By Katherine McCloud

From the stripped-back noir of Following to the mythological scale of The Odyssey, we rank all 13 Christopher Nolan films from weakest to greatest.

Few directors have transformed themselves quite like Christopher Nolan. What began with a 70-minute independent thriller filmed on weekends has developed into a career defined by enormous practical set pieces, fractured timelines, existential questions and an almost evangelical belief in the theatrical experience.

Time, memory, identity and obsession have remained at the centre of Nolan’s work, whether he is entering dreams, travelling through space, reconstructing a wartime evacuation or sending Batman into the streets of Gotham. The budgets have grown, but the filmmaker’s central interests have remained remarkably consistent.

Following the release of The Odyssey, Nolan now has 13 feature-length directorial films to his name. Here is our ranking of every Christopher Nolan movie from worst to best.

13. Following — 7/10

Nolan’s feature debut contains the blueprint for almost everything that would follow: nonlinear storytelling, morally compromised men, shifting identities and characters whose desire for control eventually consumes them.

Made with severely limited resources, Following centres on an unsuccessful writer who begins shadowing strangers around London before being drawn into the orbit of a charismatic burglar. Its fractured chronology helps elevate what could otherwise have been a relatively conventional piece of low-budget noir.

There is plenty to admire in the film’s construction, particularly when considering the restrictions under which it was produced. However, it still feels more like an accomplished demonstration of Nolan’s emerging interests than a completely developed work. The characters are deliberately distant, the performances can feel uneven and the film’s cleverness leaves a greater impression than its emotional stakes.

As an origin point, Following is fascinating. Judged solely as a film, however, it remains Nolan’s least satisfying.

12. Insomnia — 7/10

The most conventional film of Nolan’s career is also one of his least distinctive.

A remake of the 1997 Norwegian thriller, Insomnia follows troubled Los Angeles detective Will Dormer as he investigates a murder in an Alaskan town where the summer sun never sets. Al Pacino gives a suitably exhausted performance, while Robin Williams delivers one of the most controlled and unsettling dramatic turns of his career.

Nolan makes effective use of the relentless daylight, transforming something normally associated with safety into an oppressive force. As Dormer’s sleeplessness worsens, the boundaries between professional duty, self-preservation and guilt begin to collapse.

The problem is not that Insomnia is poorly made. It is tense, intelligent and performed with complete conviction. It simply lacks the formal ambition and unmistakable personality that define Nolan’s greatest work. Unlike Memento, Inception or Dunkirk, its structure does not fundamentally reshape the audience’s experience.

It is a strong psychological thriller from a filmmaker who would soon become capable of something far more singular.

11. The Dark Knight Rises — 7.5/10

Following The Dark Knight was an almost impossible assignment, and The Dark Knight Rises occasionally collapses beneath the pressure of trying to deliver a suitably enormous conclusion.

Eight years after Batman’s disappearance, Bruce Wayne is physically and emotionally diminished. The arrival of Bane forces him to return, confront the consequences of his choices and rediscover the reason he became Batman in the first place.

The film is packed with memorable imagery, from Bane’s terrifying opening attack to Bruce’s climb from the underground prison. Hans Zimmer’s thunderous score gives the story an almost operatic intensity, while Christian Bale delivers some of his most vulnerable work as Wayne.

However, the film is also overstuffed. Its political ideas are underdeveloped, several character decisions feel rushed and the final act relies on convenient revelations that do not withstand much scrutiny. Tom Hardy is physically imposing as Bane, but the character cannot match the unpredictability or psychological danger of Heath Ledger’s Joker.

Its ambition is undeniable, and its final moments are emotionally effective. As a complete film, though, it is the least consistent chapter in Nolan’s Batman trilogy.

10. Memento — 7.5/10

Memento was the film that announced Nolan as one of the most inventive emerging filmmakers of his generation.

Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a man unable to create new memories who attempts to identify the person responsible for his wife’s death. Nolan famously constructs the central narrative in reverse, placing the audience in a state of uncertainty that reflects Leonard’s own fractured perception.

It is a remarkably disciplined storytelling exercise. Each scene changes our understanding of the one that preceded it, while photographs, handwritten notes and tattoos become unreliable substitutes for memory. The structure is not merely decorative; it places the audience inside Leonard’s condition.

Yet the film can occasionally feel trapped by its own design. Its machinery is so visible that the intellectual experience becomes more compelling than the emotional one. Leonard is a fascinating protagonist, but he can also feel like a component within Nolan’s puzzle rather than a completely accessible human being.

Memento remains ingenious and enormously influential, even if Nolan would later become better at combining structural experimentation with emotional scale.

9. Batman Begins — 8/10

Before cinematic universes became Hollywood’s dominant business model, Batman Begins demonstrated how a familiar superhero could be rebuilt from the foundations.

Rather than immediately presenting Bruce Wayne as a fully formed crime-fighter, Nolan explores the fear, anger and moral philosophy behind the symbol. Gotham feels physically inhabited, while Batman’s equipment, training and methods are given enough practical grounding to make the character believable without removing his mythic power.

Christian Bale remains one of the strongest actors to play Bruce Wayne, particularly when portraying the character’s isolation and barely contained rage. Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson and Morgan Freeman provide the film with an unusually strong supporting ensemble.

The final act becomes more conventional than the psychological origin story preceding it, and some of the action lacks the clarity Nolan would later develop. Even so, Batman Begins permanently changed expectations for superhero filmmaking.

It treated its central character seriously without becoming embarrassed by the source material, creating the foundation upon which an even greater sequel would be built.

8. Tenet — 8/10

Tenet is Christopher Nolan’s most underappreciated film.

Its exposition is relentless, its emotional temperature is deliberately cold and some of its dialogue is almost impossible to hear. Yet few modern blockbusters are this committed to giving audiences something genuinely unfamiliar.

John David Washington plays the unnamed Protagonist, an operative introduced to technology capable of reversing an object’s movement through time. What begins as an espionage mission expands into a conflict in which cause and effect can move in opposing directions.

The inversion concept produces some of Nolan’s most extraordinary action filmmaking. Fights unfold forwards and backwards simultaneously, vehicles appear to reconstruct themselves and entire military operations are staged across competing temporal directions. Rather than using computer-generated imagery as the default solution, Nolan repeatedly attempts to give impossible concepts a physical presence.

The film’s perceived coldness is partly intentional. Tenet plays less like an intimate character drama than an enormous cinematic machine about instinct, sacrifice and friendship across time.

It may not possess the accessibility of Inception, but its ambition, craft and rewatchability have only become more impressive. Tenet deserved far more appreciation than it initially received.

7. The Prestige — 8.5/10

Two magicians transform professional rivalry into total psychological destruction in one of Nolan’s most controlled and rewarding films.

Hugh Jackman’s Robert Angier and Christian Bale’s Alfred Borden begin as colleagues before a tragedy turns their relationship into an obsession. Each becomes willing to sacrifice his career, relationships and identity to discover the secret behind the other man’s illusion.

Like the magic tricks at its centre, The Prestige openly explains how it operates while trusting that the audience will still look in the wrong direction. Nolan structures the film as an elaborate act of misdirection, using diaries, flashbacks and competing perspectives to conceal information that has frequently been placed in plain sight.

The film’s greatest strength is that its final revelations do not merely provide surprise. They complete its central argument about obsession. Both men achieve versions of what they wanted, but only by destroying almost everything that made the achievement meaningful.

Atmospheric, economical and exceptionally rewatchable, The Prestige may not have the scale of Nolan’s later work, but it is one of his most precisely engineered films.

6. Inception — 8.5/10

With Inception, Nolan convinced a major studio to finance an original science-fiction blockbuster built around dreams, grief and multiple levels of subjective time.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a specialist who enters the subconscious minds of others to steal information. Offered the opportunity to return to his children, Cobb accepts a seemingly impossible assignment: implanting an idea rather than extracting one.

The film’s greatest achievement is how confidently it transforms complicated rules into propulsive entertainment. Dreams within dreams operate at different speeds, allowing Nolan to construct a climax that unfolds across several realities simultaneously. The rotating hallway fight remains one of the defining practical action sequences of the century.

Beneath the architecture is a comparatively simple emotional story. Cobb’s inability to release his memory of Mal threatens every level of the mission, making grief the disruptive force inside an otherwise meticulously controlled system.

Some characters primarily exist to explain the mechanics, and the dialogue can become heavily functional. Nevertheless, Inception remains a thrilling example of what mainstream filmmaking can achieve when spectacle is built around a genuinely ambitious idea.

5. Interstellar — 9/10

Interstellar is Nolan at his most openly emotional.

Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a former pilot who leaves his children behind to join a mission searching for a new home for humanity. What follows is both an enormous journey across space and an intimate story about a father attempting to return to his daughter.

The film contains some of Nolan’s most overwhelming images: a spacecraft spinning desperately through orbit, waves towering over a distant planet and a black hole rendered with a sense of terrifying beauty. Hans Zimmer’s organ-led score gives the film a spiritual quality, as though space exploration has become an act of faith.

Not every element works equally well. The dialogue occasionally states ideas that the images have already communicated, while the treatment of love as a force capable of transcending dimensions risks becoming overly sentimental.

Yet that sincerity is also the source of the film’s power. The sequence in which Cooper watches decades of messages from his children is among the most emotionally devastating moments in Nolan’s career.

Interstellar reaches for the cosmic and the intimate at the same time. Even when it falters, it does so while attempting something extraordinary.

4. Dunkirk — 9/10

Nolan strips the traditional war film down to movement, sound, survival and time.

Rather than explaining the wider history through lengthy dialogue or a central commanding figure, Dunkirk places the audience alongside soldiers trying to escape the beaches of France. The story is divided across land, sea and air, with each perspective unfolding over a different period before eventually converging.

That structure turns the evacuation into a sustained piece of cinematic tension. Dialogue becomes secondary to physical experience: approaching aircraft, flooding compartments, limited fuel and the constant possibility that safety will disappear without warning.

Hoyte van Hoytema’s large-format cinematography gives the film immense scale, but Nolan never allows that scale to obscure individual fear. The soldiers are not presented as conventional action heroes. They are exhausted young men desperate to survive.

The restrained performance from Mark Rylance provides the film with its moral centre, while Tom Hardy communicates extraordinary resolve despite spending much of the story behind a pilot’s mask.

At once technically monumental and narratively economical, Dunkirk is perhaps Nolan’s purest piece of filmmaking.

3. Oppenheimer — 9/10

Nolan turned a three-hour historical biography dominated by conversations, scientific theory and political hearings into a global cinematic event.

Cillian Murphy gives a career-defining performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, portraying him as brilliant, seductive, arrogant and increasingly haunted by the consequences of his work. Rather than presenting history as a clean sequence of events, Nolan constructs the film through competing memories, interrogations and political agendas.

The Trinity test is staged not as a conventional action climax but as an encounter with something almost beyond human comprehension. Yet the film’s most disturbing moments come afterwards, as celebration gives way to the recognition of what has been unleashed.

Robert Downey Jr. delivers one of his finest performances as Lewis Strauss, while Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Matt Damon and a vast ensemble move through the film without overwhelming its centre.

The final act occasionally spends too long explaining political manoeuvring that the audience may already understand. Nevertheless, Oppenheimer represents an extraordinary combination of historical drama, psychological horror and large-format filmmaking.

The film won Best Picture, while Nolan received his first Academy Award for directing.

2. The Dark Knight — 9.5/10

The Dark Knight did not simply raise the standard for superhero movies. It became one of the defining crime films of its era.

Nolan expands Gotham into a city governed by institutions, competing moral philosophies and fragile systems of trust. Batman, Harvey Dent and the Joker are not merely hero, ally and villain. They represent different beliefs about whether order can survive in a society vulnerable to fear.

Heath Ledger’s Joker remains an extraordinary creation. He is frightening not because of physical strength or advanced technology, but because he understands how quickly supposedly principled people can be pushed into abandoning their values.

Christian Bale gives an appropriately restrained performance, allowing Bruce Wayne’s growing desperation to emerge through his decisions rather than speeches. Aaron Eckhart is equally important, transforming Harvey Dent from Gotham’s symbol of legitimate hope into the human cost of Batman and the Joker’s conflict.

The film’s boat sequence, interrogation scene and climactic sacrifice all return to the same question: are people fundamentally better than the systems surrounding them suggest?

Nearly two decades later, The Dark Knight remains gripping, intelligent and remarkably difficult to imitate.

1. The Odyssey — 9.5/10

With The Odyssey, Nolan takes everything he has learned about scale, time, spectacle and human endurance and applies it to one of the foundational stories of Western literature.

The film follows Odysseus on his prolonged journey home after the Trojan War, confronting mythological forces while his family faces mounting pressure in his absence. Nolan approaches the material not as a distant literary monument, but as an immediate story about survival, identity, temptation and the emotional cost of returning from war.

The production’s greatest accomplishment is its sense of physical scale. Shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, The Odyssey gives oceans, landscapes, ships and mythological threats a weight that makes the journey feel genuinely dangerous rather than digitally manufactured.

Yet the film is not carried by spectacle alone. Nolan understands that the story only matters when the desire to return home remains stronger than the wonders and horrors encountered along the way. Beneath the gods, monsters and enormous set pieces is a deeply human story about a man trying to recover the life that war has taken from him.

At 9.5, it stands alongside The Dark Knight, but The Odyssey narrowly takes first place because it feels like the fullest expression of Nolan’s career: intellectually ambitious, technically overwhelming and emotionally resonant.

It is not simply Nolan working on his largest canvas. It is Nolan demonstrating complete command of it.

READ: ‘The Odyssey’ Review: Christopher Nolan Conquers the Ancient World With a Monumental Masterpiece

Even Christopher Nolan’s weaker films contain ideas and images that most filmmakers would struggle to realise. His work can be emotionally distant, overloaded with exposition and so committed to structure that characters occasionally become pieces within a larger design.

But few contemporary directors have used their industry influence as ambitiously. Nolan has repeatedly persuaded studios and global audiences to embrace nonlinear storytelling, original science fiction, historical tragedy and large-format filmmaking on a blockbuster scale.

From the handmade construction of Following to the IMAX mythology of The Odyssey, his career represents one of modern cinema’s most remarkable expansions in scale. The tools became larger, but the obsession remained the same: using time, memory and spectacle to explore people desperately trying to impose order on forces they cannot fully control.