Klout and Warner Bros. have partnered together to offer Klout users the opportunity for tickets to an early screening of WB’s “Man of Steel.”
Klout is awarding 500 users and a guest of their choosing to a screening on June 10, four days before the film bows on June 14.The screening will take place on June 10 in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas and Miami with users also getting the opportunity to watch guests arrive on the red carpet prior to their own screening.
Users are asked to go to Klout.com to see if they are eligible.
The site recently announced it has already awarded one million perks to Klout users from more than 400 brands which include Chevy, Nike, Sony, McDonald’s, Microsoft and American Express.
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.
But even when “Oppenheimer” settles down into a more realistic, less phantasmagorical groove (which it does fairly quickly), it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning — no mere metaphor in this case, since the movie, which tells the story of the man who created the atomic bomb, feels almost like it’s about the invention of lightning.
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. His “Oppie” is an elegant mandarin who’s also a bit snakelike — at once a cold prodigy and an ardent humanist, an aristocrat and a womanizer, a Jewish outsider who becomes a consummate insider, and a man who oversees the invention of nuclear weapons without a shred of doubt or compunction, only to confront the world he created from behind a defensive shield of guilt that’s a lot less self-aware.
Murphy, wearing Oppenheimer’s trademark wide-brimmed porkpie hat (or sometimes wearing nothing at all, a shock because we’re not used to seeing a science geek portrayed with this kind of sensuality), is at the center of almost every scene, and he imprints himself on your imagination. The movie needs that, because “Oppenheimer” is a relentless, coruscating piece of maximalist cinema that you watch on the edge of your brain. Nuclear fission means the release of energy that happens when the nucleus of an atom is split, and Nolan has conceived “Oppenheimer” as an act of cinematic fission. He fragments the story into parts that keep colliding, immersing us in the heat and energy that all gives off. It’s a style that owes a major debt to Oliver Stone’s “Nixon,” though that movie was a masterpiece. This one is urgent and essential, but in a less fully realized way.
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.
By the time Hitler attacks Poland, in 1939, it seems like the Nazis might seriously be able to create their own nuclear weapon, which in Oppenheimer’s view means the potential end of Western Civilization. It takes a while for him to earn the trust that gets him invited into the Manhattan Project. But once he does, General Leslie R. Groves (Matt Damon), heading up the top-secret endeavor, appoints Oppenheimer to be its leader, and Murphy and Damon have the first of several terrific scenes together. It would be hard to imagine a scientist more worldly, or a hard-ass general more grudgingly in tune with the academic mind.
“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.)
But the Oppenheimer who then goes on to fight the invention of the more powerful hydrogen bomb, as if it were some utterly different weapon from the one he created, and who is desperate to rein in the existence of nuclear weapons in general, is the spokesman the film ends with. And in a way, for all his crusading fervor, he’s the wrong messenger. Oppenheimer, of course, had every right to be haunted by the weapon he’d created. But he also possessed a kind of masochistic naïveté, forgetting the key lesson of the revolution he was at the center of: that human beings will always be at the mercy of what science makes possible. “Oppenheimer” tacks on a trendy doomsday message about how the world was destroyed by nuclear weapons. But if Oppenheimer, in his way, made the bomb all about him, by that point it’s Nolan and his movie who are doing the same thing.
“Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” director Benny Safdie expands his acting career with a prominent supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” He plays Edward Teller, the real-life theoretical physicist known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” Teller joined Oppenheimer to work on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., focusing on nuclear implosion and uranium hydride research. He was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, and had a thick accent, which presented Safdie with one of his biggest acting challenges.
“The accent was something I was so nervous about,” Safdie recently told Vulture. “I remember Chris asking me, ‘How’s the accent coming?’ And I’m just like, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to accomplish this?’ I didn’t know if he was going to want me to do it. But he sent me all of these interviews and we talked about how Teller speaks and who he is. It was a long process of working together to really nail it down.”
“I remember finally I was like, ‘You know what? I could sound crazy, but I don’t care. This is what Teller sounds like and I’m just going to do it,’” Safdie added. “I sent a voice-memo where I just narrated what my breakfast was and how Teller really liked pineapple.”
Because “Oppenheimer” spans several years, Safdie also had to find a way to change his accent as Teller grew older. Screaming ended up being a solution.
“Before each take, I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to yell. I’m going to really break up my vocal cords,’” Safdie told Vulture. “It makes such a big difference. We also came up with this weird laugh-snort that Teller has when Kenneth Branagh is talking and we realize the Germans are behind and we’re ahead of them. Snorting and hitting the leg. We spent so long on that! Just that little snort. You’re not afraid to look stupid in a lot of ways, because when you’re free like that, it’s a fun place to be.”
Another signature part of bringing Teller to life was his eyebrows. Safdie sports some pretty thick brows in the film, which he said Christopher Nolan was adamant about.
“I am proud to say that it’s all my eyebrows,” Safdie said. “Teller had the best eyebrows. Every once in a while I have a straggler that I’ll just pluck out, cause it looks a little too crazy. But Chris said, ‘Don’t do that. Let’s just let it go crazy.’ I had the most insane eyebrows for months and months, and you just had to brush them out and then they shined in all their glory.”
“Oppenheimer” is now playing in theaters nationwide from Universal Pictures.
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The script behind Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has jumped to the top of bestseller lists on Amazon following the film’s smashing blockbuster release last month.
The film, based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “American Prometheus,” tells the definitive story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb. The film, starring Cillian Murphy as the eponymous scientist, pulls straight from the 700-page biography, which traces Oppenheimer’s life starting with his time at Cambridge, where he earned a reputation as an intellectual prodigy. As a physicist, Oppenheimer made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, earning him great respect among his peers.
The narrative takes a dramatic turn with the onset of World War II, when Oppenheimer was appointed as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret government initiative aimed at developing the first atomic bomb. His leadership and organizational skills were instrumental to the project, which culminated with the devastating nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 200,000 Japanese people.
In his introduction to the screenplay, Bird praises Nolan’s skill in extremely complex life story and miraculously turning it into “visual art that is faithful both to the history and the man.”
When Bird read Nolan’s screenplay, he was “struck by how faithful it was to the book, capturing what was always most important to Sherwin: the paradoxes at the heart of Oppenheimer’s character and the intimate details that dovetailed with enormous plate shifts of world history.”
Having memorably explored the Caped Crusader’s origins in “Batman Begins,” director Christopher Nolan puts all of Gotham City under a microscope in “The Dark Knight,” the enthralling second installment of his bold, bracing and altogether heroic reinvention of the iconic franchise. An ambitious, full-bodied crime epic of gratifying scope and moral complexity, this is seriously brainy pop entertainment that satisfies every expectation raised by its hit predecessor and then some. That should also hold true at the box office, with Heath Ledger’s justly anticipated turn as the Joker adding to the must-see excitement surrounding the Warner Bros. release.
With the Bruce Wayne/Batman backstory firmly established, “The Dark Knight” fans out to take a broader perspective on Gotham City — portrayed as a seething cauldron of interlocking power structures and criminal factions in the densely layered but remarkably fleet screenplay by helmer Nolan and brother Jonathan (stepping in for “Batman Begins’” David S. Goyer, who gets a story credit).
Using five strongly developed characters to anchor a drama with life-or-death implications for the entire metropolis, the Nolans have taken Bob Kane’s comicbook template and crafted an anguished, eloquent meditation on ideas of justice and power, corruption and anarchy and, of course, the need for heroes like Batman — a question never in doubt for the viewer, but one posed rather often by the citizens of Gotham.
Indeed, with trusty Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman, superbly restrained) and golden-boy District Attorney Harvey Dent (a cocksure Aaron Eckhart) successfully spearheading the city’s crackdown on the mob, even Wayne himself (Christian Bale) figures his nights moonlighting as a leather-clad vigilante are numbered. The young billionaire hopes to hang up the Batsuit for good and renew his relationship with assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, an immediate improvement over Katie Holmes), who has taken up with Dent in the meantime.
But Batman’s stature as a radical symbol of good has invited a more sinister criminal presence to Gotham City — and, as seen in the crackerjack bank-robbery sequence that opens the pic, one who operates in terrifyingly unpredictable ways. Utterly indifferent to simple criminal motivations like greed, Ledger’s maniacally murderous Joker is as pure an embodiment of irrational evil as any in modern movies. He’s a pitiless psychopath who revels in chaos and fears neither pain nor death, a demonic prankster for whom all the world’s a punchline.
After Ledger’s death in January, his penultimate performance (with Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” still to come) will be viewed with both tremendous excitement and unavoidable sadness. It’s a tribute to Ledger’s indelible work that he makes the viewer entirely forget the actor behind the cracked white makeup and blood-red rictus grin, so complete and frightening is his immersion in the role. With all due respect to the enjoyable camp buffoonery of past Jokers like Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson, Ledger makes them look like — well, clowns.
The pic shrewdly positions the Joker as the superhero-movie equivalent of a modern terrorist (one of several post-9/11 signifiers), who threatens to target Gotham civilians until Batman reveals his identity. Batman, Gordon and Dent uneasily join forces, but the Joker seems to have the upper hand at every step, even from a jail cell; the city, turning against the hero it once looked to for hope, seems more fractious, vulnerable and dangerous than ever.
Though more linear than “Memento” and “The Prestige” (both also co-scripted by the Nolans), “The Dark Knight” pivots with similar ingenuity on a breathless series of twists and turns, culminating in a dramatic shift for Dent. This subplot reps the film’s weakest link, packing too much psychological motivation into too little screen time to be entirely credible. Yet Eckhart vividly inhabits the character’s sad trajectory, underscoring the film’s point that symbols of good can be all too easily tarnished.
From Wayne’s playful debates with faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine) about the public perception of Batman to the Joker’s borderline-poetic musings on his own bottomless sadism, the characters almost seem to be carrying on a debate about the complicated realities of good vs. evil, and the heavy burden shouldered by those fighting for good. One of the few action filmmakers who’s capable of satisfying audiences beyond the fanboy set, Nolan honors his serious themes to the end; he bravely closes the story with both Gotham City and the narrative in tatters, making this the rare sequel that genuinely deserves another.
Viewers who found “Batman Begins” too existentially weighty for its own good will be refreshed to know that “The Dark Knight” hits the ground running and rarely lets up over its swift 2½-hour running time. Nolan directs the action more confidently than he did the first time out, orchestrating all manner of vertiginous mid-air escapes and virtuosic highway setpieces (and unleashing Batman’s latest ooh-ah contraption, the monster-truck-tire-equipped Bat-Pod). In a fresh innovation, six sequences were shot using Imax cameras, and will presumably look smashing in the giant-screen format (pic was reviewed from a 35mm print).
Though not as obsessively detailed as “Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight” shares with that film a robust physicality and a commitment to taking violence seriously; a brief shot of bruises and scrapes on Bale’s torso conveys as much impact as any of the film’s brutal confrontations. Bale himself is less central figure than ensemble player, but the commandingly charismatic thesp continues to put his definitive stamp on the role, and also has devilish fun playing up Wayne’s playboy persona.
Tech work is at the first entry’s high standard, with many artists reprising their contributions here — from Nathan Crowley’s imposing production design, shown to flattering effect in Wally Pfister’s gleaming widescreen compositions, to the propulsively moody score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. Perhaps most impressive is Lee Smith’s editing, confidently handling multiple lines of action and cutting for maximum impact.
Exteriors were lensed in Chicago aside from an early, plot-necessitated detour to Hong Kong, which marks the first time in a Batman film that the title character has left Gotham City.
Ryan Knapp woke up before sunrise one morning in July and left his home in northern New Hampshire at 5:30 a.m. to catch a movie.
It wasn’t just any day at the cinema. In fact, it was a 14-hour round-trip journey that involved crossing two state lines by car, train and bus. That’s because Knapp wanted to see Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” the way the director intended: in Imax 70mm, a rare format crafted from Nolan’s film negative, with physical reels spanning 11 miles and weighing 600 pounds. It’s a movie nerd’s dream — but it’s only available on 30 screens worldwide, 19 of them in the U.S.
So Knapp trekked to Providence, R.I., for a 2 p.m. showing. The verdict? “It was definitely worth it.”
“Oppenheimer,” an R-rated three-hour drama consisting mainly of people talking in rooms, is not the type of movie audiences typically clamor to see on premium screens. Yet Imax accounted for a whopping 20% of the film’s $180.4 million global opening. And the company’s share of the movie’s box office haul has increased each successive weekend, with the 70mm version raking in $17 million to date, an astounding figure for such a limited format.
Audiences have flocked to Imax screens because they offer an experience that cannot be replicated at home, according to box office analyst Jeff Bock, and “when a Christopher Nolan film comes out, that is an event in and of itself.” Plus, premium large formats like Imax 70mm are “a cinephile argument that has now carried over into the mainstream.”
According to Nolan, Imax 70mm is the ideal cinema experience because “the sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled.” But there are serious limitations when it comes to bringing the format to a wider audience. For one, Imax has only 30 Imax film projectors in rotation worldwide, and it takes three days to create each print. Since most theaters have switched over completely to digital projection, the company worked for two years to evaluate, reinstall and fix Imax 70mm projectors, sending tech teams to every site to perfect the audiovisual components. With “Oppenheimer,” Imax oversaw the hiring of 50 film projectionists globally and helped develop the first-ever Imax 70mm black-and-white film, bringing some of Kodak’s more experienced personnel out of retirement in the process.
Due to popular demand, Imax has twice extended “Oppenheimer’s” 70mm run. But on Sept. 1, exhibitors will have to cede those screens to Denzel Washington’s “The Equalizer 3.”
“We really want to support Chris and the movie in every way we can, but we have to balance that with our other commitments,” says Richard Gelfond, CEO of Imax. “We’ll play it by ear and see where it goes.”
Mark Jafar, Imax’s global head of corporate communications, adds, “Imax 70mm film lasts, on average, 10 times longer than regular 70mm or 35mm film. Those prints are assets that we’ll be using for the next 20 years.” He’s confident that specialty theaters like BFI in London and AMC Lincoln Square in New York will bring back “Oppenheimer” in Imax 70mm for Nolan retrospectives.
But it might return even sooner. With theaters selling out more than three weeks in advance — and fans like Knapp road-tripping to their nearest Imax 70mm showing — it’s likely “Oppenheimer” will come back to premium large formats after moviegoers have checked out “The Equalizer 3.”
As Imax 70mm continues to permeate the mainstream and draw in younger auteurs like Jordan Peele and Damien Chazelle, Gelfond’s hope is to “find more projectors and refurbish them.”
“It’s an art form that’s been fading away,” he says. “Imax is all in on trying to keep film alive.”
With $134 million generated from “Oppenheimer” alone, the premium film-tech company is largely responsible for bringing multiplexes out of the pandemic slump. “If Hollywood is going to invest in one thing,” says Bock, “it should have almost everything to do with Imax.”
Due to popular demand, “Oppenheimer” has extended its 70mm run at Imax theaters nationwide through the end of August.
The previous end date, which was already an extension of the film’s original run in Imax 70mm format, was Aug. 17. Tickets for Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb drama are already on sale through Aug. 31 at some Imax theaters, as exhibitors will make them available on a rolling basis.
Nolan, a longtime vocal champion of the premium format, touted Imax 70mm as the “best possible experience” to see “Oppenheimer” because “the sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled.” Only 19 theaters in the U.S. (and 30 worldwide) have the capability to play films in Imax 70mm, including the AMC Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles and the AMC Lincoln Square in New York — making those screens some of the hottest tickets in town.
“It actually looks better in film,” Imax CEO Richard Gelfond tells Variety. “It’s not just about nostalgia. It’s a better experience.”
A lot of work goes into the 70mm experience, he adds. It takes three days to make an Imax film print, and each one is crafted directly from Nolan’s film negative. In the case of “Oppenheimer,” which clocks in at three hours, physical reels are 11 miles long and weigh 600 pounds.
The process is “time consuming and expensive,” Gelfond admits. But ultimately, it’s “worth it.”
Already, the historical biopic starring Cillian Murphy as the “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer, has raked in over $550 million at the global box office, a triumphant feat for an R-rated drama that runs over three hours long. Imax has accounted for a remarkable $114.2 million (22%) of the film’s worldwide total.
“Oppenheimer” will control the Imax footprint until Denzel Washington’s “The Equalizer 3” takes its spot on Sept. 1. Later in the year, Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune Part II,” also filmed with Imax cameras, is getting an exclusive Imax run starting on Nov. 3.
Still, executives at Imax are confident this summer won’t be the last of “Oppenheimer” in Nolan’s preferred format.
“Imax 70mm film lasts, on average, 10 times longer than regular 70mm or 35mm film. Those prints are assets that we’ll be using for the next 20 years,” says Mark Jafar, global head of corporate communications for Imax. “Places like BFI [in London] or Lincoln Square will do Nolan retrospectives or bring back ‘Oppenheimer’ given how popular it is. We’ll be showing it in this format for years to come.”
Zeitgeist Films has formed a joint venture with Syncopy, Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas’ production company, to release Blu-ray editions of Zeitgeist’s prestige titles.
Nolan and Thomas have been friends of Zeitgeist since the independent distributor handled Nolan’s first feature film, “Following,” in 1998.
The first title in the partnership is “Elena,” from “Leviathan” director Andrey Zvyagintsev. “Elena,” which won the Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize, is a modern noir thriller in which 60ish spouses uneasily share a palatial Moscow apartment.
“Elena” stars Nedezhda Markina in the title role and features Hitchcockian music by Philip Glass. Zeitgeist has set an Aug. 4 release.
“We are excited to be able to release this beautiful film on Blu-ray for the first time,” said Zeitgeist co-presidents Nancy Gerstman and Emily Russo. “This is a dream project for us and we’re grateful to Chris and Emma for their support in making it possible.”
The next collaboration between Syncopy and Zeitgeist will be a compilation of the Quay Brothers’ animated short films to be released for the first time on Blu-ray in the fall.
“It’s very exciting to think that ‘Elena’ is receiving an American release in Blu-ray,” said Zvyagintsev. “As a long-time admirer of Christopher Nolan, I am honored that he is initiating his partnership with Zeitgeist with my film. I wish all the parties involved success.”
For decades, the three Oscar shorts prizes — live action, animated and especially documentary — have confounded those who watch the awards. Shorts were all but impossible to see and subject to a different set of rules. That was until ShortsTV came along to distribute the nominees, but even then, at the qualification stage, virtually every other category had to play theatrically, whereas the shorts didn’t, causing some to question whether they even belonged in the Oscar telecast at all. And then the pandemic hit: In 2020, hardly any features opened in cinemas, whereas short films enjoyed more exposure than they had previously, thanks to the rapidly expanding number of streaming platforms that carried them — from Netflix to Paramount Plus to outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times. Suddenly, the doc shorts category seems more accessible and relevant than ever.
Steven Spielberg laid claim to the Normandy beach landing, Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Christopher Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk. Unlike those other battles, however, this last was not a conventional victory, but more of a salvaged retreat, as the German offensive forced a massive evacuation of English troops early in World War II. And unlike those other two directors, Nolan is only nominally interested in the human side of the story as he puts his stamp on the heroic rescue operation, offering a bravura virtual-eyewitness account from multiple perspectives — one that fragments and then craftily interweaves events as seen from land, sea and air.
Take away the film’s prismatic structure and this could be a classic war picture for the likes of Lee Marvin or John Wayne. And yet, there’s no question that the star here is Nolan himself, whose attention-grabbing approach alternates among three strands, chronological but not concurrent, while withholding until quite late the intricate way they all fit together. Though the subject matter is leagues (and decades) removed from the likes of “Inception” and “The Dark Knight,” the result is so clearly “a Christopher Nolan film” — from its immersive, full-body suspense to the sophisticated way he manipulates time and space — that his fans will eagerly follow en masse to witness the achievement. And what an achievement it is!
From the opening scene, “Dunkirk” places us in a state of jeopardy as German sharpshooters pick off a group of British soldiers just yards from the embattled beachhead. Not that things are any safer on the other side of the French-defended barricade. “We surround you,” reads an air-dropped leaflet that accurately represents the Allies’ ever-shrinking position. Backed against the sea, what remains of the British Expeditionary Force can practically see their homeland a mere 26 miles away, but are vulnerable to attacks from the air.
The first fly-by bombing catches us just as much off-guard as it does Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), thin, handsome and hardly more than a child. His dash to the beach could be a game, if the gunshots that fell his comrades and explode inches from his head weren’t so lethal or so loud (as always with Nolan, sound design dramatically heightens the intensity of the experience, which already feels extraordinary given his use of massive-scale Imax cameras).
Driven by a mix of naïveté and survival instinct, Tommy makes an ideal guide through the week-long ordeal, allowing us to experience the strange, almost random way that cowardice blossoms into courage on the battlefield. His storyline, labeled “The Mole” (possibly a play on words, seeing as how it’s set primarily on Dunkirk’s pier-like projection, or mole, but also introduces a somewhat unnecessary subplot involving a non-British infiltrator, or mole), is the most audacious: It features hardly any dialogue, relying instead on our ability to adapt to the unrelentingly harrowing situation, as when Tommy and another low-ranking soldier (Aneurin Barnard) grab a stretcher and use the injured man to board a hospital ship, only to be ordered off moments before it sinks.
No fewer than four British ships go down in “Dunkirk” — not counting the one from which Cillian Murphy’s nameless “shivering soldier” is rescued — and each capsizes alarmingly quickly. This isn’t “Titanic,” in which miniature melodramas had time to unfold as the boat slowly sank, either. Whereas air battles are drawn out and repeated for effect, Nolan and editor Lee Smith compress the doomed-boat scenes for ruthless efficiency, turning the water into a place of high-stakes peril.
While big military ships make massive targets for German bombers and U-boat attacks, Dunkirk’s rough waves and shallow coastline demanded a different approach, and so Operation Dynamo was born: an all-hands call to civilian sailors, asking that they steer any vessel they can, from fishing trawlers to pleasure yachts, across the English Channel to rescue as many of the stranded soldiers as possible. Labeled “The Sea,” this segment feels more traditional, emotionally manipulative enough to match the almost-corny 1940s British propaganda film in this year’s “Their Finest.” (Even in Imax, in which most of the movie fills the massive, nearly-square aspect ratio, this portion is presented in a relatively constrained 2.40:1 format — the same dimensions to which the entire film will be cropped in traditional theaters.)
During this sea-rescue segment, the characters are familiar archetypes, from duty-bound captain Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) to determined teenage tagalong George (Barry Keoghan), and their predictable behavior is elevated by the actors’ fine performances. Rylance in particular speaks volumes even when saying very little, and several of the movie’s most poignant moments are conveyed almost entirely without words, via his expressions alone — as when Dawson realizes the likely death that awaits them just beyond the horizon.
Dunkirk’s beaches represent a special kind of hell in the film, a danger zone where the British are frightfully exposed to attacks from above — and where fate, in all its grim absurdity, forces a few of the characters to return multiple times. Just when the soldiers think they’ve escaped, the tide pulls them back in.
Though much of the Royal Air Force was ordered not to engage, a third strand called “The Air” focuses on two Spitfire pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) determined to protect, as best they can, the rescue vessels from airborne German attack. Hilariously enough, the role finds Hardy once again in Bane mode, his mouth covered and his dialogue all but inaudible — and yet, the heroism shows through his actions and the determined glint in his eyes.
Both Murphy and Hardy have worked with Nolan before (each as Batman villains), but he uses them in character-actor mode here, treating these marquee talents as equals among a cast of newcomers (including Harry Styles, looking every bit the 1940s matinee idol). Playing the highest-ranking Navy officer on the beach, Kenneth Branagh provides the film’s only star performance, and even then, it all comes down to a meaningful salute delivered in “Dunkirk’s” final minutes.
By this point in the film, Nolan has tied the three storylines together. While unnecessarily confusing at times (and not especially satisfying as a puzzle — at least not in the way the ingenious backward-logic of “Memento” was back in the day), by splintering these three storylines, the director allows us to experience the Dunkirk evacuation from multiple perspectives. In his extensive pre-production research, Nolan pored over survivors’ firsthand accounts and inevitably found inconsistencies among them — a phenomenon he ingeniously incorporates into his screenplay. In “Dunkirk,” subjectivity is not merely a tool for in-the-moment suspense, but also for suggesting the innumerable different ways people both lived and remembered the week’s events: One moment, a Spitfire pilot might be swooping in to save a Navy ship, and the next, he’s the one in need of rescuing as his seatbelt jams and his cockpit fills with water.
And yet, Nolan never once privileges the German p.o.v. (a bold departure from most war movies, including “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” which showed both sides, or Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor,” which famously offered a Japanese bomb’s-eye-view of the attack). Nolan’s goal is to give an exclusively British account of events, zeroing in on how it must have felt to the everyday heroes who lived it, as opposed to the leaders calling the shots. When Winston Churchill is finally heard, his words are being read aloud from the pages of a newspaper by an ordinary soldier, rather than delivered by the prime minister himself.
And in that nuance is the great accomplishment of Nolan’s feat: On one hand, he has delivered all the spectacle of a big-screen tentpole, ratcheting up both the tension and heroism through his intricate and occasionally overwhelming sound design, which blends a nearly omnipresent ticking stopwatch with Hans Zimmer’s bombastic score — not so much music as atmospheric noise, so bassy you can feel it rattling your vertebrae. But at the same time, he’s found a way to harness that technique in service of a kind of heightened reality, one that feels more immersive and immediate than whatever concerns we check at the door when entering the cinema. This is what audiences want from a Nolan movie, of course, as a master of the fantastic leaves his mark on historical events for the first time.
Few blockbusters have borne so heavy a burden of audience expectation as Christopher Nolan’s final Batman caper, and the filmmaker steps up to the occasion with a cataclysmic vision of Gotham City under siege in “The Dark Knight Rises.” Running an exhilarating, exhausting 164 minutes, Nolan’s trilogy-capping epic sends Batman to a literal pit of despair, restoring him to the core of a legend that questions, and powerfully affirms, the need for heroism in a fallen world. If it never quite matches the brilliance of 2008’s “The Dark Knight,” this hugely ambitious action-drama nonetheless retains the moral urgency and serious-minded pulp instincts that have made the Warners franchise a beacon of integrity in an increasingly comicbook-driven Hollywood universe. Global B.O. domination awaits.
Even without the bonus of 3D, a technology Nolan has resolutely avoided while continuing to shoot in 35mm and 70mm, “The Dark Knight Rises” should continue the writer-director’s commercial hot streak following “The Dark Knight” and “Inception.” Pic’s B.O. reign will be sustained in part by repeat attendance and Imax ticket premiums; 72 minutes of the film (roughly 40%) were lensed using super-high-res Imax cameras, representing the most extensive and sophisticated use of the giantscreen format in a studio picture.
Once again writing with his brother Jonathan from a tale conceived with David S. Goyer, Nolan has more story obligations than usual this time around. The result is a nearly three-hour yarn that draws on key plot points from “The Dark Knight” before bringing the trilogy full circle, back to the origin story of “Batman Begins,” even as it ushers in a motley crew of villains and allies (not always easy to tell apart) inspired by Bob Kane’s original comics, and pushes the citizens of Gotham into new realms of terror and mayhem.
Initially, at least, the city is enjoying a period of relative peace eight years after the disappearance of the outlawed vigilante known as Batman, presumed responsible for the death of beloved law-and-order figurehead Harvey Dent. Yet the deception continues to weigh heavily on Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and Bruce Wayne himself (Christian Bale), now a shut-in who spends his nights slinking, Hamlet-like, about the parapets of Wayne Manor.
While the ever-loyal Alfred (Michael Caine) supplies one of the series’ emotional high points with a tender expression of love and concern for the man he’s known since boyhood, it takes the intervention of several new characters for Wayne to return to public life. Two formidable women court his attentions: first Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who’s spearheading an important clean-energy initiative, then Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a wily cat burglar who skillfully robs the billionaire playboy, and later has the nerve to upbraid him for his obscene fortune. There’s also John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a smart young cop who clings to his belief in Batman’s goodness, and turns out to share some of Wayne’s childhood traumas.
Yet the figure who decisively triggers Batman’s re-emergence is Bane (Tom Hardy), a vicious mercenary introduced seizing control of an aircraft mid-flight in a bravura opening sequence (Hans Bjerno handled the stunning aerial photography). Wearing a steel-trap-like gas mask to neutralize the pain of unspeakable wounds, this bald, hulking brute is a former member of the League of Shadows, the same “gang of psychopaths” that gave Wayne his own basic training. For this reason, Bane is also the franchise’s first major villain who turns out to be a physical match for Batman, something made brutally apparent in a pummeling scene of hand-to-hand, mask-to-mask combat.
The heavy artillery comes out just after the halfway point as Bane’s men take advantage of a well-attended football game to turn Gotham into a terrorist stronghold. There’s nothing particularly ingenious about their scheme (call it the Bane-ality of evil), which confronts audiences with the now-familiar spectacle of a city’s apocalyptic destruction. Yet it’s typical of Nolan’s approach that his evocation of mass chaos feels so trenchantly detailed, so attuned to the crisis’ human toll as glimpsed in the terrified faces of civilian onlookers.
As d.p. Wally Pfister’s camera scans the war-torn island metropolis, viewers see not just buildings but social structures collapsing; anarchy ensues as prisoners are released en masse, and various legal, political and financial chieftains are made to answer for their alleged crimes against the underclass. All in all, the picture impressively conveys a seething vision of urban anxiety that speaks to such issues as the greed and complacency of the 1%, the criminal neglect of the poor and oppressed, and above all the unsettling sense that no one and nothing is safe.
Nolan’s previous Batman picture tapped into a similar vein of post-9/11 distress. Yet while “The Dark Knight Rises” raises the dramatic stakes considerably, at least in terms of its potential body count, it doesn’t have its predecessor’s breathless sense of menace or its demonic showmanship, and with the exception of one audacious sleight-of-hand twist, the story can at times seem more complicated than intricate, especially in its reliance on portentous exposition and geographically far-flung flashbacks.
Perhaps inevitably, one also feels the absence of a villain as indelible as Heath Ledger’s Joker, although Hardy does make Bane a creature of distinct malevolence with his baroque speech patterns and rumbling bass tones, provoking a sort of lower-register duet when pitted against Batman’s own voice-distorted growl (the sound mix rendered their dialogue mostly if not entirely intelligible at the screening attended).
In a more gratifying development, the film reasserts the primacy of its title character and the general excellence of Bale’s performance, forcing Wayne to reckon once and for all with the alter ego he’s fashioned for himself and Gotham in the name of justice. If the point is that only a state of total desperation can push a person to greatness, Nolan movingly acknowledges the limits of lone-ranger justice, as Selina, Miranda, Gordon, Blake and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Wayne’s old friend and gadgets expert, come to play crucial and sometimes unexpected roles in the twisty drama.
Hardy, Gordon-Levitt and Cotillard, recruited for duty after their stints in “Inception,” are all on their game here, blending easily in a supporting cast anchored by old pros Caine, Oldman and Freeman. Perhaps the riskiest casting choice was that of Hathaway in the potentially problematic role of Selina/Catwoman, but although her kitty outfit reps a slightly more cartoonish touch than Nolan’s neo-noir aesthetic typically allows (if nowhere near as campy as those worn by Halle Berry and Michelle Pfeiffer), the versatile actress nails the sardonic, hard-edged tone necessary to make this morally ambiguous vixen a dynamic foil for the Caped Crusader.
Production designers Nathan Crowley and Kevin Kavanaugh opt for a grittier, more working-class Gotham this time around, a fully inhabited city of rundown street corners, public-works offices, bombed-out bridges and fetid sewers. While Chicago served as a recognizable template in the earlier two pictures, the exterior city shots here were achieved in New York, Pittsburgh and especially Los Angeles, whose downtown serves as the backdrop for a thrilling Michael Mann-style street chase marked by the appearance of Wayne’s latest vessel, a jet-helicopter hybrid known simply as the Bat.
Lee Smith’s editing maintains tautness and energy over the estimable running time, and Hans Zimmer adds a few ivory-tickling grace notes to his magnificently brooding score, still one of the most striking and definitive elements of this altogether exemplary studio franchise.
Michael Shannon has previously revealed that he was “a little confused” when he received the offer to join “The Flash” in a reprisal of his role of General Zod from “Man of Steel.” Now, the actor has revealed that those complicated feelings weren’t exactly resolved while making the new DC film.
In a new interview with Collider, Shannon got honest about the multiverse-traversing premise of “The Flash” and his own dissatisfaction with Zod’s arc in the film.
“I’m not going to lie — it wasn’t quite satisfying for me, as an actor. These multiverse movies are like somebody playing with action figures,” Shannon said. “It’s like, ‘Here’s this person. Here’s that person. And they’re fighting!’ It’s not quite the in-depth character study situation that I honestly felt ‘Man of Steel’ was.”
Shannon shared that he felt that “The Flash” was “all about Ezra [Miller].” Zod was “basically there to present a challenge” to the film’s star.
“I just think Ezra is a fascinating performer and actor. I can’t wait to see this performance,” said Shannon. “It’s a huge challenge. I don’t want to give anything away, but what Ezra has to do in this movie is pretty crazy. I think [they’re] up for the task.”
After Shannon’s initial confusion about being offered to join “The Flash” — after all, his character’s neck is snapped by Superman in “Man of Steel” — the actor made it a priority to get Zack Snyder’s blessing to return to play Zod. Snyder directed Shannon in “Man of Steel” which kicked off his own DC Universe.
“I was hesitant [to come back] because I wasn’t really happy about what happened to Zack Snyder in that whole deal,” said Shannon. “I talked to [‘The Flash’ director] Andy Muschietti about it, and I said, ‘Andy, look — I just want to get Zack’s blessing on this because it just doesn’t feel right without that.’ And Zack, to his credit, was very understanding. He gave me his blessing, and I went to do it.”
Decades before Christopher Nolan set his sights on a movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer, a science-obsessed BBC executive ventured to America in 1979 to make a $1.5 million TV show about the father of the atom bomb.
Peter Goodchild began his career at the BBC in radio drama, but eventually migrated to the storied “Horizon” science unit to put his chemistry degree to some use. The division began experimenting with factual dramas in the 1970s, and after delivering a hit series on French-Polish physicist Marie Curie, Goodchild set his sights on the New York-born Oppenheimer.
“I’d seen a play on J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Hampstead Theatre Club way back in 1966,” the 83-year-old tells Variety from his home in Exeter, southwest England, where his Zoom background reveals a room teeming with books on heaving shelves.
“It was an amazing story, and I’d always wanted to do it,” Goodchild continues. “Someone suddenly presented me with a book about Oppenheimer and his relationship with one of his other scientific colleagues, which was an excellent story. I said, ‘I’d love to take it further.’ And we did.”
Goodchild’s seven-part 1980 BBC series “Oppenheimer” — with the physicist played by 40-year-old Sam Waterston, just years away from his Oscar-nominated performance for “The Killing Fields” — received seven BAFTA nominations and took home three golden masks, including best drama series. The show, which was co-produced with WGBH Boston (which contributed just $100,000), also picked up a Golden Globe nod for Waterston along with two Primetime Emmy nominations.
Viewed through a contemporary lens, “Oppenheimer” is astonishing. A BBC-produced series telling an American story, featuring a predominantly American cast? It simply would never happen now. The broadcaster’s ongoing fight to justify its license fee-based funding model — in which every BBC-watching household in the U.K. pays £159 ($204) a year to fund its content — means that most original dramas on the Beeb have a distinctly British flavor.
But back then, “the sheer volume of drama that was happening was extraordinary,” explains Ruth Caleb, then a plucky line producer on “Oppenheimer.” “It went beyond the insular; it was much more outward-looking.” BBC drama still is, in some ways, she hastens to add. “But for different reasons that are often commercial reasons. Back then, they were creative reasons.”
“When Peter put up ‘Oppenheimer’ as an idea, it was clearly an important subject matter, because it’s not just about the country we live in, but about the world that we live in,” says Caleb, who is still producing films and scripted series under her own banner. “I think they trusted that Peter would come up with something pretty special.”
The BBC’s “Oppenheimer” production in Colorado Springs. (Photo courtesy of Ruth Caleb)
“Oppenheimer” introduces the nuclear physicist during his time with the University of Berkeley physics department — a halcyon period for the listless scientist, who surrounded himself with card-carrying Communists (though never fully subscribed himself) and carried on with the troubled Jean Tatlock while falling for Kitty Puening, a married woman.
The bulk of its seven hours focused on the formation of the Manhattan Project and the Los Alamos settlement in New Mexico, with special attention paid to Oppenheimer’s tumultuous relationship with General Leslie Groves and other scientists such as Edward Teller (played by “Poirot” star David Suchet). A masterful depiction of the Trinity test in Episode 5 used archival material to convey the actual blast, but also relied on a huge, arid Colorado Springs set. The final two episodes focused on Oppenheimer’s post-war troubles, and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission hearing that stripped him of his security clearance, effectively severing his ties to U.S. government.
While much had been written by the late 1970s about Oppenheimer, who died of throat cancer in 1967, Goodchild and screenwriter Peter Prince spent a month in America researching the scientist. In addition to meeting a number of his academic peers — “They were happy to talk and talk!” says Goodchild — the duo also located Oppenheimer’s son Peter, his brother Frank and sister-in-law. (Kitty had died a few years prior, in 1972, while his daughter Toni died by suicide in 1977.)
“We got very, very strong images from his brother,” says Goodchild. “And then we went one Sunday morning to meet Peter. But when we arrived, he wasn’t there. Someone said he’s gone, but that he has these moods and may feel differently in an hour.”
So, Goodchild and Prince “hung out and wandered about” until he returned. “And he turned up,” the producer exclaims. “He wouldn’t let us in the house. He talked in a very—” Goodchild falters. “It was obvious life has not been straightforward for him.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves in 1945.
When the team began casting, they hired U.K.-based American actors, which helped to save money. A lead, however, proved elusive. All sorts of ideas were thrown at the wall — at one point, even “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins was in the mix — until Caleb suggested Waterston, who would need to be flown in from the U.S. where he’d been shooting a movie in Wisconsin.
“He was a dreamboat,” says Caleb. “Just the loveliest guy.”
Adds Goodchild: “I think we were paying him £1,200 a program. He liked the scripts, and said, ‘Yes, I’ll do it’ … We put him up in a house in Chelsea, which was around £1,200 a month, which seemed astronomical to us.” (Calculating for inflation, that’s roughly £6,500 per month.)
Waterston was worth the eye-watering Chelsea rent. His casting was considered to be a masterstroke due to his complex, unsentimental portrayal of Oppenheimer. One Manhattan Project scientist even remarked at the time that Waterston was “more Oppenheimer than Oppenheimer ever was.”
“My abiding memory of the production is how nice Sam Waterston was to work with,” screenwriter Peter Prince tells Variety over an email. “I re-watched a couple of episodes to refresh my memory and was reminded again how good Sam was as the actor: he was the complex Oppenheimer — charming, conflicted and driven.”
The show filmed between a studio in the U.K. for interior shots, and in Colorado Springs, where the Los Alamos project was constructed along with the vast tower that housed the atom bomb (pictured). “Everyone [tried] to be as authentic and near the actuality as possible,” says Caleb, who always had one eye on the $1.5 million budget — the equivalent of around $5.5 million today.
“When we were setting up Trinity, we hired this guy to make the bomb. And I knew that when we film, what you see in it is not the detail. But he did that bomb, which was hugely expensive, and every single detail of it was accurate — not that you ever saw it,” says Caleb. “I wasn’t pleased, yet he was so delighted that he managed to make this bomb exactly as it was. And all he got from me was a rather sour face saying ‘Yes, but you’ve gone over your budget!’”
Trinity was shot in three parts, with the American shoot completed over four weeks, followed by the studio work — which encompassed several control room scenes — and then other extraneous shots. Goodchild and Caleb detail a “pretty smooth” production that was primarily the work of the show’s gifted late director, Barry Davis, whom they describe as “fearsome” but someone who “knew what he wanted.” They also credit their editor Tariq Anwar, “who was brilliant,” adds Caleb.
Despite the show’s heavy subject matter, the team managed to eke out some fun on set. Toward the end of the shoot, when Suchet wrapped his final scenes as Teller and stepped out of the studio, “they delivered a cream pie into his face,” laughs Caleb. “I can’t remember whether it was Sam or someone else. But that demonstrates the good nature on the production. It was a happy production.”
Yet as one of Hollywood’s most visionary directors returns the A-bomb’s formidable creator to the cultural consciousness, the BBC’s “Oppenheimer” has become a largely forgotten production.
Sam Waterston (left) on the Trinity set.
Goodchild — who used his research to write a book on Oppenheimer that published alongside the series in 1980 — had some interaction with Kai Bird, co-author of the 2005 Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus” that Nolan’s film is based on. However, neither he nor Caleb were contacted by the “Tenet” director or Universal Studios as the new film came together. In fact, the pair are full of questions about how the movie turned out, and how it compares to the series. “I wonder what attracted [Nolan] to Oppenheimer,” Caleb says.
Goodchild, meanwhile, is shocked to hear the film will open on the same day as Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” “Wow,” he mutters. “I’m going to be very interested to see how well it goes down.”
Though there are 43 years between the TV show and the movie, the similarities in approach to scenes between Oppenheimer and the main players in his orbit are striking, particularly certain conversations between the scientist and Groves and Teller. The BBC series may be of its time — devoid of Ludwig Göransson’s feverish score, Nolan’s propulsive direction and a massive IMAX canvas — and made for around 5% of the movie’s budget in real terms, but in many ways, its narrative structure and use of sub-plots that delve deeper into Oppenheimer’s inner circle make it a more holistic portrait of an unpredictable character.
Caleb at one point asks whether the BBC will bring “Oppenheimer” out of the archives to air alongside the movie hitting cinemas. With an estimated opening of $50 million this weekend and clear public interest, it’s a good question.
But for all its critical success, “Oppenheimer” appears to have been all but lost in the annals of TV history. In the U.K., it’s not even on the BBC’s streaming service iPlayer; instead, it’s available for purchase on Prime Video for around £10. BBC Studios owns the rights to the series, but Variety understands a “complicated” rights situation means the show may not be rerun anytime soon.
Those who do uncover the series, of course, don’t tend to regret it. When Goodchild’s neighbors visited New Mexico several years back, he suggested they visit the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History.
“Not only did they do that, but they bought a DVD [of ‘Oppenheimer’] and took it home and watched it,” says Goodchild. “They came back and quite seriously said, ‘That was wonderful.’ After 42 years, it wasn’t something that got thrown at you very often.”
Cillian Murphy quite literally wandered into acting. At the age of 20, he walked up to the door of the Corcadorca Theatre Company in his hometown of Cork, Ireland, and knocked. He told the person who answered that he’d be interested in getting involved in any upcoming shows, and the man suggested he try out for a new play called “Disco Pigs,” about a pair of reckless teenagers. It was Murphy’s first audition, and he got the part.
The Enda Walsh play was a big success, moving to larger and larger theaters and eventually leading to a film adaptation in 2001 from director Kirsten Sheridan. That film caught the eye of filmmaker Danny Boyle, then looking to cast a fresh face for his post-apocalyptic thriller “28 Days Later.”
The rest is history — or history in the making as, 20 years later, Murphy is continuing to seek out bold projects with some of the best filmmakers working today. That includes Christopher Nolan, who first brought Murphy to supervillain stardom in “Batman Begins” and who directs the actor in the titular role in “Oppenheimer,” now in theaters. It’s their sixth collaboration, and Murphy’s biggest role yet, playing the complex physicist and “father of the atomic bomb” over a course of several years and a three-hour runtime. It’s one of Murphy’s finest performances, which is saying a lot.
There isn’t a genre or a medium the actor has shied away from over the years. And while some films might not always work as a whole, Murphy always shines. He’s also a true actor’s actor, one who understands every role is integral and is comfortable taking on supporting parts. Here’s a look at 10 of his best performances from his career on stage, film and television.
This is how most of the world was introduced to Murphy — a pair of impossibly blue eyes fill the screen as his character, a bicycle courier named Jim, awakes from a coma in Danny Boyle’s heralded action epic. He’s been asleep less than a month, but a lot can happen in that time — including the complete collapse of society thanks to a virus called “Rage” that turns its victims into mindless aggressors. (Note that the Z-word is never uttered throughout the film.) It’s a star-making turn for Murphy, only 24 at the time, who not only carries the film but holds his own against such impressive cast members as Brendan Gleeson and Naomie Harris as fellow survivors. Jim is discovering everything at the same time as the viewer, and Murphy makes the perfect audience surrogate, taking everything in with a suitably shocked but level-headed demeanor. He’s not a traditional action hero, and that’s the point: He’s just an ordinary man trying to navigate an entirely new world.
Prior to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, films adapted from comics were a largely uplifting affair full of primary colors and bright locations. It’s easy to forget how much had to go right for “Batman Begins” to succeed, but it started with finding a villain who was as compelling as his nemesis. Though Murphy originally tested for Bruce Wayne/Batman, it was a stroke of genius that Nolan would peg him as Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka Scarecrow. With a charisma that can be both terrifying and seductive (which would become a Murphy speciality in years to come) Crane doesn’t need to showboat he’s the bad guy. Rather, he exudes a calm confidence, taking his time with methodical precision. Even the way he says the word “Batman,” drawing it out into two separate words, is chilling. It was wise of Nolan to include Scarecrow in the film’s two sequels — particularly in “The Dark Knight Rises,” where he pops up as a judge in a kangaroo courtroom with a smirk (“Exile or death?”) that shows he’s enjoying this almost as much as the audience is.
It would be easy to dismiss Wes Craven’s tight thriller — largely set onboard a red-eye flight in which a terrorist threatens a fellow passenger in order to pull off an assassination plot at the hotel she manages — because it’s so damn fun. But it’s also a clever, lean thriller buoyed by two actors toward the beginning of their film careers. Murphy is the perhaps too-aptly named Jackson Rippner while Rachel McAdams is his victim, Lisa Reisert. Part of the brilliance of Carl Ellsworth’s script is how the first few minutes play like a rom-com; two impossibly good-looking people meet cute at the airport and sparks immediately fly. Murphy understands that Rippner can’t telegraph evil — this is a man chosen for the assignment because he has deep resources of charm. They engage in a cat-and-mouse game throughout the flight that is so charged, don’t be surprised if there’s a part of you wondering if these two crazy kids can work it out.
From the beginning of his film career, Murphy refused to be pigeonholed, seeking out unique projects and interesting roles without much of a concern for box office results. The same year he made his supervillain debut in “Batman Begins,” he pivoted by playing Kitten, the transgender heroine searching for love and her birth mother in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Pat McCabe’s novel. While the casting of a cis man in the role might raise issues today, Murphy’s portrayal is a loving homage to the tenacity and tenderness of the character. Kitten is charming and determined, and Murphy finds a joy in her life even when things take a dark turn. It’s also a chance for Murphy to reunite with some of his previous co-stars, including Gleeson, Stephen Rea and Liam Neeson – forming a powerhouse of Irish performers.
Murphy’s feature film debut is an adaptation of the Enda Walsh play in which he made his theatrical (and acting) debut. Murphy stars as “Pig” and Elaine Cassidy is “Runt,” a pair of teenagers who have been devoted to one another since birth. Pig is all raging id, completely unpredictable and prone to violent outbursts. But Murphy also shows his deep vulnerability and affection for his friend, particularly as their relationship begins to shift away from purely platonic. It’s a stunning debut, and Murphy’s raw talent and potential are on full display. So much so that the film caught the eye of an up-and-coming director named Danny Boyle, who would go on to cast Murphy in his breakout “28 Days Later” role.
Ken Loach is such a perfect fit for Murphy, it’s a shame the two haven’t collaborated on another film since this tale of two war-torn brothers during the Irish War of Independence. Murphy is Damien, a doctor who initially wants no part of the fighting, resigned to the idea that the war is unwinnable. But after witnessing several injustices, he impulsively joins the Irish Republican Army. Murphy portrays the transformation into a radicalized soldier who ultimately sacrifices everything for his cause without ever hitting a false note. It’s a heartbreaking, emotional journey that grounds the film, which went on to win the Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and is regarded by many as Loach’s best.
Murphy has always been drawn to the written word, no matter the medium. So after headlining films from the likes of Danny Boyle and Neil Jordan, he made a point to return to the stage and had no qualms about signing up for a television series penned by acclaimed writer Steven Knight (“Dirty Pretty Things,” “Eastern Promises”). The actor is a perfect fit in Knight’s universe of morally compromised men you can’t take your eyes off of. His Tommy Shelby is a war veteran turned leader of the Peaky Blinders criminal organization. His work is all pragmatism: He’s often stoic as he manipulates and calculates. But he’s also haunted — both by what he’s seen in the war and by his deep and abiding love for his late wife Grace. Of course, Murphy is so magnetic, fans of the show often have to be reminded that he is actually a villain. Put aside the mass murder and corruption — I’m still not over him shooting that horse.
After five collaborations with Nolan, the filmmaker finally let Murphy take the lead — and it was worth waiting for. Murphy portrays the rise and fall of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist known as the creator of the atomic bomb. Murphy ricochets through time, portraying Oppenheimer in his young adulthood as a fragile student, his glory heading The Manhattan Project and his later years where he’s fighting the government that once heralded him. These three timelines are usually easy to distinguish from one another, but sometimes they flow together with no obvious way to differentiate –yet Murphy is always precisely where he needs to be. Though Oppenheimer is a mass of contradictions — he can be controlled yet irrational, naïve yet arrogant — he always makes sense through Murphy’s interpretation. He is particularly haunting playing Oppenheimer in his later years: Both physically and spiritually, you feel like you’re watching a man fading away before your eyes.
For this tour-de-force, Murphy went back to where it all began – not only the theater but specifically a play by Enda Walsh, whose “Disco Pigs” set Murphy on his journey as an actor. He plays Thomas Magill (never “Tom”) a loner and fanatic on a mission to cleanse his small Irish town of its sins. Murphy is the only actor on stage for the duration of the play, but this is not a staid affair — he literally bounces off the walls, hurls objects and races back and forth — all as he builds his story to a powerful crescendo. It’s exhausting just to watch, and yet you won’t be able to look away. It was produced by Landmark Productions and Galway International Arts Festival and was filmed at the National Theatre. There are plans to show it on NT at Home. Keep an eye out, as it’s not one to be missed.
When citing Murphy’s collaborations with Nolan, it would make sense to favor “Dunkirk,” in which he offers a harrowing depiction of PTSD as a traumatized solider; or “Oppenheimer,” in which he occupies nearly every frame as the star of the film. But for me, Murphy is the lynchpin in one of Nolan’s best, most ambitious and most emotional masterpieces, the byzantine thriller “Inception.” He plays Robert Michael Fischer, the heir to a business empire whose unresolved daddy issues make him the target of a team of “extractors.” Led by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb, the thieves use dream technology to infiltrate the subconscious of a target to access information. Fischer is a man of few words and Murphy is fantastic at quietly communicating his pain and making you care for a character that is, in many ways, intended to be a cipher. Murphy shows that “best” doesn’t need to mean “most” — both in terms of the size of the role and the acting, delivering a sublime supporting performance that the entire movie rests on. Nolan is often accused (wrongly) of being a cold filmmaker. But the moment where Fischer finds closure with his late father is perhaps the most affecting gut-punch he’s ever delivered, thanks largely to Murphy’s beautiful performance.
Who would win in a fight, Batman or Superman? Could the Flash outrun Superman? Could Superman craft a boulder so heavy even he couldn’t lift it? While “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” ostensibly seeks to tackle the first of those evergreen schoolyard hypotheticals, it’s the third that ends up proving the biggest litmus test for director Zack Snyder. Tasked with colliding the two most archetypal of American superheroes while also answering critics of his last outing, “Man of Steel,” and perhaps most importantly, paving the way for an extended DC Comics universe of films on which much of Warner Bros. future bottom line relies, Snyder has set a Sisyphean task for himself. That this very long, very brooding, often exhilarating and sometimes scattered epic succeeds as often it does therefore has to be seen as an achievement, and worldwide box office should be sufficiently lucrative to ensure future installments proceed on schedule. But amidst all the grueling work of saving the world and shouldering a franchise toward the heights, it would be nice to see these heroes, and this series, take a few more breathers to enjoy the view.
Proving that the placement of names in the title isn’t simply alphabetical, the first few reels of “Batman v Superman” are dominated by the Caped Crusader, with controversial casting Ben Affleck stepping quite comfortably into the role. That the film opens with yet another operatic depiction of the young Bruce Wayne’s most formative trauma is perhaps unavoidable — Thomas and Martha Wayne have been killed so many times in so many different media that their deaths may as well be one of the Stations of the Cross — but our first glimpse of the adult Wayne is hardly standard issue. Taking a civilian-level view of the cataclysmic destruction of Metropolis that ended “Man of Steel” on a contentious note, we watch as Wayne attempts to remotely evacuate his own Metropolitan Wayne Enterprises skyscraper, crippled by a wayward Superman (Henry Cavill) as he battles with General Zod just outside the frame. Despite his mad drive through the battle-torn streets, Wayne arrives just in time to watch, horrified, as a friendly security guard loses his legs and a young girl becomes an orphan.
Setting Wayne up as the film’s initial conscience is one of Snyder’s most interesting gambles, especially as his Batman quickly evolves into the most morally ambiguous iteration of the character yet seen on film. More than willing to shoot, brutalize and kill if the need arises, this Batman is still a figure of mystery in Gotham, and Snyder refrains from showing us the character in full cowl until surprisingly late in the game.
Fortunately, Affleck’s Wayne — here sporting salt-and-pepper temples and all the baggage of a man who, as faithful butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons) notes, “got too old to die young, and not for want of trying” — is a winningly cranky, charismatic presence even when out of costume. Diving headfirst into the sorts of detective work that Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy often short-shrifted, Wayne casts a skeptical eye on Superman while investigating a mysterious underworld figure named White Portuguese, his tracks traced by an equally mysterious woman (Gal Gadot).
Meanwhile, Superman has hardly recovered from the fallout of his chaotic battle with Zod when controversy strikes yet again. Though he’s been welcomed as a savior by most of Metropolis, in the course of rescuing Lois Lane (Amy Adams) from a terrorist interview gone awry, he’s blamed for the deaths of several African villagers. This attracts the scrutiny of the crusading southern Senator Finch (Holly Hunter), who heads up a Congressional Superman Committee, disturbed by the Krypton’s exercise of unilateral power.
She gains an uneasy ally in a cheeky young industrialist named Alexander “Lex” Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg, retaining his Zuckerbergian misanthropy from “The Social Network” and his stringy, Cobainian hair from “American Ultra”), who hopes to seduce her into allowing him to import a mysterious glowing green substance discovered in the Indian Ocean. Scarfing Jolly Ranchers, quoting Nabokov and showing up to formal events wearing a white blazer and sneakers, Eisenberg tackles Luthor as the brogrammer from hell, a chattily malevolent presence who provides the only real moments of levity in the film.
Juggling all of these strands while steadily beating the drum toward the battle promised in the title, Snyder sometimes loses track of his various allegories. Scripters Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer provide kernels of philosophical and theological quandaries throughout, while their nods toward contemporary political debates are more complex than the scattered visual gags (such as an anti-Superman protester waving an “Aliens Are Un-American” placard) might seem to imply. Yet the essential clash of ideologies promised by the central conflict — vigilante justice vs. self-sacrificing restraint, night vs. day, Dionysus vs. Apollo — never develops quite as forcefully as it should, and the life-or-death battle between the two icons ultimately comes down to a series of misunderstandings.
While “Batman v Superman’s” Dark Knight may be more of a pure punisher than some fans would prefer, Snyder’s conception of the character at least feels fully formed. Superman remains something of a work-in-progress. (If nothing else, it’s strange to see Clark Kent cast a more brooding figure than Bruce Wayne.) Daily Planet scenes are even more perfunctory this time around, and Adams’ Lois has plenty to do but little to say.
As a pure visual spectacle, however, “Batman v Superman” ably blows the hinges off the multiplex doors, and editor David Brenner does excellent work to comprehensibly streamline the chaos, capably captured by d.p. Larry Fong. Composers Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL are again key assets here, with Gadot’s theme in particular proving quite infectious. Snyder largely tamps down his penchant for hyper-stylized combat imagery until the end, when he stages a series of galactic battles that take style notes from sources as varied as classic WWE rumbles and Harryhausen creature features. As overblown as the lengthy showdown might become, Snyder gets closer than ever before to the chiaroscuro palette of classic comics, and even if his scrupulous efforts to avoid reopening “Man of Steel’s” collateral damage debates are a bit on the nose, at least he’s clearly received the message.
In the days after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, I remember seeing the boats. Boats off all kinds. Civilian boats. Dozens of them. Rushing into the smoke and panic in lower Manhattan. They courageously pushed into the danger, to help their fellow Americans. They didn’t know if another attack was coming. They didn’t know if more planes were coming. They didn’t know if they’d die. They just knew people needed help — people who needed to escape what had instantly and shockingly become a war zone in Lower Manhattan. The scope of it all was mammoth. Beyond anything the world had ever seen. It was too big to capture on a TV screen. So was the breadth of the bravery.
It was a kind of unity and selflessness I’d never seen in my life. And in the 16 years since 9/11, we haven’t seen since. It reminded me of a quote I remember was posted in a classroom of my high school: “No one made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do little.” On 9/11, so many did whatever little they could do to help. Beneath the fire and carnage of 9/11 that most saw on TV, that’s what I will always remember about that time I was there as a first responder in the National Guard.
I wrote about it at length in my book, because it was often overlooked — and now — mostly forgotten. The civilian reaction on 9/11 in New York, at the Pentagon, and in the planes above, was a magnificent display of unity and cohesion across race, social, economic, and political lines that seems unimaginable in today’s nasty, divided times where too many Americans fill our days with cable news shouting matches, Facebook political attacks, and Twitter wars.
9/11 was the best of the true spirit of America. Our Pearl Harbor. Ordinary people — welders, doctors, firefighters, fast food workers — all chipping in to hand out water, help the traumatized, and dig for the dead. Ordinary citizens doing extraordinary things in the face of unprecedented circumstances. That’s also what happened in 1940 in Dunkirk — and why the groundbreaking, eardrum-pressing film by Christopher Nolan that bears the same name is so important — especially right now. At Dunkirk, thousands of courageous civilians, stood together, with hundreds of thousands of troops, to sacrifice their own future to change a history they might not live to see. They were all united by the connective tissue of crisis, to create a combined shield of resilience that would ultimately save the western world from tyranny. It’s a huge thing. That’s what war often is: a massively, unexplainably enormous magnitude of emotion and life that is almost impossible to process — much less recreate. When I stood on the pile at Ground Zero, my heart was crushed downward by the sheer size of it all. It was too big an experience to properly explain — you just had to be there to understand. That’s the challenge of any ambitious war movie, and that’s the challenge that “Dunkirk” has improbably met — and exceeded — in the way only a modern-day, Imax-fueled, Hans Zimmer-scored, Christopher Nolan-directed film could. “Dunkirk” is not a film, it’s an immersion. The confusion, the noise, the size — the indescribable size — Dunkirk masterfully pulls it off. I never served in World War II, but as a combat veteran of Iraq, I know a filmmaker gets the raw experience of war close to right when I have to give my fellow veterans with mental health injuries a warning about the possible triggers it contains.
“Dunkirk” is overwhelming, swirling, consuming. Maybe most of all: intense. Blasts made me jump awkwardly, like I was sitting in a horror movie, jerking side to side in my chair to see if the other people in the theater saw how much it actually just scared the s— out of me. The deep, swarming, disorientating cinematography is the hull, and the pounding, relentless, appropriately-too-loud soundscape is the engine, that the acting and the story drive like a crew running a well-oiled, modern aircraft carrier of an experience. Although centered around the English war experience, the important distance will feel short for most Americans. Their fight was ours to come. And like a great soccer match, the pain and thrill is universal. In a way the English know all too well, you’ll be stressed and holding your breath, painfully alternating from wincing to cheering, from the first minute, until the very last. From the moment the lights go down, the driving tension begins. And it doesn’t stop crashing into your chest until the credits roll, leaving you rattled and exhausted. But more alive. And in an importantly visceral way, just like combat.
For that alone, “Dunkirk” is a masterful salvo of a film that will forever contribute to the public understanding of war: a theatrical gut check for all times.
And in these times when such a small percentage of Americans are experiencing our post-9/11 war being waged worldwide, and as our president flippantly calls and orders for more of it, our nation needs this film now more than ever.
Paul Rieckhoff is CEO and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), an Iraq veteran, and the author of “Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier’s Perspective.”
Josh Hartnett revealed to Playboy magazine in 2015 that he talked with Christopher Nolan about taking on the role of the Caped Crusader in the director’s “Batman Begins,” which launched Warner Bros.’ billion-dollar grossing “Dark Knight” trilogy. How far did those talks go before Nolan settled on Christian Bale instead? In a new interview on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, Nolan confirmed talks with Hartnett took place, but his casting never got too serious.
“No, it never got that far,” Nolan said when asked if he screen-tested Hartnett for the role of Batman.
“I met with Josh and if I recall, he was a young actor whose work I was very interested in,” Nolan added. “I had an initial conversation with him but he had read my brother’s script for ‘The Prestige’ at the time and was more interested in getting involved with that. So it never went further than that.”
Hartnett was not cast in “Batman Begins,” nor was he cast in “The Prestige.” Both films starred Bale. Hartnett would have to wait over a decade to get his chance to work with Nolan, which he did in the upcoming “Oppenheimer.” Hartnett plays Ernest Lawrence, a nuclear physicist and the inventor of the cyclotron who becomes J. Robert Oppenheimer’s close friend at the University of California, Berkley.
Hartnett isn’t the only “Oppenheimer” actor with ties to Nolan’s Batman. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nolan confirmed his “Oppenheimer” lead Cillian Murphy screen tested for the role of Batman. Both men knew Murphy was not right for the part, but Nolan wanted Murphy to screen test in front of studio executives so they could see his acting chops.
“Everybody was so excited by watching you perform that when I then said to them, ‘Okay, Christian Bale is Batman, but what about Cillian to play Scarecrow?’ There was no dissent,” Nolan remembered. “All the previous Batman villains had been played by huge movie stars: Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, that kind of thing. That was a big leap for them and it really was purely on the basis of that test. So that’s how you got to play Scarecrow.”
“Oppenheimer” opens in theaters July 21 from Universal Pictures. Watch Nolan’s latest appearance on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast below.
Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” has grossed $8.6 million from its first two days in 31 international markets.
France is the leading market with $1.8 million on 668 screens in its first two days, followed by South Korea with $1.6 million on its opening day on Thursday at 1,252 locations. The Korean results were in line with Nolan’s “Interstellar” and above “Gravity” and “American Sniper.”
“Dunkirk,” based on the 1940 evacuation of 300,000 stranded Allied troops from France, stars Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, and Harry Styles. Film critics have already offered extensive praise for the cinematography, direction, acting, and musical score.
Nolan shot most of “Dunkirk” in France and California. The Warner Bros. release has a price tag of $150 million.
Australia took in $938,000, including Wednesday night sneaks, on 535 screens for a 54% share of the top five films. The results are 45% ahead of “Gravity,” 33% ahead of “Interstellar,” and on par with “American Sniper.”
Russia debuted with $641,000 on 2,119 screens with a 42% share of the top five films. Opening day results are 6% ahead of “Gravity.”
“Dunkirk” opens in 15 more markets Friday, including Spain and the U.K. Thursday night previews in North America hit $5.5 million and the World War II epic is expected to gross at least $35 million in its opening weekend, topping openings for “Girls Trip” and “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.”
Steven Soderbergh recently spoke to Rolling Stone while promoting his new series “Command Z” about the origins of his friendship with fellow filmmaker Christopher Nolan. According to the “Traffic” and “Ocean’s Eleven” director, a Warner Bros. executive refused to meet with Nolan about a potential directing gig for the studio’s thriller “Insomnia.” The exec allegedly disliked Nolan’s “Memento,” which counted Soderbergh as one of its biggest fans.
“What happened was, I got a call from Chris’ agent, Dan Aloni, who I had known because he screened ‘Memento’ for me after it couldn’t find a distributor after being on the festival circuit for a year,” Soderbergh said. “Dan calls me up out of the blue and says, ‘Could you watch this movie? I have this client of mine who has this movie, and we think it’s really good, but nobody will pick it up and we don’t understand why. Maybe we’re all crazy.’ I see the movie and I think it’s a fucking instant classic.”
“Cut to months later, Dan calls me and he goes, ‘Look, there’s this script over at Warner, “Insomnia.” Chris is really interested in it, but Warner won’t take the meeting,’” Soderbergh continued. “And I go, ‘What do you mean they won’t take the meeting?’ And he goes, ‘Well, the executive there didn’t like “Memento.”‘ And I said, ‘Well, so what? Why won’t they take the meeting?’”
Soderbergh’s love for “Memento” inspired him to personally get in contact with Warner Bros. to advocate on Nolan’s behalf.
“I called that executive and I said, ‘Take the meeting. You’ve got to take the meeting,’” Soderbergh said. “And he goes, ‘But I didn’t like the movie.’ And I go, ‘Well, did you like the movie-making?’ And he goes, ‘Well, yeah, it’s brilliantly made.’ And I go, ‘Take the meeting.’ That is all I did. I knew Chris well enough to know that if he gets in the room, he’s going to get that job.”
“Memento” earned Nolan an Academy Award nomination for original screenplay, while the movie also picked up a nomination for film editing. The director was jostling to break into the studio world with Warner Bros.’ “Insomnia,” but it took Soderbergh’s help to land the job.
Based on the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name, “Insomnia” stars Al Pacino as a detective thrust into a cat-and-mouse game with a killer (Robin Williams) in Nightmute, Alaska, where it’s always daylight. The film, which grossed $113 million worldwide, started a career-defining relationship between Nolan and Warner Bros, which ended up giving Nolan the keys to the Batman franchise based on the success of “Insomnia.”
“It started a very fruitful relationship [between Nolan and Warner Bros.],” Soderbergh said. “But let’s be clear: one way or another, Christopher Nolan is going to emerge. If he didn’t make ‘Insomnia,’ he’d have made something else and still had the career he has. That was just a fortunate set of circumstances where I could get on the phone and advocate for him.”
Nolan’s latest directorial effort, Universal’s “Oppenheimer,” is now playing in theaters nationwide.
As thousands of moviegoers gear up for double features of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” one person taking joy in the “Barbenheimer” craze is Nolan himself. Although his movie will be battling “Barbie” at the box office, Nolan recently told IGN that “it’s terrific” to have both summer tentpoles open on the same day.
“Summer, in a healthy marketplace, is always crowded, and we’ve been doing this a long time,” Nolan said. “I think for those of us who care about movies, we’ve been really waiting to have a crowded marketplace again, and now it’s here and that’s terrific.”
Cillian Murphy, who stars in the title role of “Oppenehimer,” agreed with Nolan, telling IGN: “I think it’s great. I mean, I’ll be going to see ‘Barbie.’ I can’t wait to see it. I think it’s just great for the industry and for audiences that we have two amazing films by amazing filmmakers coming out the same day. Could spend a whole day in the cinema, what’s better than that?”
“I love the fact that people are talking about going to two movies in a weekend,” added “Oppenheimer” co-star Matt Damon. “Ben [Affleck] and I used to go to two movies every weekend, and I think people should do that.”
A third “Oppenheimer” cast member, Emily Blunt, called it “awesome” for the two movies to be opening at once as “the interest in the variety of what’s available is so awesome.”
While “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were originally pitted as rivals (most likely because Nolan left “Barbie” studio Warner Bros. after over a decade to make “Oppenheimer” at Universal), the two movies have started to uplift one another in recent weeks. AMC Theatres reported on July 10 that over 20,000 members of its AMC Stubs program have purchased tickets to see both “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” on the same day.
“That more than 20,000 moviegoers have already made plans and purchased tickets to see ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ on the same day is a great sign that the growing online conversation around seeing both of these incredible films is turning into ticket sales,” said Elizabeth Frank, executive VP of worldwide programming and chief content officer at AMC Theatres.
“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” open in theaters July 21 from Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures, respectively.
Christoper Nolan revealed to Empire magazine that he did something during the development of “Oppenheimer” that he’s never done before in more than two decades of making movies: He wrote a script in the first person.
“There’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were visualizing this radical reinvention of physics,” Nolan said. “One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of intelligence or genius. It very often fails to engage people.”
When sending the finished “Oppenheimer” screenplay to his visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, Nolan stressed to him that “we have to find a way into this guy’s head. We’ve gotta see the world the way he sees it, we’ve gotta see the atoms moving, we’ve gotta see the way he’s imagining waves of energy, the quantum world. And then we have to see how that translates into the Trinity test. And we have to feel the danger, feel the threat of all this somehow.”
“My challenge to him was, ‘Let’s do all these things, but without any computer graphics,’” Nolan said.
The majority of “Oppenheimer” is told from the perspective of the title character who led the Manhattan Project in creating the atomic bomb. He’s played by Cillian Murphy.
“I actually wrote in the first-person, which I’ve never done before,” Nolan said. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before. But the point of it is, with the colour sequences, which is the bulk of the film, everything is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view — you’re literally kind of looking through his eyes.”
Nolan said that even the script’s character descriptions, setting details and stage directions were all written from the first person as Oppenheimer.
“Odd thing to do,” Nolan admitted. “But it was a reminder to me of how to shoot the film. It was a reminder to everybody involved in the project, ‘Okay, this is the point of view of every scene.’ I wanted to really go through this story with Oppenheimer; I didn’t want to sit by him and judge him. That seemed a pointless exercise. That’s more the stuff of documentary, or political theory, or history of science. This is a story that you experience with him — you don’t judge him. You are faced with these irreconcilable ethical dilemmas with him.”
As Variety previously confirmed, “Oppenheimer” will be Nolan’s first R-rated movie since 2002’s “Insomnia.” The film is also Nolan’s longest, with a runtime just shy of the three-hour mark. The director’s previous longest film, “Interstellar,” ran 2 hours and 49 minutes. “Oppenheimer” is so long that its IMAX film stock runs 11 miles long and weighs 600 pounds.
“Oppenheimer” opens in theaters July 21 from Universal Pictures.
Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has surpassed $700 million at the global box office, becoming the fourth-highest grossing movie of the year.
After five weeks of release, the R-rated historical drama has generated $718 million at the worldwide box office, including $285 million in North America and $437 million internationally.
The film has outperformed “Fast X” ($704 million) and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” ($686 million) and trails behind “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” ($1.35 billion), Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” ($1.279 billion) and Marvel’s “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3” ($845 million).
Those ticket sales also rank as Nolan’s fourth-biggest movie of all time, passing 2014’s “Interstellar” ($715 million) and standing behind “The Dark Knight” ($1.006 billion), “The Dark Knight Rises” ($1.08 billion) and “Inception” ($837 million). It’s also the director’s highest-grossing release in 50 overseas markets, including Germany, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia.
In North America, “Oppenheimer” has remained in the top three for more than a month. It’s the highest-grossing R-rated film of the year, ahead of “John Wick: Chapter 4” ($187 million), and it’s the sixth-biggest release of 2023 after Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” ($297 million).
“Oppenheimer” has been a particularly huge draw in Imax with $146.4 million from the premium format’s screens. It’s the fifth-highest grossing Imax movie ever — and the top four were $2 billion blockbusters: “Avatar” and its sequel “The Way of Water,” “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Avengers: Endgame.”
Nolan adapted “Oppenheimer” from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “American Prometheus.” Cillian Murphy stars as the theoretical physicist who led the development of the atomic bomb. The rest of the ensemble cast includes Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh and Alden Ehrenreich.
The early reviews of “Dunkirk” are in, and critics seem to be singing director Christopher Nolan’s praises.
Hitting theaters this Friday, Nolan’s World War II epic is currently averaging 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, thanks to overwhelmingly positive reviews.
Critics almost unanimously complimented Nolan’s ability to seamlessly interweave the Allied evacuation from three different perspectives: land, air, and sea. They also applauded the filmmaker’s decision to cast an ensemble of newcomers (Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, and Jack Lowden) alongside pop star Harry Styles, who is making his film acting debut.
The drama has already stirred up significant buzz, set to open with the widest 70MM release in 25 years. One thing is clear based on early reviews — and that’s that Nolan’s vivid storytelling is likely make him a serious Oscar contender, with Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty calling “Dunkirk,” “easily the best movie of the year so far.”
Here’s what critics have said about “Dunkirk”:
Variety‘s Peter Debruge:
“Take away the film’s prismatic structure and this could be a classic war picture for the likes of Lee Marvin or John Wayne. And yet, there’s no question that the star here is Nolan himself, whose attention-grabbing approach alternates among three strands, chronological but not concurrent, while withholding until quite late the intricate way they all fit together. He’s found a way to harness that technique in service of a kind of heightened reality, one that feels more immersive and immediate than whatever concerns we check at the door when entering the cinema. This is what audiences want from a Nolan movie, of course, as a master of the fantastic leaves his mark on historical events for the first time.”
Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty:
“Nolan has for all intents and purposes conjured the British response to Steven Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan.’ If you can imagine that film’s kinetic, nerve-wracking 29-minute opening D-Day invasion stretched out to feature length, this is what it would look like. It’s a towering achievement, not just of the sort of drum-tight storytelling we’ve come to expect from the director of ‘Memento,’ ‘The Dark Knight,’ and ‘Inception,’ but also of old-school, handmade filmmaking. This is visceral, big-budget filmmaking that can be called Art. It’s also, hands down, the best motion picture of the year so far.”
Indiewire’s David Ehrlich:
“Cleaving closer to Sartre than Spielberg, ‘Dunkirk’ is a stunning work of raw spectacle that searches for order in the midst of chaos. It’s the most contradictory film that Christopher Nolan has ever made, and — not incidentally — also the best. Nolan jumbling unknowns together with mega-celebrities in order to stress the egalitarian nature of being left to die. Combat experience isn’t required to appreciate how everyone fights their own war, how the grunts who got mowed down on Normandy Beach had as much to live for as the generals who sent them to the slaughter. Accordingly, ‘Dunkirk’ doesn’t judge these lads for their desperation, nor for the lengths to which it takes them. In fact, his film is enormously forgiving when it comes to the fevers of war, empathetic towards self-protection even as it celebrates the virtues of solidarity.”
Associated Press’s Lindsey Bahr:
“Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dunkirk’ is a stone cold masterpiece. It’s a stunningly immersive survival film told in 106 thrillingly realized minutes. Nolan puts the viewer right in the action whether it’s on the beach with 400,000 men queued up and waiting for a rescue that may never come, on the waters of the English Channel in the little civilian ship headed into hostile waters with only an aging man and two teenage boys aboard, or in the air above in the two lone Spitfires that are quickly running out of fuel. The screen and images envelope you with urgency, dread and moments of breathtaking beauty and grace as you wait with the soldiers, as the title card at the beginning says, for deliverance.”
The Wrap’s Alonso Duralde:
“Christopher Nolan makes pop movies that aspire to be art — and vice versa — and he has perhaps never served his twin goals as successfully as he does in ‘Dunkirk.’ In telling the story of the rescue of hundreds of thousands of blockaded Allied forces in the early days of World War II, Nolan has crafted a film that’s sensational in every sense of the word; it aims for both the heart and the head, to be sure, but arrives there via the central nervous system.”
Village Voice’s Bilge Ebiri:
“The nerve-racking war thriller ‘Dunkirk’ is the movie Christopher Nolan’s entire career has been building up to, in ways that even he may not have realized. He’s taken the British Expeditionary Force’s 1940 evacuation from France, early in World War II — a moment of heroism-in-defeat that has become an integral part of Britain’s vision of itself — and turned it into a nesting doll of increasingly breathless ticking-clock narratives.”
Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips:
“With a bare minimum of dialogue, and a brutal maximum of scenes depicting near-drowning situations in and around Dunkirk, France, in late May and early June 1940, Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dunkirk’ is a unique waterboarding of a film experience.”
USA Today’s Brian Truitt:
“Nolan’s feat is undeniable: He’s made an immersive war movie that celebrates the good of mankind while also making it clear that no victory is without sacrifice.”
Cillian Murphy is earning some of the best reviews of his career for leading Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer, but no praise might be higher than this rave from co-star Robert Downey Jr.: “I have never witnessed a greater sacrifice by a lead actor in my career,” the “Iron Man” star told People magazine about Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer.
“He knew it was going to be a behemoth ask when Chris called him,” Downey Jr. added. “But I think he also had the humility that is required to survive playing a role like this. We’d be like, ‘Hey, we got a three-day weekend. Maybe we’ll go antiquing in Santa Fe. What are you going to do?’ ‘Oh, I have to learn 30,000 words of Dutch. Have a nice time.’ But that’s the nature of the ask.”
“Oppenheimer” shot for 57 days, one of Nolan’s quickest film shoots, and Murphy is front and center in nearly every scene. The cast and crew lived together in the same hotel during the film’s production, but Murphy never joined his fellow ensemble for dinner due to the intensity of playing the lead role.
“Of course he didn’t want to come and have dinner with us,” Matt Damon previously told People magazine. “He couldn’t. His brain was just too full.”
Emily Blunt reasoned that Murphy did not attend cast dinners because “the sheer volume of what he had to take on and shoulder is so monumental.”
For Murphy, “Oppenheimer” marks the biggest leading role of his film career thus far. That kind of pressure isolated the actor. “You know that when you have those big roles, that responsibility, you feel it’s kind of overwhelming,” he told People.
Murphy also lost weight for the role, although he has not disclosed how much. The actor stars in the film as theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was tasked with leading the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico in the effort to create the atomic bomb. Downey Jr. stars as Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who later persecuted Oppenheimer for being a Soviet spy.
“Chris had one of the most incredible leads in Cillian,” Florence Pugh added to People. “He is an actor that I have been watching for quite some time and have been desperate to work with for ages. You’d have to be mad to say no. It was truly one of the best experiences that I’ve had.”
“Working with him was hugely impressive,” she added. “Every single day he shows up knowing every single possible way, intonation, inflection of how to bring this character to life. That was hugely impressive to me. There’s a reason why he is one of the greats.”
“Oppenheimer” is now playing in theaters nationwide from Universal Pictures.
Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has already received a handful of strong first reactions, but now comes a huge claim from “Taxi Driver” writer and “The Card Counter” director Paul Schrader. The Oscar nominee attended the New York premiere of Nolan’s atom bomb epic and took to social media afterwards to hail it as “the best, most important film of this century.”
“If you see one film in cinemas this year it should be ‘Oppenheimer,’” Schrader added in a Facebook post shared widely across social media. “I’m not a Nolan groupie but this one blows the door off the hinges.”
“Oppenheimer,” based on the 2005 book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, tracks the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II through the eyes of theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy stars in the lead role. The film also features Matt Damon as Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh and Benny Safdie also star.
Bird previously raved about Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” adaptation during a conversation at the Institute for Advanced Study last month.
“I am, at the moment, stunned and emotionally recovering from having seen it,” Bird said. “I think it is going to be a stunning artistic achievement, and I have hopes it will actually stimulate a national, even global conversation about the issues that Oppenheimer was desperate to speak out about — about how to live in the atomic age, how to live with the bomb and about McCarthyism — what it means to be a patriot, and what is the role for a scientist in a society drenched with technology and science, to speak out about public issues.”
“Oppenheimer” opens in theaters nationwide July 21 from Universal Pictures.
Thirteen years later and Christopher Nolan is still being hounded with questions about the ending of “Inception,” his acclaimed 2010 action thriller about a group of criminals who pull off a dream heist. The ending is notorious. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb has completed his task and returns home to his children, but the film lingers on his spinning totem top as it begins to wobble. Cut to black. If the top spins indefinitely, Cobb is still dreaming. If it falls, Cobb is awake in the real world.
Moviegoers have spent over a decade debating whether or not Cobb is awake or dreaming at the end of “Inception,” but Nolan recently said on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that such debates are missing the ending’s real takeaway: Cobb doesn’t care.
“I went through a phase where I was asked that a lot,” Nolan said when the topic of the “Inception” ending came up. “I think it was [producer] Emma Thomas who pointed out the correct answer, which is Leo’s character…the point of the shot is the character doesn’t care at that point. It’s not a question I comfortably answer.”
“There is a nihilistic view of that ending, right? But also, he’s moved on and is with his kids,” Nolan added to Wired earlier this month. “The ambiguity is not an emotional ambiguity. It’s an intellectual one for the audience.”
Whether or not Cobb’s top keeps spinning or falls on the table has no effect on the emotional conclusion of “Inception,” which for Nolan is where the heart of the story is. Cobb has made it home to his kids. The character’s emotional journey is complete, thus he doesn’t even care to check if his top spins or falls.
Other “Inception” cast members have weighed in on the debate over the years. Michael Caine once famously shared: “When I got the script of ‘Inception,’ I was a bit puzzled by it. And I said to [Nolan], ‘I don’t understand where the dream is.’ I said, ‘When is it the dream and when is it reality?’ He said, ‘Well, when you’re in the scene, it’s reality.’ So get that — if I’m in it, it’s reality. If I’m not in it, it’s a dream.”
Since Caine’s character appears in the film’s final scene, the actor always thought that meant Cobb was in the real world and his top would fall on the table. In a recent interview with Insider, Nolan said watching the ending of “Inception” with fans is a memory that has stayed with him.
“In terms of sitting with a crowd and experiencing the end of the film, ‘Inception’ was a very unique type of ending,” Nolan said. “If I would sneak into the back of the theater when it was playing, and we would get to the end, there would be a tremendous sort of gasp, groans, frustrations — it was an incredible mixture and I would feel very much like I need to get out of here before anybody notices I’m there.”
“So that was a pretty remarkable ending to sit through with audiences over the years,” he added.
Nolan’s latest directorial effort, “Oppenheimer,” is now playing in theaters nationwide.
Top global talent paid homage to director Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale,” ”Goldeneye”) and special effects supervisor Chris Corbould (“Inception,” ”The Dark Knight,” “No Time to Die”) at the second London Action Festival, which concluded Sunday.
The duo, who were honored with the festival’s Moving Target Award for their outstanding contribution to action cinema, were surprised with a range of video messages from people who had worked with them.
Daniel Craig described Campbell and Corbould as “two people who have had a major influence on my career.” On Campbell, Craig said: “It gave me incredible security knowing you were steering the ship [Casino Royale]. I have so much to thank you for. I’m incredibly proud of the film we made together.” On Corbould, Craig added: “I don’t know what to say. You’ve blown me up, you’ve set me on fire – but what has been so incredible in working with you is to have had the privilege of getting inside your imagination. Those have been some of the most joyous experiences on a film set that I have had in my fairly long career.”
James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli said that Campbell and Corbould are “an important part of the Bond family.”
Christopher Nolan, with whom Corbould has collaborated on four films, said: “Nobody’s contribution matches yours to action cinema.” J.J. Abrams lauded Corbould as “a true hero in filmmaking. It’s been an honor to have worked with you.”
Campbell’s “Mask of Zorro” star Catherine Zeta Jones said: “Working with you has been one of the joys of my career. Your enthusiasm for filmmaking is contagious.” Liam Neeson also congratulated him as “a fantastic director.”
The festival’s biggest in-person surprise was Kit Harington, who made an appearance at a screening of the “Battle of the Bastards” episode from “Game of Thrones” that was followed by a Q&A with director Miguel Sapochnik, cinematographer Fabian Wagner and editor Tim Porter.
Across the five days of the festival highlights included a screening of the first two episodes of Season 4 of Prime Video’s “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” followed by a Q&A with Wendell Pierce; a 50th anniversary screening of “Enter the Dragon” as part of Warner Bros.’ 100th anniversary celebrations with a Q&A featuring the British star of “Warrior,” Andrew Koji; Lesley Paterson (“All Quiet on the Western Front”) and Steven E. De Souza (“Die Hard”, “Commando”) sharing their approaches to writing action for the screen; and a discussion of “Bodyguard” on its fifth anniversary featuring showrunner Jed Mercurio, executive producer Simon Heath and director Thomas Vincent.
There were also discussions with writer-director Nia DaCosta and actors Amita Suman and Priya Kansara highlighting the work of women making an impact in the traditionally male dominated action genre.
“The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” a new period horror film set aboard a merchant ship, is capsizing in its debut at the domestic box office amid the ongoing success of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”
The Universal release — the studio’s second stab this year at a Dracula film after the action-comedy “Renfield” bombed in the spring — is facing some choppy waters after earning $2.62 million on its opening day from 2,715 locations, a figure that includes $750,000 in Thursday previews. “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is projecting a fifth-place debut and a mere $6.5 million gross for its three-day opening weekend.
Nothing really says the summer blockbuster season is winding down like an anachronistic genre picture meeting a swift end in its debut. Even with a production budget totaling only $45 million — a moderate figure for a period spectacle — it’ll likely be difficult for “The Last Voyage” to be a theatrical success. Reviews have been meager, turning in a 27% approval rating from top critics on aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences don’t really dig the film either, with Cinema Score’s survey of early ticket buyers leading to a mediocre “B-” grade.
Based on a chapter of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” tells the story of a merchant ship and its crew, who find themselves at the mercy of a vampire who has snowed away. Directed by André Øvredal (“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”), the film stars Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham and David Dastmalchian.
It’s still a “Barbie” world at the box office, as rivals project the fantasy comedy added $31.4 million from 4,178 locations in its fourth weekend of release, down just 41% from its prior frame. Warner Bros. has yet to send numbers for Friday.
Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” surpassed $1 billion last week at the global box office, making Gerwig the first-ever solo female filmmaker with a billion-dollar movie. Starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, the hot-pink comedy crossed the $500 million mark domestically on Friday and is expected to become the top-grossing Warner Bros. release of all time in North America, unadjusted for inflation. “The Dark Knight” currently holds the record at $534 million.
Meanwhile, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” added $5.1 million from 3,761 theaters on Friday, a decline of 39% from last weekend. The Universal biographical drama is projecting $17.2 million for the weekend, which would be down 41% from its previous outing, bringing domestic ticket sales of $262 million.
In third place, Paramount Pictures’ “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” earned $4 million from 3,950 locations on its second Friday, a decline of 56% from its debut. The animated feature, produced by Nickelodeon Movies and Point Grey Productions, is tracking for a $14.6 million three-day weekend, leading to a domestic total north of $71.6 million.
“Meg 2: The Trench” isn’t making huge waves at the domestic box office, as rivals project only $11.8 million from 3,604 theaters for its second outing. That’d be down a hefty 60% from its $30 million opening weekend, which was already a significant drop from the 2018 original’s $45 million domestic debut.
Many reviews for Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” noted that the film felt like the director’s own version of Oliver Stone’s sprawling historical epic “JFK,” and now Stone himself has weighed in on Nolan’s latest achievement. The “Platoon” Oscar winner took to social media to deem Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” a new film classic, while also revealing he flirted with making his own film in the past about theoretical physicist and “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer.
“I sat through 3 hours of ‘Oppenheimer,’ gripped by Chris Nolan’s narrative,” Stone wrote. “His screenplay is layered and fascinating. Familiar with the book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, I once turned the project down because I couldn’t find my way to its essence. Nolan has found it.”
“His direction is mind-boggling and eye-popping as he takes reams of incident and cycles it into an exciting torrent of action inside all the talk,” Stone continued. “Each actor is a surprise to me, especially Cillian Murphy, whose exaggerated eyes here feel normal playing a genius like Oppenheimer.”
“‘Oppenheimer’ is a classic, which I never believed could be made in this climate,” Stone concluded. “Bravo.”
Stone is far from the only prolific director to publicly praise Nolan’s epic. Before “Oppenheimer” released in theaters, Paul Schrader posted a rave reaction on social media. The “Taxi Driver” writer called Nolan’s film “the best, most important film of this century.”
“If you see one film in cinemas this year it should be ‘Oppenheimer,’” Schrader added. “I’m not a Nolan groupie but this one blows the door off the hinges.”
“Oppenheimer” has since become a box office blockbuster despite its three-hour runtime and R rating. The film has already surpassed $400 million at the worldwide box office in under two weeks of release. It’s now playing nationwide courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Michael Keaton’s Batman isn’t the only big comic book character return happening in Warner Bros.’ long-awaited “The Flash.” As the film’s official trailer confirmed last month, Michael Shannon is also coming back to the DC Universe as “Man of Steel” villain General Zod in the upcoming Ezra Miller-led comic book tentpole. Shannon admitted in a recent interview with Looper that he was quite baffled when the offer came in to reprise General Zod.
“I was a little confused,” Shannon said. “I said, ‘As memory serves me, I think I died in ‘Man of Steel.’ Are they sure they got the right guy?’ But then they explained to me the whole multiverse phenomenon, which I was a little behind the times on that. I can’t say that I’m a huge consumer of this genre of films — not that I have anything against them. If I’m going to watch a movie, the odds are it’s not going to be one of those, but I sure love making them.”
The multiverse storyline in “The Flash” means that Shannon will not be playing the same iteration of General Zod that he did in 2013’s “Man of Steel.” The actor said his role in the film is relatively small and he only shot for a couple of weeks.
“I tried to get back into his skin,” Shannon added. “He’s a little different in this film. He’s a little more… I don’t know how to put it. You don’t spend as much time with him, so you don’t really get to know as much about what he’s thinking. It’s not necessarily his movie. That’s the thing with these multiverse movies — you get a little bit of this and a little bit of that. But it’s really Ezra [Miller’s] movie.”
“The Flash,” directed by “It” helmer Andy Muschietti, stars Shannon opposite Ezra Miller, Michael Keaton, Sasha Calle and Ron Livingston. The film has been called a “reset” for the DC Universe by new DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Safran. Gunn has also called “The Flash” one of the greatest superhero movies ever made.
“The Flash” opens in theaters nationwide June 16 from Warner Bros.
“Meg 2: The Trench,” the second Jason Statham-led shark thriller, is swimming to $112 million in its international box office debut, bringing its global total to $142 million.
It’s a strong start for the $130 million-budgeted film, which was co-financed by Warner Bros. and China Media Capital. Like the original, 2018’s “The Meg,” which earned nearly 73% of its $530 million worldwide tally from the foreign box office, the sequel will rely on overseas audiences to propel the film to profitability.
China was the top territory for “Meg 2” with $53.3 million, followed by Mexico with $7.6 million and the United Kingdom with $5.1 million. In North America, the poorly reviewed “The Trench” opened in second place with $30 million, a decent opening, albeit one that’s significantly below the original’s domestic debut of $45 million.
Overall, it was a weekend of global box office milestones as “Barbie” crossed the coveted $1 billion mark and “Oppenheimer” glided past $500 million.
Greta Gerwig’s fantasy-comedy “Barbie” joined the billion-dollar club after just 17 days on the big screen. It’s the fastest Warner Bros. release (and eighth in the studio’s 100-year history) to surpass $1 billion, besting the 19 days it took “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.” This also makes Gerwig the first-ever solo female filmmaker with a billion-dollar film.
“Barbie” collected $74 million over the weekend, bringing its international total to a sizable $572 million. The biggest international markets are the U.K. and Ireland ($87.9 million), Mexico ($48.9 million), Australia ($41.1 million) and Brazil ($39.5 million).
Christopher Nolan’s dark historical drama “Oppenheimer,” also in its third weekend of release, has hit $552.9 million worldwide. Imax has accounted for a remarkable $114.2 million (22%) of the film’s worldwide total.
The R-rated movie, which stars Cillian Murphy as the scientist who led development on the atomic bomb that helped to end the second world war, added $52 million from 78 foreign territories over the weekend for an overseas total of $324 million.
Now, it stands as Nolan’s fifth-biggest release ahead of “Dunkirk” ($530 million), as well as the highest-grossing World War II movie of all time. “Oppenheimer” is also one of four biographical films to reach the $500 million mark, according to Universal, joining “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “The Passion of the Christ” and “American Sniper.”
Elsewhere at the box office, Sony and Blumhouse’s “Insidious: The Red Door” has amassed $182.5 million worldwide, including $100 million overseas. It became the highest-grossing horror film of the year, overtaking Universal’s sensation “M3GAN” ($180 million).
One of the most shocking lines in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” was not scripted by the writer-director himself. It arrives during a scene where Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is meeting with U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and other government officials about where to drop the atomic bombs in Japan. Stimson tell the group to avoid bombing Kyoto because that’s where he and his wife honeymooned. It’s a stomach-churning line given Stimson’s off-hand delivery and the way he frames the atomic bombs’ destructive repercussions around his own interests.
During an interview with The New York Times, Nolan revealed that it was James Remar, the actor playing Stimson, who created that shocking line of dialogue. Because “Oppenheimer” features such a sprawling cast and Nolan’s script is mostly told through his main character’s perspective, the filmmaker encouraged his supporting actors to do their own thorough research on their roles. That’s where Remar discovered Stimson honeymooned in Kyoto.
“There’s a moment where James Remar… He kept talking to me about how he learned that Stimson and his wife had honeymooned in Kyoto,” Nolan said. “That was one of the reasons that Stimson took Kyoto off the list to be bombed. I had him crossing the city off the list because of its cultural significance, but I’m like, ‘Just add that.’ It’s a fantastically exciting moment where no one in the room knows how to react.”
“Each actor was coming to the table with research about what their real-life counterpart had been,” Nolan said earlier in the interview. “They had tons of homework to do. They had a great resource with ‘American Prometheus.’ They then did their own research and what it meant for me, which isn’t something I’d ever really been able to do in the past. So, for example, with the scene in the section classroom with all the scientists, we would be able to improvise the discussion. The script is there, but they could come into it with passion and knowledge based on all of their own learning.”
“Oppenheimer” has become a box office powerhouse for Universal Pictures since its July 21 release date. The film crossed the $180 million mark at the domestic box office in less than two weeks, and it’s already soared past $412 million worldwide. Considering “Oppenheimer” is a three-hour, R-rated biographical drama, these numbers are staggering.
Head over to The New York Times’ website to read Nolan’s interview in its entirety.
Months after leaving multiplexes, “Get Out” and “Dunkirk” are returning to movie theaters in the wake of scoring best picture Oscar nominations.
“Get Out,” which opened Feb. 24 and grossed $254 million at the worldwide box office, left theaters in July. It received four nominations Tuesday — best picture for producers Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, Edward H. Hamm Jr., and Jordan Peele; best actor for Daniel Kaluuya; and best director and best original screenplay for Peele.
“Dunkirk,” which opened on July 21 and closed on Nov. 23 with $525 million worldwide, received eight nominations including best picture, best director, best cinematography, and best production design. It’s Christopher Nolan’s first directing nomination.
A Warner Bros. spokesman said “Dunkirk” would begin appearing in North American theaters as early as Wednesday. Universal will bring back “Get Out” to select theaters nationwide beginning Friday.
AMC said it will play all nine best picture nominees starting on Jan. 29 at hundreds of its locations nationwide, including “Dunkirk” and “Get Out.” AMC, the nation’s largest chain with 660 locations, is also significantly increasing the number of AMC sites where each of the best pictures nominees is playing to between 200 and nearly 500 AMC locations.
AMC will also hold its Best Picture Showcase for all nine films in late February and early March. Cinemark will stage a similar showcase that week. The Oscars will be awarded on March 4.
The weekend will also see an array of awards contenders adding locations in an attempt to capitalize on Tuesday’s announcement of Oscar nominations, led by Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” which picked up 13 nominations. Fox Searchlight has seen $30 million domestically from “The Shape of Water,” which was playing last weekend at 853 North American sites. It’s expected that “Shape” will add several hundred locations.
Fox’s “The Post,” which received a best picture nomination and a best actress nod for Meryl Streep, has been playing in wide release for the past two weekends and has grossed more than $45 million.
Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name” landed four nods. Sony Classics has earned $9.1 million in two months of release with 815 venues screening the coming-of-age story last weekend.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” which scored six Oscar nominations, saw a major expansion last weekend to 896 sites and will expand to 1,015 venues. The fashion drama finished 12th with $3.2 million to lift its four-week total to $6.1 million.
It was in 2021 that Christopher Nolan first read “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s sweeping biography about the physicist dubbed the father of the atomic bomb. As Nolan is known for his epic and often extreme films, it makes sense that the prolific director was determined to adapt the explosive story, which had been optioned numerous times in Hollywood but never made it past development.
Two years later and Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” one of the most anticipated films of the year, is finally out.
The film, starring Cillian Murphy as the eponymous scientist, pulls straight from the 700-page biography, which traces Oppenheimer’s life starting with his time at Cambridge, where he earned a reputation as an intellectual prodigy. As a physicist, Oppenheimer made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, earning him great respect among his peers.
The narrative takes a dramatic turn with the onset of World War II, when Oppenheimer was appointed as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret government initiative aimed at developing the first atomic bomb. His leadership and organizational skills were instrumental to the project, which culminated with the devastating nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 200,000 Japanese people.
When Bird read Nolan’s screenplay, he was “struck by how faithful it was to the book, capturing what was always most important to Sherwin: the paradoxes at the heart of Oppenheimer’s character and the intimate details that dovetailed with enormous plate shifts of world history.”
Purchase “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” below:
Cillian Murphy’s decades-long collaboration with Christopher Nolan hit a new peak with “Oppenheimer,” his first leading role in a Nolan feature that has garnered him the best reviews of his career and Oscar buzz for best actor. “Oppenheimer” follows Murphy’s supporting turns in three Batman films, “Inception” and “Interstellar.” Recently asked by The Independent if there were any Nolan movies not featuring Murphy that he wished he could’ve starred in, Murphy selected the director’s 2014 space epic “Interstellar.”
“I adore ‘Interstellar’ just because I find it so emotional,” Murphy said. “I remember seeing it in the cinema when I had little kids. It just had a big impact on me. It broke my heart. I love watching his films when I’m not in them because you don’t have to freak out about the size of your ears, or whatever.”
Murphy stressed that Nolan cast the “right people” in “Interstellar,” so there’s no hard feelings that he missed out on it. The epic stars Matthew McConaughey as an ex-NASA pilot who is recruited on a mission to locate a new planet outside of the solar system that can support human life. Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Matt Damon and Michael Caine had supporting roles in the film.
The Independent also asked Murphy which Nolan movie he’d pair with “Oppenheimer” for a double feature.
“You could go ‘Interstellar,’ which is very… explores similar scientific, physic themes. Or you could watch ‘Dunkirk,’ which is also set in World War II,” Murphy said. “‘Dunkirk’ is shorter, so that might be a good match ‘cause it’s like an hour-and-a-half, and then you can go into [‘Oppenheimer’].”
Despite being a talky biographical drama that runs three hours and is rated R, “Oppenheimer” has already surpassed the lifetime domestic box office totals of “Interstellar” and “Dunkirk.” The film has earned $264 million in the U.S. and Canada, while its global gross is about to cross the $650 million mark. “Oppenheimer” is now playing in theaters nationwide.
“Transcendence” is a most curious name for a movie that never shakes free from those hoary old cliches about the evils of technology and the danger by which man plays at becoming a god. The man in question here is Johnny Depp, whose listless lead performance as a brilliant scientist in the field of artificial intelligence does little to aid this overplotted, dramatically undernourished debut feature from longtime Christopher Nolan d.p. Wally Pfister. Arriving at a crowded spring box office, the pic will test Depp’s drawing power outside of the Disney franchise factory, before weak word of mouth and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” send it packing.
One of the manifold pleasures of Spike Jonze’s “Her” was how elegantly it shrugged off decades of speculative fiction in which technological progress correlated to a loss of human individualism. In its place was the delightful suggestion that, rather than battling us for domination, artificial intelligence might join us in romantic bliss, and then, having had its fill, journey off in search of some more fulfilling destiny in the cosmos. But in “Transcendence,” which might have been titled “Him,” it’s very much back to square one: the culture of technophobia that gave us the predatory mainframes and cyborgs of “2001,” “Demon Seed” and “Alien,” and that early ’90s wave of cyber-paranoia thrillers (“The Net,” “The Lawnmower Man,” “Virtuosity”) that now seem as quaint as dial-up Internet.
Some might add to that list the collective work of James Cameron, almost all of which involves the fusion of man and machine; except, in Cameron’s case, technology is just as often friend as foe, and in any event an inevitability that we can’t reasonably be expected to live without. Yet, when “Transcendence” begins in some unspecified near-future year, the plug has been pulled on that whole crazy information superhighway. Abandoned cell phones litter the streets like tumbleweeds in an old Western; computer keyboards make for convenient door stops. Our narrator (Paul Bettany) reports of an “unstoppable collision between mankind and technology,” and then begins to unfurl his tale of woe. Fittingly, we are in Berkeley, that hallowed hippie enclave where the coming of chain stores was once seen as a sign of cultural apocalypse, until a more immediate threat arrived in the form of Silicon Valley one-percenters.
The movie then flashes back five years and introduces us to Depp’s unsubtly named Dr. Will Caster and his wife and fellow researcher, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall). That the Casters have not (yet) fully sold their souls to demon science is evinced by Will’s building of a copper-encased “technology-free zone” in the backyard of the couple’s picture-perfect craftsman home. But meanwhile, back at the lab, the Casters are hard at work on a sentient machine called PINN (Physically Independent Neural Network), which takes up an entire room (like the all-knowing super-computer from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”) and converses in a female droid monotone that sounds like HAL 9000’s premenstrual sister.
Not everyone, it seems, is thrilled with this idea. In the course of a single day — a kind of cyber-9/11 — a series of coordinated terror attacks lays waste to the best and brightest in the A.I. community. Will himself takes a bullet to the belly but makes an incredibly speedy recovery, only to learn that the bullet was laced with radiation and now, like the poisoned man of the classic noir “D.O.A.,” he’s living on borrowed time. Rather hurriedly (as it has a habit of doing), the screenplay by first-timer Jack Paglen introduces the notion that, just as one might save a video or music file to a hard drive, so might we do the same with an entire human consciousness. And so, with some help from their best scientist friend (Bettany), the Casters spend Will’s dying days digitizing the good doctor’s noggin for posterity.
Thus “Transcendence” arrives at that old, irresolvable conundrum: Is it live or is it Memorex? Staring out from a bank of computer monitors, the digital Will looks and sounds awfully like the old one — and yet, as with George Romero’s zombies, looks can be deceiving. This new Will isn’t content to stay contained on one (massive) server. He wants to stretch his bits and bytes, to be uploaded into the cloud (and not only, one suspects, so that he can debate philosophy with Alan Watts). And Evelyn, who wants more than anything to believe that her husband is still somehow alive, happily obliges. Appearing periodically to offer grave prognoses is Morgan Freeman (one of several members of the Nolan stock company who appear here), once more cast as the wise, weary Voice of Reason.
There are intriguing, half-formed ideas afoot in “Transcendence,” but the script and Pfister’s heavy, humorless direction tend to reduce everything to simplistic standoffs between good and evil — or, in this case, heartless technocrats and crunchy-granola resistance fighters known as RIFT (Revolutionary Independence From Technology) and led by plucky martyr-in-training Bree (Kate Mara). Take that, PINN. The bigger problem is that all the characters on both sides are so uniformly bland and lifeless that one can hardly tell the flesh-and-blood humans from the army of man/machine “hybrids” Will begins assembling with his suddenly infinite powers (including, for murkily defined reasons, the ability to manipulate real-world organic matter). Imagine a version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in which the aliens arrive to discover a world of anodyne pod people already in place.
It’s a bit of a cliche (which doesn’t make it untrue) that when cameramen turn to directing, they make movies long on visual splendor and short on storytelling. In any case, most who make the transition (Jack Cardiff, Haskell Wexler, Gordon Willis, John Bailey, Dean Semler) eventually go back to shooting for others. With “Transcendence,” Pfister has certainly delivered a good-looking, well-produced picture, albeit one lacking in the memorable images he has supplied in excess in Nolan’s employ. (Pfister’s d.p. of choice, Jess Hall, is big on sun flares and slow-mo water droplets.) More critically, he’s made a movie empty of feeling, even as it labors to convince us that the entire future of the human race is hanging in the balance. There is, at the story’s center, an attempt at a grand, doomed sci-fi romance between Will and Evelyn, but one need only think back to David Cronenberg’s remake of “The Fly,” or Nolan’s own “Inception,” to see how short “Transcendence” falls on this particular score.
Presented with much the same challenge as Scarlett Johansson in “Her” — to play a character who, for most of the movie, exists only as a disembodied voice (and, in this case, a flickering face on a screen) — Depp fails to convey any real sense of the passion and curiosity that supposedly drive Will Caster to do what he does. The gravely beautiful Hall (who was, along with Johansson, one of the women caught up in the epic magicians’ duel in Nolan’s “The Prestige”) seems to have been directed to deliver her entire performance in an unwavering state of glassy-eyed anxiety. Indeed, long before the Web goes bust, “Transcendence” has already flatlined.
Composer Mychael Danna rattles the speakers of the new Dolby Atmos sound system with a score that combines lush string arrangements and occasional electronic twangs, whenever the basso profundo sound design isn’t doing same.
Syncopy Films Inc. 