrence is played by the great Josh Hartnett, whose warm and welcome performance sets the tone for a film in which virtually every bit part has been cast with someone’s favorite actor: Benny Safdie, Josh Peck, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Clarke, David Krumholtz, Alex Wolff, Dane DeHaan, “Gargoyles” auteur Kenneth Branagh, Macon Blair, Matthew Modine, and Olivia Thirlby are just a small sample of the names printed on what must have been the wildest call sheets in recent memory. 

It’s also 1947, and Oppenheimer is accepting a cushy Princeton job from Downey’s Salieri-like Strauss, who seethes at perceived slights from the giants before him as he watches his new hire make smalltalk with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti, just the right amount of silly). This is the rare scene that proves meaningfully enriched by Nolan’s color-coded approach to subjectivity, as Oppenheimer and Strauss turn out to have very different takeaways from the encounter. For the most part, however, the frequent shifting between color and black-and-white serves as a frustrating reminder of how little Nolan gets in return for this gambit. As the director of “Inception” must already know: If you need a glaring signpost to inform the audience they’re in a character’s head, they’re not really in a character’s head.

The test itself makes for an incredible setpiece, even if Nolan’s awesome pyrotechnics fail to capture the full horror of a bomb that was designed to be a spectacle of deterrence (the explosion feels unimpeachably realistic, and yet falls short of viscerally reconciling modern audiences to a horror that recent generations have tried to wish away). But the aftermath proves far more searing, as Oppenheimer is forced to relinquish control of his precious “gadget” and sit by the radio like everyone else in order to learn about what happened when it was deployed. It’s Schrödinger’s bomb. For one extraordinary moment in time, the destroyer of worlds is perfectly suspended between theory and execution, as Nolan’s shark-like storytelling slows down long enough for us to imagine the moral calculations that Oppenheimer must have been making in his head, and how weak he must have felt in the aftermath of harnessing such god-like might (contained as it is, few movies have so effectively conveyed the destructive power of ambitious men in small rooms). 

Murphy’s performance is every bit as inspired as his casting. He plays Oppenheimer as more of an artist than a physicist — as the rare man of science who God could mistake for a prophet — and the opening passages of Nolan’s film twitch and fulminate in response to that creative temperament. That effect is most palpable in the way that Murphy appears to dance on the bow tip of Ludwig Göransson’s Zimmer-worthy score, which is all mercurial violins and spooky action at a distance before that delicate touch is replaced by the cacophonous layers of sound that every Nolan film relies upon when its parallel storylines converge in the third act.

Nolan sympathetically addresses Oppenheimer’s discomfort with being hailed as a hero, and takes great pains to detail his subject’s even greater distress at realizing that he’ll never be able to put the atomic genie back in its bottle. “Who would want to justify their own life?,” someone asks, with the implicit understanding that none of us could. Nolan indicates time and again that Oppenheimer is powerless to understand the full meaning behind his actions (“Genius is no guarantee of wisdom,” one character offers), but the film is deeply afraid of sitting with the weight of that uncertainty. 

But it’s no great feat to rekindle our fear over the most abominable weapon ever designed by mankind, nor does that seem to be Nolan’s ultimate intention. Like “The Prestige” or “Interstellar” before it, “Oppenheimer” is a movie about the curse of being an emotional creature in a mathematical world. The difference here isn’t just the unparalleled scale of this movie’s tragedy, but also the unfamiliar sensation that Nolan himself is no less human than his characters.

Universal Pictures will release “Oppenheimer” in theaters on Friday, July 21.

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Kid reviews of, oppenheimer.

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Parents complaining about nudity is proof teenagers are smarter than some of their own parents, stellar film contemplating the ethicality of invention.

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It is history, stop hating on it, you can’t just make it inaccurate so it has less sex.

2 stars is wild, nolan's terrifying, unique biography of legendarily controversial scientist.

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Good movie but what people are saying about the nudity is all wrong

Interesting, yet complex, and sometimes boring movie has sex scenes and nudity., dont see if u r a teen, movie is a masterpiece, common sense media review is awful lol, what to watch next.

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Oppenheimer review – Cillian Murphy’s finest hour

Review by David Jenkins @daveyjenkins

Directed by

Christopher Nolan

Cillian Murphy Emily Blunt Matt Damon

Anticipation.

What will Nolan do next after the clever if underwhelming Tenet?

There's a whole lotta movie here, though it’s Murphy who deserves the sashes and garlands.

In Retrospect.

A juggernaut historical biopic that you'll want to see again asap, even if it doesn’t all work on the first sweep.

This combustible and relentlessly-paced biography of the “father of the the atomic bomb” is a contender for Christopher Nolan’s best film.

T here’s something very moving about watching a film and being able to see dust motes float in the air. Or the reddened, mottled skin on the back of an actor’s neck. Or the abrasive textures of wood and fabric. Or drops of water causing minute ripples once they descend into a pond – a visual motif that receives its fiery analog at the slow burn climax of this grandiose new film from Christopher Nolan.

All of this is the 70mm effect, the wide-gauge film format that, due to its dimensions and design, is able to drink up details that other, lesser film stocks do not have the alchemical make-up to capture. Maybe some could argue that it’s the job of cinema to airbrush out these elements and offer a primped and manicured fantasy of reality, lest we be reminded too much of the lives we’re attempting to escape by going to see such entertainment.

Oppenheimer, a luxuriant, tactile and often nerve-shredding screen adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s lauded non-fiction doorstop, ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer’, sees the showman filmmaker creating a more intimate milieu for this urgently-paced and personnel-heavy historical biography.

It is a film about embracing imperfection, about being realistic with regards to who we are and what we do in this life, and the relative values of taking a chance on a maverick. Yet is also a film which accepts that the tectonic plates of history often make their earth-jogging shifts from within cramped offices or out on dusty, depopulated plains.

Indeed, at the time of an in-progress writers and actors strike in Hollywood, Oppenheimer operates as a critique by stealth as it lambasts the scowling middle-men, the steely bureaucratic enforcers, the politicians and the back-room operators whose job it is to coax in the talent they need to perform an immediate function, and then make sure they’re quickly dispensed of at the point of delivery.

Nolan attempts to be objective in his lush, realist portrait of “the father of the atomic bomb”, yet there’s a clear sense of awe at both his subject’s inquiring mind, his poise and his role as “director” on the Los Alamos “set” that was built to develop a nuclear arsenal before one of America’s many geopolitical rivals can blow them to smithereens.

In his development of the atomic bomb, Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer deadpans that the possibility of one such device destroying the world through an atmospheric chain reaction is “near zero”, which causes his more military-minded colleagues to perspire a little. But taking these chances – turning theory into practice – is the only way to find out for sure.

That said, despite the character and his world, Nolan doesn’t lean too heavily on the actual quantum physics behind this lofty endeavour. Films such as Interstellar and Tenet were hampered by the need to wrap your head around fanciful sci-fi conceits rooted in real physics, but this allows for a more immediate and dramatic experience by keeping the science simple and off-stage somewhat.

The film comprises a rushing, heady continuum of scenes which focus on the logistical ins and outs of the Manhattan Project and the eventual “Trinity” bomb tests, as well as drawing intrigue from the precarious (and, eventually, ferocious) anti-left political sentiments of the era. Nolan appears to frame Oppenheimer as someone who only sees politics in practical terms, not an ideologue or a firebrand who feels he needs to conceal his beliefs.

Many of the strongest, most tense scenes chart Oppie’s attempt to score security clearance for a range of potentially disreputable but brilliant science colleagues while fighting a war of words against the men whose job it was to filter out and eliminate possible spies (a small role by Casey Affleck offers a delicious early highlight). As a viewing experience, it’s a film which travels at the speed of Oliver Stone’s JFK, one which is also successful at keeping many plates spinning at one time. It’s rare that a film which comprises so many scenes of men talking in rooms should whip by at such a clip, especially as Nolan’s framing, blocking and movement of the camera is rarely what you’d call artistic (though it more than does the job).

Of the famously gigantic ensemble cast roped in to tell this story, there’s not a single player who feels like they’ve been given short shrift. I can see some arguing that Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s communist lover, and Emily Blunt’s tipsy wife Kitty are sidelined in favour of the many male protagonists, yet they both contribute small but important scenes. I would argue that Blunt is responsible for the film’s strongest moment, as she stoically takes the stand for her husband at a sham security hearing and brings home the backbone that he’s currently lacking.

But the lion share of plaudits need to go to Murphy who is extraordinary in the title role, transmitting both a boyish passion for learning and discovery and a deep if shrouded sense of paranoia and guilt that would come from revealing the contents of a Pandora’s Box for which he has the only key. His gaunt, greying, unglamorous features are emphasised by the cigarettes he smokes which look like giant white batons dangling from his lips.

On that front, he has noted that he was physically modelled on David Bowie’s character from Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, which feels apposite as this too is a film about a genius outsider coming to terms with how he has been exploited from the off. Murphy is a reliably great actor, but this is on a different plateau, a muscular and effortlessly charismatic turn in which he commands every frame he appears in.

The film falters in its final act, as the focus shifts to the backroom machinations of Robert Downey Jr’s one-time chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss. It’s nice to see Downey outside of a metal onesie, yet his arc feels manipulated as a way to give the film some conventional closure. This is when the witch trials are at full pelt, and Nolan can’t help but present Oppenheimer as the newly-moralistic martyr, even if he himself didn’t appear to want that end. And yet there’s a paradox: if Nolan was more objectively ambivalent about his subject, does that remove some of the impetus to make the film in the first place? Does he see himself as the lone genius who just about slips out the back door with a moral victory?

Oppenheimer shares facets with Nolan’s greatest film, 2006’s The Prestige , in that it is about a man who builds a machine that, if placed into the wrong hands, has the ability to destroy lives. It also has a certain messiness to it, avoiding the hokily rigid plot schematics of Dunkirk , Interstellar and Inception . Robert Oppenheimer, too, operates in the same shady moral domain as Bruce Wayne’s Batman , a self-starting mercenary who’s bottomless financial coffers allow him to mete out punishment on those he believes to be wrongdoers.

This film is less about offering some neat, cyclical narrative, and more about navigating the twisty moral maze that comes from harnessing the power of the atom to do great damage on the world and its people. And it’s perhaps kudos to Nolan’s writing (and Murphy’s intuitive interpretation of the text) that all this comes out so cleanly. It’s not a faultless film, but it’s one that sits within the higher echelons of the oft-tawdry biopic form, and also reveals hidden depths to the Nolan project and, excitingly, suggests that we should brace ourselves for anything the next time around.

Published 19 Jul 2023

Tags: Christopher Nolan Cillian Murphy Dunkirk Emily Blunt Florence Pugh Matt Damon Tenet

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‘Oppenheimer’ movie review: Christopher Nolan’s “event that changed the world” is truly captivating

There’s always a worry that arises when a film receives as much hype as Christopher Nolan’s new historical biopic Oppenheimer has because it often leads to unfair expectations, those that suggest the film may be the most extraordinary cinematic event of all time. Of course, that’s always unlikely to be accurate, but Nolan and his cast and crew have still delivered a genuinely captivating movie, even up against the excessive hype.

In Oppenheimer , Cillian Murphy portrays the reluctant “father of the atomic bomb”, J. Robert Oppenheimer, finally being given the lead role-nod in a Nolan film, having starred in five of his previous efforts. Unsurprisingly, given his undoubted talent as an actor, Murphy delivers a performance of dedication, nuance and, most importantly, believability.

After all, Oppenheimer was not just a critical historical figure but someone at the centrepiece of one of the most important historical events the world has ever known. It may as well be called “the event that changed the world forever”. After playing the central part in the Manhattan Project development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos in New Mexico, Oppenheimer irreversibly altered the nature of global mass-scale warfare as we previously knew it, no longer to be played out on the frontlines, but as dangerous and paranoid games of nuclear cat-and-mouse the likes of which we saw during the Cold War proceeding World War II.

So it’s fair to say that Oppenheimer had a fair few megatons of pressure on his slight shoulders, and Nolan’s film throws us straight into such intensity, with just the right amount of biographical information leading up to the main events. We’re spared Oppenheimer’s youth in favour of his days as a student, then a lecturer and finally as the man who would change the world.

The fact that there is rarely a moment of tedium in Oppenheimer is a testament to a three-hour film focusing on only one event (though including its lead-up and fall-out). Then we have the event itself, of course, The Trinity Test, to finally see whether this painstakingly researched atomic bomb could really work and thereby end the Second World War. Unlike Nolan’s other films, though, Oppenheimer , as a biographical drama, is admittedly light on his usual spectacle set-pieces, but the Trinity Test itself does not disappoint; it’s not just a mere explosion, it will viscerally shock and confound audiences but also provide a real focus on the man himself and the justification of his actions.

After all, morality is dripping throughout the film. It all seemed like such a good idea – build the bomb, end the war. But with Hitler dead and Germany already surrendered, leaving only a stubborn Japanese nation still fighting, Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists are pressured by the American government into making this thing work, even with the potential of the comprehensive destruction of the physical world.

Whether we should justify the historical actions of Oppenheimer, his Los Alamos colleagues, United States President Harry S. Truman and his Defence Forces is intentionally left by Nolan to the audiences choosing. And as always with Nolan, he does not assume the audience’s intelligence to be any lower than his own; we’re deemed just as capable of understanding quantum physics as we are of evaluating the morality of dropping nuclear warheads on an increasingly weakening nation.

So Oppenheimer is a vital film, not just a glorification of the actions of a great mind but an examination of that mind grappling with such actions’ intense ramifications. Of course, Oppenheimer would fall flat without the excellence of the cast, particularly Emily Blunt (Kitty Oppenheimer, J. Robert’s wife), Robert Downey Jr. (Lewis Strauss, his jealous scientific rival) and Benny Safdie (fellow scientist Edward Teller), to name but a few.

So too, does Nolan’s actual craft undoubtedly play its part in creating a work of genuine fascination. Re-creating The Trinity Test without the use of CGI is a cinematic marvel in its own right, but equally impressive is the intensity of each of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s shots, beautifully capturing each pore of Murphy et al.’s face in glorious 70mm IMAX film. Even without the usual set pieces of The Dark Knight and Interstellar , Ludwig Göransson’s score can still shine in moments of drama, if not action. However, at times, it can tend to overshadow the more vital dialogue in crucial scenes.

Let’s face it, Nolan consistently delivers in whatever project he takes on; he knows his vision and style and creates a positive, intimate environment for his actors to provide their best work. But with Oppenheimer , he hasn’t just delivered an entertaining, thought-provoking movie as he had done with his previous efforts, but a thoroughly important one that informs even the most sheltered of us about the global situation we find ourselves in today.

• తెలుగు

Review: Nolan masterfully conveys Oppenheimer's triumph & tragedy

Movie: Oppenheimer Rating: 4/5 Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh Dialogues: Kalyana Chakravarthy Music: Ludwig Göransson Director & Screenplay: Christopher Nolan Release Date: July 21, 2023

The life of American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the most respected leader of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb during World War II, has been the subject of a number of biographies, but history hasn’t been kind to him. His story still needs to be chronicled.

The epic biographical thriller 'Oppenheimer', written and directed by Christopher Nolan, gives us a fatalistic view of nuclear weapons, and the trauma that they entail. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography 'American Prometheus' by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the film is about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who pioneered the study of the first nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project, thereby ushering in the Atomic Age.

During World War II, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. appoints Oppenheimer, along with a team of scientists, to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project. The mission gets completed on July 16, 1945, as they witness the world's first nuclear explosion, and it forever changes the course of history.

The film begins with a reference from Greek mythology to Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to men. For his action, the gods condemned him to being chained to a rock and tortured lifelong.

Thereafter, it shifts focus back and forth giving viewers a peek into the multifarious elements, namely, politics, the effects and limitless possibilities of science, the annihilation that war could bring, and Oppenheimer's unbridled passion. The narrative investigates the character of power, and how, if not balanced out, it could lead to shadowy Catch-22s without so much as an explanation for any conclusion in sight.

Interestingly, the three-hour-long film is not about the bomb as much as it is about the U.S. government's decision and the subsequent bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and gives us a glimpse into all the paperwork that justified the morality that was ever questioned.

In the film, the physicist (Cillian Murphy) after starting his initial research as a young boy takes to quantum physics, and goes on to lead the Manhattan Project for which he was denounced and even scorned by the government. But being who he was, he neither compromised on his values and principles, nor did he stop dreaming.

Considering the biography 'American Prometheus' took 25 years to be completed and is a 600-page tome, encapsulating all of it in three hours is rather unfair. But then, Nolan strives to tell us how condemnable the development of nuclear weapons and their existence can be. It is also a story deeply germane to what the invention eventually does to change the history of the world. Oppenheimer spent his remaining years opposing the militarisation of the very weapons he invented, and destroyed himself in the bargain.

Filmed in a combination of IMAX 65mm and 65mm large-format film, including sections in IMAX black-and-white film photography, the film has utilised extensive practical effects and minimal computer-generated imagery.

Not made in a linear narrative, the protagonist's life is shown in three main acts that are interwoven together. There are scenes from his college life, and later, two separate hearings, and of course, the process of creating the atomic bomb itself.

An important scene based on an insignificant meeting between Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) is almost missed until it appears that it is central to the narrative.

In a track shown there are different aspects of his life filmed. In one, there is a lot of criticism that Oppenheimer faces. Viewed from the perspective of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a senior member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the encounter sparks intrigue, leading him to obsess over its content.

An agitated Strauss holds a serious grievance against Oppenheimer for seemingly badmouthing him to Einstein in a conversation he views from afar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and publicly dismisses his bete noir's concerns regarding the export of isotopes.

By exploiting these allegations at a hearing intended to remove Oppenheimer from any position of political influence, he makes sure Oppenheimer's security clearance is revoked. Alongside, Oppenheimer's perceived communist ties and affair with fellow physicist Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh) lead to his public fall from grace.

Strauss' personal grievances against Oppenheimer get exposed, but it also leads to the physicist's downfall. This section named 'Fusion' is in black and white, and is followed by another 'Fission'.

Switching back and forth between black and white and colour, Nolan tries to depict the difference between the objective (black and white) and subjective (colour) points of view. As the two distinct storylines both  Fusion and Fission offer different perspectives. But if one is not clued into these strategic divisions, it could leave one confused.

Nolan also doesn’t adhere to dates and details of traditional biopic storytelling; instead, he dives headlong into the advent and fallout of the nuclear arms race.

The entire mood is sombre and often leads to bleak moments that spell morose historical facts. But what is noteworthy is that it is an absolute delight to watch, more also as an adaptation that is not -- as it seems --fictionalised even one bit, so faithful to the original biography it appears to be. Not having read the book could be both advantageous and act as a detriment to one's complete understanding of the film.  

Music by Ludwig Goransson remains understated; Cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema is one of the film's biggest assets.  

The ensemble cast is exemplary. Cillian Murphy stars as the titular character, with Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's wife, Katherine 'Kitty' Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer's military handler, and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, to name a few, are all a delight to watch. The supporting cast also includes Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, and Kenneth Branagh.

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Joshua oppenheimer on how his dystopian musical ‘the end’ might sway u.s. voters: “we have a choice between a bunker and inclusivity”.

The acclaimed documentarian discusses his first narrative feature and shares some strong words about the upcoming presidential election: "Donald Trump may escape justice, but [he can't] escape punishment for the habitual disregard of our fellow human beings."

By Lily Ford

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Joshua Oppenheimer is optimistic. The filmmaker says his postapocalyptic musical film The End , starring Tilda Swinton , Michael Shannon and George MacKay, is an opportunity to spark change.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at the San Sebastian Film Festival , where his movie is screening, Oppenheimer described being motivated to make this film after visiting the bunker of an oligarch who, perhaps eerily, refused to discuss exactly why he was investing in a bunker.

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“When you’re surviving all alone in this bunker trying to preserve some semblance of status and wealth, how do you cope with the abyss of meaninglessness into which you’ve cast yourself?” says Oppenheimer of one of the key questions in The End .

The film premiered at the 51st Telluride Film Festival in August. It will be released by Neon in the U.S. on Dec. 6.

In an interview with THR in San Sebastian, the director discussed the daunting prospect of marrying a dystopian future with 1950s Broadway musicals, why he wants audiences to confront their regrets in the face of an ever-weakening planet, and how this film might urge voters to choose a particular leader in the upcoming U.S. election : “ Donald Trump may escape justice, just like the father in The End , but neither of them, nor any of us, can escape punishment for the habitual disregard of our fellow human beings.”

Your background is in documentary filmmaking and this is your first narrative feature film. Was that daunting or exciting?

When you’re surviving all alone in this bunker trying to preserve some semblance of status and wealth and your art collection, how do you cope with the abyss of meaninglessness into which you’ve cast yourself? How do you cope with guilt for your role in the catastrophe from which you’re fleeing? How do you live with the remorse of not having brought loved ones because they might be difficult or inconvenient, but are ultimately some of the most important people in your lives?

The film I really wanted to make was the documentary with them, 25 years after they moved into the bunker. And I understood at once that won’t happen. But what I would do is make a fiction film, that it would be a musical inspired by the great, forward-looking, optimistic, golden-age Broadway musicals of the 1950s — that it would not be a satire. It would be deadly sincere, and it would be called The End … It was very hard and daunting, to answer the second part of your question. It was like a second career. But if it’s not daunting, then you haven’t asked a question that’s important enough.

What was that specific question in your mind, if you could summarize it succinctly?

Not even so secret! But [there’s a] level of commitment to making this is an optimistic [film] — and it comes from the belief that animates any cautionary tale — which is that while it may be too late for the family inhabiting this dystopian vision, it’s not too late for us. And that if we can make a film that encourages people to face their regrets with honesty, to ask forgiveness wherever necessary, to forgive themselves and forgive each other always, then we can change course as a human family before we career right off the abyss into catastrophic environmental collapse.

There’s that moment where one of your characters says something like, “If I didn’t live the way I did, someone else would have.” He says it’s arrogance to think that anything you do could make an impact. But you’re saying that this isn’t just a denial that exists in the dystopian future. This denial exists in the present.

That’s true. That’s right. I think of something George [MacKay] said yesterday, it purports to be a film about the future, but it’s an allegory for the present. It’s a dark mirror held up to all of us. It’s like [Oscar Wilde novel] The Picture of Dorian Gray . It’s inviting us to acknowledge our mistakes before it’s too late.

Yeah. I think we face a meaningful contest within the context of a democracy that has been crippled by oligarchy, to some extent. In the United States, the country where I vote, we face a meaningful contest between a bunker where we exclude the other, where we build walls and tell ourselves that we’re putting ourselves first when we’re actually destroying our own humanity by doing so, and a more inclusive vision of the human family.

And I think any time we find our meaning and place all of our energies into preserving a family at the exclusion of the broader human family, we harm ourselves. To talk of impunity, Donald Trump may escape justice, just like the father in The End , but neither of them, nor any of us, can escape punishment for the habitual disregard of our fellow human beings. And even the people closest to us whom we love yet tell ourselves, “Well, I won’t address this hurt that lingers between us because it’s just too difficult. And we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine.” Up to the day that the private moment of reckoning each of us face as we age and approach death.

It’s a recipe for empty lives, and I think it’s unnecessary. And I offer the film out of the greatest optimism and hope that each of us can change all these levels, at once, on the biggest political level and on the private level.

Writing a musical, and crafting these sequences, is a whole other genre in itself.

It was the height of the pandemic in 2020, when we started to write the songs, and it was just a joy. I would love to make another musical and I’d love to do it with him. My editor said to me recently, “We should sing more together, Joshua,” and I said, “Oh, why?” He said, “Because you can’t sing when you’re not happy.” There’s blues and genres of songs that are melancholy, but they’re also songs of self-consolation.

And of course, it helped that you had a wonderful cast at your disposal with Tilda, Michael and George. What was it like working with them?

They brought the most luminous human radiance to this piece. Their commitment was like that of a doomsday cult waiting for the rapture. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film where you sense the commitment of the cast more deeply. That works beautifully for my approach to filmmaking, which is a deep curiosity and love for everyone who’s onscreen, and that curiosity is what motivates me to make films, and they all work differently. So Tilda approaches a take like a sandbox for exploring. I’m always trying to give Tilda as many takes as possible, because she’s just discovering amazing things over several takes … George comes incredibly prepared, ready to offer a palette of related interpretations where different nuances or aspects of the character or performance can be adjusted at a word.

Are you excited to be here in San Sebastian?

It was beautiful being in San Sebastian. I love San Sebastian. They did a retrospective around The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence and films that may have inspired those films; that’s the other time I was here for this festival. My films are about how we make our world through the stories we tell about it, as I said. I’m also a political filmmaker and concerned with the direction of our society, and that means I’m looking at issues of power and again, impunity. And Spain is a particularly interesting country to visit because I’m always asked about that because they had an experience of fascism that virtually brought us to the 1980s. Far, far later than the rest of Western Europe experienced fascism, and there’s a real grappling with impunity and the legacy that impunity has left [here].

This connection between how victors write the history to conceal their actions, to ease their regrets and the obstacles we face, the urgent changes we need so that our societies are more just, and our survival as a species is sustainable. Those are somehow still vivid to people in Spain.

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