Christopher Nolan films take your head hostage. They look unassuming enough: typical blockbusters, advertised on TV and playing at the multiplex. But then you start watching and find all the tropes of genre film-making — chases, heists, shoot-outs — playing as if in a funhouse mirror. The streets of Paris fold back on themselves like origami. Eighteen-wheel trucks flip like a beetle. Planes are upended mid-flight. Car chases happen in reverse. Looped plot strands and shattering twists rock the ground beneath us, lending the otherwise solid narrative architecture a gauzy metafictional shimmer, as all we had thought solid melts into air. In an age of mindless thrills Nolan specialises in the mindful sort — a delighted astonishment a million miles away from the bombast of a typical blockbuster, with an echo that plays in your mind afterwards for weeks, even years. Some of us poor souls are still trying to work out the ending of Inception.
Get to know him
Memento (2000)
A dizzyingly structured neo-noir with the eerie, sunlit clarity of a dream, Nolan’s American debut stars Guy Pearce as a former insurance investigator with short-term memory loss who is trying to solve the mystery of his wife’s death: Raymond Chandler by way of Oliver Sacks. Nolan conveys his hero’s discombobulation with a stunning technical feat: scenes run in reverse order, each one ending where the last one began. If you’ve ever left the house without your keys you’ll sympathise.
A personal favourite
Inception (2010)
Nolan’s great feat of structural engineering: a heist thriller about the subconscious mind starring Leonardo DiCaprio, juggling not two but five separate plots and timelines, all like the musical figures in a Bach fugue. It’s Freud as rewritten by Ian Fleming, playing in five cinemas. Imagine North by Northwest, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and Vertigo running simultaneously, with Hitchcock whipping us from one screen to the next, before bringing it all to a synchronised climax, and you are close.
Go further
The Dark Knight (2008)
A studio-farmed sequel that is also an expression of a deeply personal vision, a defence of law and order that is also in thrall to the dogs of anarchy, The Dark Knight is franchise movie-making raised to the very highest level: a sleek, ambivalent, pantherish masterpiece, shot amid the towering glass and steel of downtown Chicago and featuring an Oscar-winning performance from Heath Ledger as the Joker: superhero cinema meets Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Underrated
The Prestige (2006)
Nolan’s Victorian-era thriller concerns two magicians, Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, locked in a fatal rivalry. Nolan’s great feat is to juggle the audience’s sympathies so that while each man is the other’s villain, both are the hero of their own tale. Crammed with twists, narrative feints and nested flashbacks, the script, which Nolan and his brother laboured on for six years, is a marvel of Jamesian elegance, organised around a single idea: the movies are the greatest magic trick ever invented.
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One to miss
Insomnia (2002)
With its themes of guilt, doubles and faulty perception, Insomnia is the most clearly Hitchcockian of Nolan’s films, a cat-and-mouse thriller in a remote Alaskan town pitting Al Pacino’s detective against Robin Williams’s preternaturally calm killer beneath the unforgiving glare of the midnight sun. Technically, it’s marvellous — the film where Nolan absorbed and mastered the nuts and bolts of studio film-making — but it’s his least distinctive movie in terms of his own voice, and the foggy, narcoleptic mood is a drag.
Go in deep
Interstellar (2014)
The film that confounded those who claim Nolan is a cold film-maker, a quantum-physics weepie. Astronaut Matthew McConaughey is separated from his family, not just by the vastness of space but by manipulations of time: an Einstein-era Doctor Zhivago. The plot is a wormhole defying comprehension, but the emotions are deep and, in the scene where McConaughey catches up with 22 years of messages from his kids, profound. In space nobody can hear you get homesick.
