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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Zoller Seitz

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

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Film credits.

Oppenheimer (2023)

Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language.

181 minutes

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt as Katherine 'Kitty' Oppenheimer

Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock

Benny Safdie as Edward Teller

Michael Angarano as Robert Serber

Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence

Rami Malek as David Hill

Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr

Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols

Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer

David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi

Alden Ehrenreich as Senate Aide

Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush

Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman

Alex Wolff as Luis Walter Alvarez

Casey Affleck as Boris Pash

Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman

Emma Dumont as Jackie Oppenheimer

Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg

David Dastmalchian as William L. Borden

Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs

Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge

Tony Goldwyn as Gordon Gray

Olivia Thirlby as Lilli Hornig

James Remar as Henry Stimson

• Christopher Nolan

Writer (based on the book by)

• Martin Sherwin

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Jennifer Lame
• Ludwig Göransson

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

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

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

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

As the title makes clear, this movie is about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb." For most of the three-hour runtime, Nolan places the viewer inside Oppenheimer's prodigious brain. We see the world as this theoretical physicist did, meaning the action is often interrupted by incredible visions of subatomic particles and cosmic fire. Yet Oppenheimer also has aspects of a memory play, or at least an exhaustive biography cut up and shuffled around. Even more than Nolan's previous film, Tenet , Oppenheimer flits about in time, effortlessly moving in and out of different events that took place across several decades, drawing connections that are logical but far from linear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘Oppenheimer’ review: Christopher Nolan’s mind-blowing biopic hits like a bomb to the brain

This tense and talk-y thriller ranks among the director's greatest films

T he atom bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 reportedly killed up to 226,000 people. The war they ended killed up to 85 million. The weight of humanity was put on the scales 78 years ago and one man decided which way they tipped – a scientist whose work in theoretical physics held the power to end wars, to start them, and to change the whole course of history.

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning book, American Prometheus , is known as the definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer – and it’s easy to see why director Christopher Nolan picked it up in the first place. Obsessively researched, dense with detail and immaculately structured, it’s the perfect subject for Nolan – and for what might be his best film so far.

Here he makes his biggest and smallest movie in one – something eclipsing the scale of Inception and the intimacy of The Prestige – a dense three-hour drama set in cramped rooms filled with men talking about particle physics and political depositions that feels more thrilling and explosive than any summer blockbuster.

If you’re not too hot on your nuclear fission, don’t worry. Complex theories are explained with fishbowls and marbles and dazzling visual effects, but Oppenheimer isn’t about science, it’s about a man. Painting a delicate character portrait on the largest canvas imaginable, Nolan casts Cillian Murphy as the flawed, brilliant doctor at the centre of his history – and then pushes pretty nearly everything else out of the way.

Oppenheimer’s most famous words (“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”, taken directly from Hindu scripture) are repeated twice in the film, years apart. First in a flash of arrogance, then in horror, everything that happens in between is Oppenheimer’s own fall from grace, finding a haunting moral worminess for Murphy, and only Murphy, to live in.

For a film so long and so crammed with great performances, the laser focus of the script is astonishing. Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr are all exceptional (as is Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh and pretty much every other A-lister in Hollywood), but they’re all playing parts that Nolan deliberately places as far in the background as he can.

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“You’re not just self-important, you’re actually important!” Damon’s General Groves (Oppenheimer’s boss) barks at the rail-thin protagonist, something his long-suffering wife (Blunt) could easily have yelled the other way around. Cocky, obsessive and often unlikeable, Oppenheimer is a complicated man, but Murphy brings him brilliantly to life; cold and contradictory in a film that roars with fire. Literally.

It might not have the flashiest action set-pieces of the summer, but some of the scenes in Oppenheimer are dazzling enough to be genuinely frightening. See it in IMAX, if you can, to really experience it – not just the wall-shaking violence of the explosions but also Nolan’s giant 70mm camera pushed right up into the film’s heart and soul in even the smallest of talky boardroom scenes.

Not just the definitive account of the man behind the atom bomb, Oppenheimer is a monumental achievement in grown-up filmmaking. For years, Nolan has been perfecting the art of the serious blockbuster – crafting smart, finely-tuned multiplex epics that demand attention; that can’t be watched anywhere other than in a cinema, uninterrupted, without distractions. But this, somehow, feels bigger.

• Director: Christopher Nolan
• Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon
• Release date: July 21 (in cinemas)
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Oppenheimer First Reviews: Breathtaking, Ballsy, and One of the Best Biopics Ever Made

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

TAGGED AS: blockbusters , First Reviews , movies

Here’s what critics are saying about Oppenheimer :

Is this possibly the best movie of the year?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/©Universal Pictures)

Will Christopher Nolan fans enjoy it?

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

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

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

Is it one of his most impressive films?

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

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

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

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

How is the screenplay?

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

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

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

Is it difficult to understand?

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

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

How is Cillian Murphy in the title role?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do any of his co-stars particularly stand out?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How is the movie’s representation of women characters?

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

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

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

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

How does it look and sound?

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

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

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

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

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

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

What about the pacing?

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

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

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

Does it have any surprises?

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

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

Do we need to see it in IMAX?

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

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

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

Oppenheimer opens in theaters everywhere on July 21, 2023.

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‘Oppenheimer’ is a towering triumph of filmmaking

Christopher nolan's "oppenheimer" is one of the most ambitious and comprehensive historical dramas ever put to film..

By Kevin Slane

There’s a moment in Christopher Nolan’s historical epic “Oppenheimer” when a skeptical scientist asks the titular physicist (Cillian Murphy) why he should join him in constructing the atomic bomb. Before Oppenheimer can answer, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves Jr. (Matt Damon) cuts in, berating the scientist for even considering not being part of “the most important f****** thing to happen in the history of the world.”

If you’ve followed the year-long promotional campaign for “Oppenheimer,” you might be under the impression that Nolan’s newest film is the cinematic equivalent of the Manhattan Project. Filmmaker Paul Schrader (“The Card Counter”) called it both the best and “most important film of the century.” AMC has already sold more than 40,000 tickets to double features of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” (an unlikely phenomenon dubbed “ Barbenheimer “). The Coolidge Corner Theatre, which has been in business since 1929, has already sold more presale tickets for both films than any other movies in its history.

So does “Oppenheimer” live up to the hype? For the most part, yes.

Watch our review of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer”

The movie is an incredible achievement, and might be one of the most thorough, ambitious historical dramas ever put to film. Every single aspect of the movie is huge, from the cast to the real, non-CGI explosions Nolan created to mimic the Trinity Test. But “Oppenheimer” is also quiet and understated. Much of its three-hour runtime functions as a tense courtroom drama and a sprawling game of 1940s backroom politics. Most of all, it’s a fascinating character study of a man stuck living in a world of absolutes whose mind never seemed to be satisfactorily made up about anything.

“Oppenheimer” tells two stories simultaneously, following both Oppenheimer’s rise to world renown as father of the atomic bomb as well as his downfall at the hands of Red Scare politicians and jealous colleagues.

Early on, we see Oppenheimer teach his first lecture at UC-Berkeley, where he asks his lone student whether light exists as a ray or a particle. The correct answer is both, the professor says, and accepting these two seemingly contradictory statements simultaneously is integral to unlocking the field of quantum physics.

It’s a thesis statement for the troubled but brilliant man, and Nolan shows us over and over the difficulty of living life as a man of two minds. After a professor upbraids young Oppenheimer in front of the whole class, he poisons the man’s apple — only to rush back later and surreptitiously remove it. He attends a communist party meeting because he finds the theories interesting, but chides his brother for joining the party. He carries on multiple affairs, and even leaves Los Alamos at a crucial point in the atom bomb’s development to visit his distraught mistress (Florence Pugh) because, as he is later forced to testify, “she needed me.”

As Oppenheimer, Murphy is almost never out of frame. He’s so central to the film that Nolan took the rare step of writing the entire script in the first person from Oppenheimer’s perspective. He is supremely confident from the start, but his eyes slowly begin to dim as the weight of his actions seep into his subconscious. When the Trinity Test is finally complete, he removes his protective eyewear to allow the full magnitude of his actions to wash over him, in a scene reminiscent of Murphy’s 2007 solar-centric sci-fi masterpiece “Sunshine.”

Even before the accolades begin rolling in, Oppenheimer begins to question (but never definitively answer) whether the bomb was needed at all. The post-WWII propaganda claim, still repeated today, that the bomb “saved lives,” is held up for scrutiny, and Oppenheimer’s opposition to construction of the hydrogen bomb makes enemies of formerly close colleagues. All of this leads to the powers-that-be slowly pushing Oppenheimer out of the picture by dredging up his communist dalliances and airing his extramarital affairs as evidence of impaired judgment.

Despite Murphy’s omnipresence, there’s plenty of room for the supporting cast to shine. Nolan doesn’t cut corners the way that a standard biopic might, refusing to create composite characters or mess with the timeline of history to serve the film. As a result, you’ll be spotting literally dozens of performers you know popping in and out of frame, even if only for a line or two. Oscar winning actors like Gary Oldman, Rami Malek, and Casey Affleck each have barely more than a scene to their name, but make their impact deeply felt with limited screen time.

The prime supporting players are outstanding as well. Damon is the most consistent comic relief, playing a gruff but loyal general overseeing Oppenheimer’s work. As a longtime Oppenheimer colleague turned adversary, Robert Downey Jr. has finally found a post-Marvel role that allows him to showcase his considerable talents. Jason Clarke (“Chappaquiddick”) is delightfully detestable as one of the film’s only out-and-out villains. Even the two female roles, typically a Nolan blind spot, have slightly more depth than usual. Playing Oppenheimer’s wife, Emily Blunt seems stuck in an alcohol-induced malaise, but snaps to life in the film’s final act, lashing out at the men who dare try to tear her husband down.

In his quest for telling the most epic, authoritative, historically accurate version of Oppenheimer’s life, Nolan has succeeded. This dedication means that a few scenes and characters probably could have been left on the cutting room floor, especially after the bomb at Los Alamos is detonated. The closest analogue might be Oliver Stone’s presidential drama “JFK,” which combines masterful filmmaking, Cold War paranoia, and a three-plus hour runtime. “Oppenheimer” has none of the propulsive action or mind-bending sci-fi that the director is known for. But at a moment in time when the world’s atomic scientists say that the planet is closer to nuclear catastrophe than we’ve been since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “Oppenheimer” quietly, persistently asks us to pay attention, lest we fail to learn from history’s mistakes.

Rating: *** 1/2 (out of 4)

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Oppenheimer review: a cinematic triumph illuminating the legacy of j. robert oppenheimer.

Discover the cinematic brilliance of ‘Oppenheimer,’ a timeless tale of genius, ethics, and consequences. A captivating masterpiece by Christopher Nolan.

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

David ehrlich.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Oppenheimer” Review Round-Up: One of the Best Biopics Ever Made

The review embargo was officially lifted on Christopher Nolan’s  Oppenheimer,  and it comes as no surprise that the film is coming in for some of the best reviews in Nolan’s career. Maybe  the  best. After the film premiered in Paris last week (but before the review embargo was lifted), the first reactions were often of astonishment . Fellow filmmaker Paul Schrader ( Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, First Reformed ) went so far as to call it “ The best, most important film of the century .” And now, the rest of the movie-reviewing world has seen it, and they’re just about unanimous in agreement.

Oppenheimer  follows the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy, lauded by every critic for his performance) and his work on the Manhattan Project, as he led the United States effort to build the bomb before the Nazis could. At three hours long and with a forgone conclusion (at least for the part of this history people know off the top of their heads), there was never any guarantee Nolan could turn his biopic into a thrilling, harrowing masterpiece. He has.

“ Oppenheimer is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates,” says Manohla Nargis, chief film critic at The New York Times .

“ Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a kinetic thing of dark, imposing beauty that quakes with the disquieting tremors of a forever rupture in the course of human history,” writes the AP ‘s Jake Coyle.

Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post writes, “[Nolan] has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end. Oppenheimer boldly posits that those arguments are still worth having, in a film of magnitude, profundity and dazzling artistry.”

There’s more like this. A lot more. Let’s have a brief glance at what some other critics are saying. Oppenheimer  arrives in theaters on July 21. You probably want to see it on the biggest screen possible.

“‘Oppenheimer’ could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director’s filmography, when he takes the stylistic and technical practices that he’d been honing for the previous 20 years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward.” https://t.co/CvPJVzI2aL — Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) July 19, 2023

Review: If “Oppenheimer” is a supersize movie, that’s because anything else would do a disservice to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the tragic figure at its core brought to fascinatingly paradoxical life by Cillian Murphy. https://t.co/bX5l1bWnpk — The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 19, 2023

‘Oppenheimer’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Epic Thriller Of The Father Of The Atomic Bomb Is As Frightening As It Is Brilliant https://t.co/jNu0AQQqgS — Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) July 19, 2023

Read our review of “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of the “father of the atomic bomb.” It’s a Critic’s Pick. https://t.co/5wcJ6dLaxq — The New York Times (@nytimes) July 19, 2023

With OPPENHEIMER, Christopher Nolan has made the kind of big, brainy, cinematic event movie that’s all but extinct from the studios. See it on the biggest screen you can find. My @THR review https://t.co/WxUmhf0CCb — David Rooney (@DavidCRooney1) July 19, 2023

Cillian Murphy gives a phenomenal performance in #Oppenheimer , Christopher Nolan’s dense, dizzying psychodrama. https://t.co/cYLc05TwGn — Variety (@Variety) July 19, 2023

REVIEW: Christopher Nolan’s starry biopic #Oppenheimer is big, loud, and a must-see. https://t.co/zaw8aNAyVC — Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) July 19, 2023

“A film that you don’t merely watch, but must reckon with.” Cillian Murphy plays the father of the atomic bomb in Christopher Nolan’s #Oppenheimer . Read the Empire review now: https://t.co/dX3bWTOK14 pic.twitter.com/O6mTkNohEE — Empire Magazine (@empiremagazine) July 19, 2023

Either despite its intense craft or because of it, Christopher Nolan’s 3-hour movie about the architect of the atomic bomb works. TIME reviews #Oppenheimer : https://t.co/ApvPgv8vZO — TIME (@TIME) July 19, 2023

Christopher Nolan’s #Oppenheimer is simply extraordinary! Check out our full review 🔥 https://t.co/MELO6ziE84 — Total Film (@totalfilm) July 19, 2023

“Oppenheimer” is astonishing. A paralyzing three-hour biopic that plays like a full-tilt thriller, steeped in hellish visions of a crumbling world and legacy. Nolan’s “Tree of Death,” practically reverse engineered from Oppenheimer’s haunted NBC closeup. https://t.co/Bm2ldwiNRa — Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha) July 19, 2023

The more I thought about OPPENHEIMER, the more I liked it. And there was never any question about Cillian Murphy’s performance, which is fantastic. https://t.co/SmeyjaKMxK — Stephanie Zacharek (@szacharek) July 19, 2023

Me on Christopher Nolan’s #OPPENHEIMER : Big, bold, full of ideas & deep moral ambiguities I yearn to see in movies. I left the theater liking it, came to love it the more I wrote. Perhaps a bit brassy on occasion, but that’s Nolan. Can’t wait to see again. https://t.co/KHgTHIVyqv — Tomris Laffly (@TomiLaffly) July 19, 2023

Christopher Nolan’s elegant, majestic “Oppenheimer” is three hours long — and you feel every thrilling, immersive minute, writes critic Moira Macdonald. (Via @moiraverse ) https://t.co/mxCPW5dMnt — The Seattle Times (@seattletimes) July 19, 2023

“It’s a paradox, but it works.” On Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER: https://t.co/JkiiWmZG0E — Justin Chang (@JustinCChang) July 19, 2023

For more on Oppenheimer, check out these stories:

Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” Called “Best and Most Important Film This Century” By Another Film Legend

“Oppenheimer” First Reactions: Christopher Nolan’s Historical Epic is Genuinely Mind-Blowing

Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” IMAX Film Prints Are 11 Miles Long & Weigh 600 Pounds

Featured image: Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Courtesy of Universal Pictures. 

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Movie Review: A bomb and its fallout in Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Cillian Murphy in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, left, and Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Dane Dehaan as Kenneth Nichols in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Jason Clarke is Roger Robb in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Benny Safdie as Edward Teller in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

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Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is a kinetic thing of dark, imposing beauty that quakes with the disquieting tremors of a forever rupture in the course of human history.

“Oppenheimer,” a feverish three-hour immersion in the life of Manhattan Project mastermind J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), is poised between the shock and aftershock of the terrible revelation, as one character calls it, of a divine power.

There are times in Nolan’s latest opus that flames fill the frame and visions of subatomic particles flitter across the screen — montages of Oppenheimer’s own churning visions. But for all the immensity of “Oppenheimer,” this is Nolan’s most human-scaled film — and one of his greatest achievements.

It’s told principally in close-ups, which, even in the towering detail of IMAX 70mm, can’t resolve the vast paradoxes of Oppenheimer. He was said to be a magnetic man with piercing blue eyes (Murphy has those in spades) who became the father of the atomic bomb but, in speaking against nuclear proliferation and the hydrogen bomb, emerged as America’s postwar conscience.

Nolan, writing his own adaptation of Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” layers the build-up to the Manhattan Project with two moments from years later.

In 1954, a probing inquiry into Oppenheimer’s leftist politics by a McCarthy-era Atomic Energy Commission stripped him of his security clearance. This provides the frame of “Oppenheimer,” along with a Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who chaired the Atomic Energy Commission and was a stealthy nemesis to Oppenheimer.

The grubby, political machinations of these hearings — the Strauss section is captured in black and white — act like a stark X-ray of Oppenheimer’s life. It’s an often brutal, unfair interrogation that weighs Oppenheimer’s decisions and accomplishment, inevitably, in moral terms. “Who’d want to justify their whole life?” someone wonders. For the maker of the world’s most lethal weapon, it’s an especially complicated question.

These separate timelines give “Oppenheimer” — dimly lit and shadowy even in the desert — a noirish quality (Nolan has said all his films are ultimately noirs) in reckoning with a physicist who spent the first half of his life in headlong pursuit of a new science and the second half wrestling with the consequences of his colossal, world-altering invention.

“Oppenheimer” moves too fast to come to any neat conclusions. Nolan, as if reaching to match the electron, dives into the story at a blistering pace. From start to finish, “Oppenheimer” buzzes with a heady frequency, tracking Oppenheimer as a promising student in the then-unfolding field of quantum mechanics. “Can you hear the music, Robert?” asks the elder Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). He can, absolutely, but that doesn’t mean finding harmony.

Nolan, whose last film was the time-traveling, palindrome-rich “Tenet,” may be the only filmmaker for whom delving into quantum mechanics could be considered a step down in complexity. But “Oppenheimer” is less interested in equations than the chemistry of an expanding mind. Oppenheimer reads “The Waste Land” and looks at modernist painting. He dabbles in the communist thinking of the day. (His mistress, Jean Tatlock, played arrestingly, tragically by Florence Pugh, is a party member.) But he aligns with no single cause. “I like a little wiggle room,” says Oppenheimer.

For a filmmaker synonymous with grand architectures — psychologies mapped onto subconscious worlds (“Inception”) and cosmic reaches ( “Interstellar” ) — “Oppenheimer” resides more simply in its subject’s fertile imagination and anguished psyche. (The script was written in first person.) Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema render Oppenheimer’s interiority with flashes of images that stretch across the heavens. His brilliance comes from his limitlessness of thought.

Just how much “wiggle room” Oppenheimer is permitted, though, becomes a more acute point when war breaks out and he’s tasked by Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. (Matt Damon) to lead the race to beat the Nazis to an atomic bomb. The rapid building of Los Alamos on the white-sand mesas of New Mexico — a site chosen by and with personal meaning to Oppenheimer — might not be so different than the erecting of movie sets for Nolan’s massive films, which likewise tend to culminate with a spectacular explosion.

There is something inherently queasy about a big-screen spectacle dramatizing the creation — justified or not — of a weapon of mass destruction. Oppenheimer once called the atomic bomb “a weapon for aggressors” wherein “the elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.” Surely a less imperial, leviathan filmmaker than Nolan — a British director making an American epic — might have approached the subject differently.

But the responsibility of power has long been one of Nolan’s chief subjects (think of the all-powerful surveillance machine of “The Dark Knight”). And “Oppenheimer” is consumed with not just the ethical quandary of the Manhattan Project but every ethical quandary that Oppenheimer encounters. Big or small, they could all lead to valor or damnation. What makes “Oppenheimer” so unnerving is how indistinguishable one is from the other.

“Oppenheimer” sticks almost entirely to its protagonist’s point of view yet also populates its three-hour film with an incredible array of faces, all in exquisite detail. Some of the best are Benny Safdie as the hydrogen bomb designer Edward Teller; Jason Clarke as gruff special counsel Roger Robb; Gary Oldman as President Harry Truman; Alden Ehrenreich as an aide to Strauss; Macon Blair as Oppenheimer’s attorney; and Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, the physicist’s wife.

The greatest of all of them, though, is Murphy. The actor, a Nolan regular, has always been able to communicate something more disturbing underneath his angular, angelic features. But here, his Oppenheimer is a fascinating coil of contradictions: determined and aloof, present and far-away, brilliant but blind.

Dread hangs over him, and over the film, with the inevitable. The future, post-Hiroshima, is sounded most by the wail of children who will grow up in that world; the Oppenheimers’ babies do nothing but cry.

When the Trinity test comes at Los Alamos after the toil of some 4,000 people and the expense of $2 billion, there’s a palpable, shuddering sense of history changing inexorably. How Nolan captures these sequences — the quiet before the sound of the explosion; the disquieting, thunderous, flag-waving applause that greets Oppenheimer after — are masterful, unforgettable fusions of sound and image, horror and awe.

“Oppenheimer” has much more to go. Government encroaches on science, with plenty of lessons for today’s threats of annihilation. Downey, in his best performance in years, strides toward the center of the film. You could say the film gets bogged down here, relegating a global story to a drab backroom hearing, preferring to vindicate Oppenheimer’s legacy rather than wrestle with harder questions of fallout. But “Oppenheimer” is never not balanced, uncomfortably, with wonder at what humans are capable of, and fear that we don’t know what to do with it.

“Oppenheimer,” a Universal Pictures release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some sexuality, nudity and language. Running time: 180 minutes. Four stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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19 July 2023 5:00 PM

‘Oppenheimer’ review: a towering masterclass in multiplex movies

Christopher nolan's big screen take on the father of the atomic bomb deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible..

By Anna Smith

A powerful, visually spectacular drama that demands your full concentration, Oppenheimer is unmistakably the work of writer-director Christopher Nolan. His second historical film after Dunkirk, it stars an excellent Cillian Murphy as the titular scientist, J Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb. 

How does a scientist create a device that could kill millions – and how does he live with that knowledge? Nolan’s film goes some way to exploring this, as we see Oppenheimer wrestling with his conscience yet excited by invention – along with the chance to beat the Nazis in the arms race. After plenty of scene-setting in academic circles, the action moves to the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, 1945, where the Manhattan Project team prepare for the Trinity Test: the controlled detonation of the world’s first nuclear device. What are the chances this could actually blow up the entire world? asks Matt Damon’s project director Lt Leslie Groves Jr. “Chances are near zero,” comes Oppenheimer’s unreassuring response. The tension is palpable as hands hover over the big red button. This is the film’s stand out sequence, nerve-wracking and even darkly funny as scientists pull up chairs and cover themselves with sunscreen to watch the blast in the desert. Hoyt van Hoytema’s cinematography is particularly jaw-dropping here, especially if you’re watching this in IMAX 70MM.

That said, Nolan has made a potentially confusing visual decision: to film certain scenes in colour and others in black and white. His goal is to show the difference between Oppenheimer’s perspective (colour) and that of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr), the Atomic Energy Commissioner who questions Oppenheimer’s credibility. Downey Jr is absolutely tremendous, but his dialogue-dominated scenes risk adding to the confusion, and there’s little time for the audience to digest the information. The starry casting can also be distracting, as you watch one Oscar-nominee after another putting everything into their few lines of exposition. Those lining up to play key historical figures include Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck, Benny Safdie and Tom Conti. As for the female characters, they’re well-cast but underserved: Emily Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer is largely characterised by her alcohol consumption, and Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock is shown in brief scenes, often nude. There is little mention of either’s profession (a biologist and a psychiatrist, since you ask). 

So: underwritten female roles, a dense plot that demands a second viewing, an all-star cast, incredible visual style and a thought-provoking story… this is Nolan, warts and all. Fans will be debating where it lands in the pecking order of his films: for my money it’s hovering down somewhere with Tenet, beneath Interstellar and well below Inception and Memento. But it’s still an incredible technical achievement and streets ahead of many a multiplex movie. It’s undoubtedly more serious, too: if you’re brave enough to do the Barbieheimer double bill, maybe see this one first.

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Oppenheimer Trailer: The World Is Not Prepared In Christopher Nolan’s Latest

We've already had a couple of glimpses at Christopher Nolan 's latest, Oppenheimer , a chronicle of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the team he shepherded to create the atomic bomb. The latest trailer is packed full of (some of) the star power and thermonuclear energy he has deployed in his giant dramatic thriller. Take look…

Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer himself, with Emily Blunt has his biologist wife Kitty. Also starring are Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich and Matthew Modine.

This latest footage gives us a much better look at Damon in particular, here playing Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves, Jr., a United States Army Corps of Engineers officer who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer's atomic team. And yes, that's Downey Jr. in monochrome (a possible bookending device?) near the end.

Oppenheimer , Nolan's first film for Universal, will arrive in cinemas on 21 July and looks to be everything we'd hope for from the director.