Tenet (2020) - Movie Review

After diverting from his usual illusionist ways in 2017 with Dunkirk, writer/director Christopher Nolan seems to be back on his cerebral shit. In fact, he seems to have gone right back to Inception, as his latest is another example of high-concept complexity wrapped up in the kind of mainstream bombast that has allowed Nolan a foot in both houses for so much of his career. While I’d argue, both for subjective and objective reasons, this doesn’t quite reach the same dizzying heights as Inception, I’d also argue that this film has more than enough of its own finesse to succeed.

Dunkirk (2017) - Movie Review

Christopher Nolan is one of those directors who seems to ferociously divide audiences, usually in reference to the director’s more staunch defenders. He has made some truly incredible films, like the cerebral heist flick Inception and the ground-breaking superhero film The Dark Knight, both of which I’d count among my favourite films ever… but the guy’s reputation has been stuck in a bit of a mire for a while now.

 

Interstellar wasn’t that well received overall, and while The Dark Knight Rises still holds up as a good Batman film, it and combined with his involvement in Man Of Steel resulted in the current state of the DC Extended Universe, one that was definitely painted with Nolan’s dark brushstrokes from his Batman work. Naturally, as is the case with pretty much all of his films, the marketing for his latest has been rather inescapable. Knowing my own hesitance to full-force advertising of films and my want for him to pull through with a film that I don’t have to defend quite so hard as something like Rises, this is already looking like an interesting situation for a film’s release.

 

But that’s all background noise; what’s the actual movie like?

Interstellar (2014) - Movie Review

As a critic, I’m always fascinated to see a film that has other critics divided, and as of right now, there is no better safe bet on getting a film like that than one that has Christopher Nolan involved. While a lot of my contemporaries were slamming The Dark Knight Rises, I personally loved the hell out of it; when Man Of Steel had the world either loving it or hating it, I was safely in the latter even without putting my general disinterest in Superman into the equation. This is yet another movie that really could go either way in terms of my reaction to it.