oppenheimer movie review nz

Oppenheimer

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.

• 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

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Jennifer Lame

Writer (based on the book by)

• Martin Sherwin
• Ludwig Göransson

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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.

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‘Oppenheimer’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director christopher nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film, starring cillian murphy..

Hi, I’m Christopher Nolan director, writer, and co-producer of “Oppenheimer.” Opening with the raindrops on the water came late to myself and Jen Lane in the edit suite. But ultimately, it became a motif that runs the whole way through the film. Became very important. These opening images of the detonation at Trinity are based on the real footage. Andrew Jackson, our visual effects supervisor, put them together using analog methods to try and reproduce the incredible frame rates that their technology allowed at the time, superior to what we have today. Adapting Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus,” I fully embraced the Prometheun theme, but ultimately chose to change the title to “Oppenheimer” to give a more direct idea of what the film was going to be about and whose point of view we’re seeing. And here we have Cillian Murphy with an IMAX camera inches from his nose. Hoyte van Hoytema was incredible. IMAX camera revealing everything. And I think, to some degree, applying the pressure to Cillian as Oppenheimer that this hearing was applying. “Yes, your honor.” “We’re not judges, Doctor.” “Oh.” And behind him, out of focus, the great Emily Blunt who’s going to become so important to the film as Kitty Oppenheimer, who gradually comes more into focus over the course of the first reel. We divided the two timelines into fission and fusion, the two different approaches to releasing nuclear energy in this devastating form to try and suggest to the audience the two different timelines. And then embraced black-and-white shooting here. Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss being shot on IMAX black-and-white film. The first time anyone’s ever shot that film. Made especially for us. And he’s here talking to Alden Ehrenreich who is absolutely indicative of the incredible ensemble that our casting director John Papsidera put together. Robert Downey Jr. utterly transformed, I think, not just in terms of appearance, but also in terms of approach to character, stripping away years of very well-developed charisma to just try and inhabit the skin of a somewhat awkward, sometimes venal, but also charismatic individual, and losing himself in this utterly. And then as we come up to this door, we go into the Senate hearing rooms. And we try to give that as much visibility, grandeur, and glamour to contrast with the security hearing that’s so claustrophobic. And takes Oppenheimer completely out of the limelight. [CROWD SHOUTING]

By Manohla Dargis

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.

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The movie is based on “ American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.

The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. “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.

The story tracks Oppenheimer — played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy — across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child.

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Oppenheimer

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Watch Oppenheimer with a subscription on Prime Video, rent on Fandango at Home, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Apple TV.

What to Know

Oppenheimer marks another engrossing achievement from Christopher Nolan that benefits from Murphy's tour-de-force performance and stunning visuals.

Oppenheimer is an intelligent movie about an important topic that's never less than powerfully acted and incredibly entertaining.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Christopher Nolan

Cillian Murphy

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt

Kitty Oppenheimer

Robert Downey Jr.

Lewis Strauss

Leslie Groves Jr.

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Oppenheimer is an unrelenting stream of bombastic vignettes in need of a narrative chain reaction

Christopher nolan’s oppenheimer epic offers a series of visceral glimpses into the life of the father of the atomic bomb but gets too busy to reach its full potential..

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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Out of all this summer’s blockbusters that have had film buffs chomping at the bit, few (really just one, actually ) have elicited hype as visceral and sustained as Universal’s Oppenheimer biopic from director Christopher Nolan . With its sizable fleet of A-listers doing mid-20th-century accent work, a complicated historical figure at its center, and a respected auteur steering the ship, Oppenheimer has all the making of a summer blockbuster destined to continue dominating this year’s film discourse for months to come.

But for all of its explosive moments of grandeur and unsurprisingly powerful individual performances, Oppenheimer, as a whole, plays like a chaotic assortment of frantic vignettes coming from a storyteller who’s far too focused on the performance of sage profundity rather than sussing out the real thing.

Inspired by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s seminal 2005 Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer , Oppenheimer is an account of the events that led to its eponymous theoretical physicist becoming one of the most lauded, hated, and infamous men in human history for his role in developing the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer commits most of its energy to chronicling the US’s race to develop nuclear weapons during World War II and the subsequent political fallout Oppenheimer weathered afterward as he began to advocate for nuclear nonproliferation. 

Like American Prometheus , though, Nolan’s new film also understands the importance of illustrating what kind of idiosyncratic, sexually frustrated, and politically engaged person Oppenheimer was in his pre-fame days — a time when he was still learning just how much of an influence he and his intellect could have over others. Long before he was being grilled by the Gray Board, gracing the covers of Time magazine, or directing the Manhattan Project laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) was an exceedingly brilliant but profoundly awkward young man looking for meaning in the arts and sciences.

Equal parts ensemble drama and stealth thriller, Oppenheimer frames its famed subject as a kind of human catalyst who — both in spite and because of his eccentric mind — innately radiates a kind of animating energy that compels most everyone around him into various kinds of action. It’s that energy that first pulls people like acerbic botanist and high-functioning alcoholic Katherine “Kitty” Puening (Emily Blunt) — Oppenheimer’s eventual wife — and depressive psychiatrist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) — his eventual longtime mistress — into his orbit. That energy’s also what makes so many of his peers gravitate toward him during his years coming up through academia and an important part of what puts him on the radar of Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) as he begins building the brain trust destined to power the Manhattan Project.

But there’s a chaos to its overall narrative structure that makes the film play like an assortment of overengineered individual scenes that only coalesce into something concrete occasionally before the movie shifts its focus and attempts to repeat the process to varying degrees of success.

At the same time the movie’s trying to illustrate how Oppenheimer’s left-wing political sensibilities and youthful experiences with labor organization informed his adult worldview, it’s also digging into his love life and the professional jealousies of Oppenheimer’s peers that made him both a threat and someone to look up to. All of that is deeply important context for the film’s quick-fire scenes set during the mid-’50s as United States Atomic Energy Commission commissioner Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) heads up hearings designed to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance and deeply discredit him in the public eye.

But Oppenheimer is so prone to bouncing around from one brief, intense, overly patter-filled scene to another that it often feels like Nolan might have simply shot far, far too much footage and then ultimately cherry-picked the moments that felt impactful to him rather than the ones necessary to set off a narrative chain reaction resulting in a cohesive movie.

This is especially unfortunate because, by and large, many of Oppenheimer ’s actors — Blunt, Damon, and Murphy, in particular — are delivering truly fantastic, studied performances that speak to the humanity and complexity of their characters. Both Rami Malek and Alden Ehrenreich are tremendous as Los Alamos physicist David Hill and an unnamed Senate aide, respectively, and Dane DeHaan is downright chilling as Army officer Kenneth Nichols. But because of Oppenheimer ’s structure, almost none of these performances really have enough time to take up the space they deserve, and just when you’ve gotten a chance to become comfortable and fully engaged with them, the movie’s already moved on.

Though composer Ludwig Göransson’s score is often beautiful, rather than flowing throughout the film consistently in time with its emotional beats, it fades in and out much like the movie’s vignettes frequently fade to black, and it tends to emphasize how disjointed they feel. But Oppenheimer ’s sound — that is to say, its sound design — is arguably the most interesting (though not always well-executed) aspect of the film and what most moviegoers are going to end up being blown away by, in multiple senses of the phrase.

For obvious reasons, there are more than a few explosions that punctuate Oppenheimer ’s three-hour runtime. But instead of fixating solely on the visual spectacle of towering infernos designed to mutilate and massacre, Nolan instead tries to use sound to make you feel a fraction of the devastation Oppenheimer became famous for. Though this approach works well when the movie’s depicting explosions, it truly begins to shine later on in the film after the atomic bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer — surrounded by fellow Americans drunk on the idea of American exceptionalism — can’t help but marvel in horror at the idea of what his life’s work has culminated in.

It’s in moments like those — when Oppenheimer ’s directly addressing the reality of the US’s decisions made as WWII was coming to an end rather than mythologizing the men behind those decisions — that the movie’s at its absolute best. But ultimately, those moments are so few and far between that Oppenheimer always feels like an assortment of great filmmaking ideas being hamstrung by their haphazard execution.

Oppenheimer also stars Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Dylan Arnold, Gustaf Skarsgård, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Tom Conti, Michael Angarano, Jack Quaid, Olivia Thirlby, Tony Goldwyn, Emma Dumont, and Gary Oldman. The movie hits theaters on July 21st.

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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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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: Christopher Nolan Makes a Riveting Historical Psychodrama, but It Doesn’t Build to a Big Bang

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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 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 review: Clever, imaginative and Christopher Nolan at his best

Cillian murphy allows the light to dim from his eyes in every subsequent scene, but it is robert downey jr who is titanic here, article bookmarked.

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Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan ’s best and most revealing work. It’s a profoundly unnerving story told with a traditionalist’s eye towards craftsmanship and muscular, cinematic imagination. Here, Nolan treats one of the most contested legacies of the 20th century – that of J Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy ), the “father of the atomic bomb” – as a mathematical puzzle to be solved.

In 1943, at the behest of Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Oppenheimer became director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Manhattan Project’s New Mexico site for attempting to successfully build an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer, at first, was driven by moral imperative: he feared deeply, as a Jewish man, about what would happen if the Nazis were to develop a weapon of such deadly capability (that a non-Jewish actor has taken on a role in which identity plays such a central role is, in this light, somewhat strange).

Following Hitler’s defeat, Oppenheimer continued to support the bomb’s deployment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, convinced that such hellish destruction would not only bring an end to the war in the Pacific, but to all wars. Historians have since disputed the idea that the bombs were in any way necessary for Japan’s surrender (the real turning point, it seems, was the threat of Soviet invasion). And Oppenheimer’s own utopian vision was swiftly dismantled by fellow scientist Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) and the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), who pushed forward with the creation of the H-bomb, a thousand times deadlier in its scope.

Oppenheimer attempted, in vain, to halt the subsequent nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. He was promptly silenced using one of America’s most cherished tools of political oppression – anti-Communist hysteria. He was attacked for his personal associations with the Communist Party, through his brother Frank (Dylan Arnold), wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), and ex-lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). It was an act of pure, public humiliation.

Nolan observes each of these chapters with sickly wonder, as Jennifer Lame’s editing work and Ludwig Göransson’s clattering score lend Oppenheimer a frightening momentum. The film is constructed in a way that allows its audience to comprehend, on an intellectual level, the profound power and chaos that led its central character to see himself as the “Death, destroyer of worlds” of Hindu scripture. I’m not sure, however, that it burrows deeper than that – into that profound, emotional space that can be both overwhelming and difficult to verbalise. It’s a little too conscious of itself, and the ways cinema crafts its own reality. Throughout, the film teases an unheard conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), its inevitable reveal delivered in the same tone as the solution to the teleportation trick in Nolan’s own The Prestige .

But the prioritisation of cleverness in Oppenheimer isn’t necessarily a criticism of Nolan – more a testament to who he is as an artist. The detonation of the A-bomb, during its first test in the New Mexico desert, is depicted as booming tufts of flame in extreme close-up, coupled with enraptured onlookers. You sense its primal force, the kind of untapped power that led Oppenheimer to view himself as a kind of American Prometheus (also the title of a 2005 biography Nolan drew heavily from). But contrast that, perhaps, with how David Lynch approached the same A-bomb test in his 2017 limited series Twin Peaks: The Return . Lynch drew the camera in, slowly, confronting us with the full-scale of the weapon’s destruction, while sucking us into its very centre, damning us through its inescapability. Nolan’s A-bomb is wondrous until we consider its context; Lynch’s A-bomb is pure nightmare.

The film’s non-linear structure (de rigueur for the Tenet and Inception filmmaker), with each timeline beautifully lensed by Hoyte van Hoytema in either colour or black and white, lends a little more focus to Oppenheimer’s post-war betrayal than it does to the blossoming of his guilt. Large swathes of the film play out as political thriller, the fuel in its engine being Downey Jr’s titanic colouring of Strauss, all boorishness and manipulative charm.

But Nolan is still committed to understanding the innerworkings of his subject. Here’s a man deep in denial. When confronted with photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he averts his gaze. Its horrors rumble (literally) in his peripheral vision, only clear to him when he imagines such brutality inflicted on the white Americans celebrating his “victory” in Los Alamos. Murphy creates his own devastating fission: brilliance torn apart by arrogance. Scene by scene, the light behind his eyes starts to dim. He even has sex the same way he builds bombs. After his extramarital affair turns sour, his wife Kitty chastises him: “You don’t get to commit a sin and then make us all feel sorry when there are consequences.” In Oppenheimer , a man’s private, internal, and political lives are strung together, each a component of the great equation that defines a man’s soul.

Dir: Christopher Nolan. Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Tom Conti, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh. 15, 180 minutes.

‘Oppenheimer’ is in cinemas from 21 July

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Oppenheimer Review: A Technical Feat That Felt Like A Chore

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer is an IMAX®-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Oscar® winner Matt Damon portrays General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

Academy Award® nominee Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie plays theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano plays Robert Serber and Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence. Oppenheimer also stars Oscar® winner Rami Malek and reunites Nolan with eight-time Oscar® nominated actor, writer and filmmaker Kenneth Branagh. The cast includes Dane DeHaan (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets), Dylan Arnold (Halloween franchise), David Krumholtz (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) and Matthew Modine (The Dark Knight Rises).

The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. The film is produced by Emma Thomas, Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer is filmed in a combination of IMAX® 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX® black and white analogue photography.

Oppenheimer Trailer :

One of the strongest elements of Oppenheimer lies in the acting of the cast. Cillian Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer is a tour de force. He convincingly portrays the brilliance, internal conflicts, and moral dilemmas of the renowned physicist. Murphy’s ability to embody Oppenheimer’s complex persona elevates the film, making it an engaging character study. Emily Blunt was probably one of my favorites in the film. She had some key moments where she simply shined and probably seemed the most relatable out of all the characters. Matt Damon was solid as well given his role as Gen. Groves Jr. Additionally, the witty dialogue and banter between Matt Damon, who plays General Leslie Groves Jr., and Cillian Murphy enhance the film’s entertainment value.  However, the one potential scene-stealer might have been Robert Downey Jr. He completely disappeared into the role of Lewis Stauss, and his delivery was so good that it would be no surprise to have him be considered for Best Supporting Actor.

OPPENHEIMER

Nolan’s signature cinematography is at its finest in Oppenheimer . The best part was the artistic visuals used to convey the mental duress faced by Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project. The visuals captured the weight of the decisions he had to make and the profound implications of his work.  I appreciated the sections shot in black-and-white analog photography, which created a visually striking contrast and added depth to crucial scenes.

Other technical feats were well executed too such as the sound production. I was really impressed with how both the sound design and score played such a significant role in enhancing key moments in the film. From the deafening sounds of the testing ground to the hauntingly atmospheric musical compositions, the audio elements contribute to the film’s emotional impact. The tension and build-up leading to the moment of the atomic bomb’s creation are masterfully handled. I thought it was a brilliant decision by Nolan to mute all sound during some key moments. As a viewer, it almost felt like after so much suspense was built up you still had a moment where you were holding your breath in anticipation for what was still to come. Nolan navigated the ethical dilemmas faced by Oppenheimer and his team, crafting an immersive experience that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats.

Oppenheimer  is not without its flaws and I personally wasn’t the biggest fan of the editing. I thought that it made the plot feel a bit cumbersome and challenging to follow.  Given the 3 hour runtime, the editing and writing made the pacing of the movie noticeable. Just when you think this movie was all about the making of the bomb, it swerves into another direction about Oppenheimer’s personal life, and then another swerve into the political drama. Essentially, it felt like multiple movies crammed into one.

To make matters a bit more difficult, in true Nolan fashion, much of the exposition felt heavy-handed. There seemed to be a presumption in the film that viewers should already be aware of the politics during the 1940s and have a physics degree of some sort. The issue I think this may pose is that while some people are learning many of the historical or scientific facts for the first time, it takes away the opportunity to really engage with the plot. It would be like studying for a test and listening to a friend tell you a story at the same time. Moreover, the film’s political and legal drama may feel heavy-handed to some viewers. While it is essential to depict the socio-political context of the era accurately, a more subtle approach could have balanced the film’s focus better.

Another aspect that draws criticism is the portrayal of female characters in the film. While Florence Pugh’s performance as Jean Tatlock is commendable, the writing of her characters may come across as lacking an authentic appeal. I think this also trickled down into an over-arching issue in the writing which was that I didn’t feel much of an emotional anchor was present. When I talk about an emotional anchor, that usually comes from the main protagonist in the film to help create a relational point for the audience. While it was demonstrated that Oppenheimer did have some trying times, my issue with the editing of the story came back into play. Right when I started to connect with Oppenheimer, we immediately jumped into some science experiment, legal drama, or historical event that snapped me out of it. A bit more of a focus might have been helpful in that case.

The Verdict:

Oppenheimer is an enthralling deep dive into the life and choices of J. Robert Oppenheimer. With outstanding performances, impressive cinematography, and gripping tension, it offers a captivating experience for audiences. I do believe that the marketing of Oppenheimer was a bit misleading because it initially gives the impression that it’s about Oppenheimer and the lead-up to the A-bomb. If you’re going into this thinking that you’re going to get some crazy explosion and massive casualties and such, then you’re going to be disappointed. This is a biopic that has a lot of story to tell. Too much story in some instances.

L to R: Cillian Murphy (as J. Robert Oppenheimer) and writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan on the set of OPPENHEIMER.

While I did enjoy Oppenheimer overall, I can’t say I’d ever want to watch this movie again. Out of the previous categories I mentioned, I’m a Nolan fan, but I didn’t particularly care for Dunkirk . I have a general understanding of physics from school, but this movie felt like I walked into a pop quiz. I also wasn’t fully aware, nor interested, of the politics of the time. So for me, this movie felt like a chore to get through. I feel like Nolan does so many things technically right in his movies that it’s really hard for him to make a bad movie. With that said, I wouldn’t say Oppenheimer is one of Nolan’s best films, but his worst films are still better than most. I’d say Oppenheimer probably ranks in the bottom three of Nolan films along with Dark Knight Returns and Dunkirk.

One thing I noticed in my observations with people who have seen the movie is that there are factors that might depend based on the viewer. For those of you who are history buffs, that are remotely familiar with the communist party, WWII, and the politics of the 1940s, then this movie is for you. For those of you who have a general understanding of physics, then this movie is for you. If you’re a Nolan fan and love movies like Tenet or Dunkirk , then this movie is really for you. If you don’t fall into any of those categories, then I wouldn’t say this movie isn’t for you. I’d just say to prepare for more than what was advertised. Nevertheless, be sure to see Oppenheimer  in theaters when you can. 

Director: Christopher Nolan Writer(s): Christopher Nolan Stars: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey, Jr., Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Josh Hartnett and Kenneth Branagh Oppenheimer   hits theaters July 21, 2023. Be sure to follow E-Man’s Movie Reviews on Facebook, Subscribe on YouTube , or follow me on Twitter/IG @EmansReviews for even more movie news and reviews !

• Acting - 10/10 10/10
• Cinematography/Visual Effects - 9/10 9/10
• Plot/Screenplay - 6/10 6/10
• Setting/Theme - 7/10 7/10
• Watchability - 8/10 8/10
• Rewatchability - 5/10 5/10

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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

How to watch Oppenheimer in New Zealand

Modern day auteur Christopher Nolan has hit us with his most ambitious and arguably controversial film yet. And so, with a complete moratorium on bomb puns, we’re here to tell you that Oppenheimer has arrived in New Zealand and is now playing in cinemas.

Nolan, one of the most revered filmmakers currently working, writes and directs this gripping biopic (as well as shooting the whole thing in IMAX and setting off one of the biggest explosions in cinema history, the madman!) based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

The film follows theoretical physicist Robert J, Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) work on the Manhattan Project, the US government’s nuclear weapons project, during World War II. It’s hard to imagine a more high-stakes real world scenario, and Nolan is pretty much guaranteed to milk it for all the drama and scale possible. Expect plenty of murky morality and ruminations on the ethics of mass destruction.

As is typical for the Dark Knight and Dunkirk director, Nolan has pulled together a ridiculously stacked cast, including Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s lover, Jean Tatlock; Emily Blunt as his wife, Kitty; Matt Damon as Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves; Robert Downey Jr as Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss; plus Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Modine, Jack Quaid, David Dastmalchian, Gary Oldman, Casey Affleck, Josh Hartnett and more.

Is there audience appeal, though? Nolan is unarguably one of the most commercially successful directors currently working, but this is a talky historical drama with a reported $100 million budget. Plus, it’s up against Barbie , and if we’re betting on which movie has broader appeal, we know where our money is going. Of course, you can always opt for the fabled Barbenheimer double feature and kill two pop culture birds with one stone…

Oppenheimer

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Oppenheimer

Sex scenes, offensive language, nudity & suicide

The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

Teasers & Trailers

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer is an IMAX®-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.

The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Oscar® winner Matt Damon portrays General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

Academy Award® nominee Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie plays theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano plays Robert Serber and Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence.

Oppenheimer also stars Oscar® winner Rami Malek and reunites Nolan with eight-time Oscar® nominated actor, writer and filmmaker Kenneth Branagh.

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Oppenheimer

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Oppenheimer.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 72 Reviews
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Common Sense Media Review

Nolan's complex A-bomb biopic has sex, swearing, violence.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan's drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the scientist responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb. But it's less an entertaining history lesson than it is a dense examination of the unholy matrimony of quantum physics and…

Why Age 15+?

Death by suicide. Massive fiery, loud bomb explosion, accompanied by a loud "doo

Several sex scenes with partial nudity, including long sequences with bare breas

Strong language includes a few uses of "f--k," plus "balls," "goddamn," "idiot,"

Frequent drinking, including by a character who's portrayed as having an alcohol

Any Positive Content?

Scientists are elevated to celebrity status, and their brain power is aspiration

You may have the knowledge and skill to create something dangerously powerful --

Most characters -- historical figures from the 1930s–'50s -- are White American

Violence & Scariness

Death by suicide. Massive fiery, loud bomb explosion, accompanied by a loud "doom" score that underlines the future impact of the detonation. Discussion of the impact of the atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a hallucination, the skin on a woman's face appears to blow off. Attempted murder through the eyes of the protagonist.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Several sex scenes with partial nudity, including long sequences with bare breasts. Recurring infidelity.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes a few uses of "f--k," plus "balls," "goddamn," "idiot," and "s--t."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Frequent drinking, including by a character who's portrayed as having an alcohol dependency. Smoking cigarettes and a pipe.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Role Models

Scientists are elevated to celebrity status, and their brain power is aspirational -- as is their perseverance and ability to work as a team to accomplish a daunting goal.

Positive Messages

You may have the knowledge and skill to create something dangerously powerful -- but should you?

Diverse Representations

Most characters -- historical figures from the 1930s–'50s -- are White American or European men. Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists, including Albert Einstein, are Jewish (though the main Jewish characters aren't portrayed by Jewish actors). One female scientist is featured, and other women can be spotted working in the background. The victims of the atomic bomb detonations (Japanese people, interned Japanese Americans, and Native Americans) don't have a voice in the film. A sex scene that includes White characters reading from the holy Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita has drawn complaints for being insensitive/offensive.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan 's drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ), the scientist responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb. But it's less an entertaining history lesson than it is a dense examination of the unholy matrimony of quantum physics and military bureaucracy, and things can get pretty confusing thanks to frequent undated time jumps and a barrage of names and characters to keep straight. The sex scenes (Nolan's first) include frequent partial nudity (particularly co-star Florence Pugh 's breasts). Characters smoke, as would be expected in the 1930s–'50s setting, and drink. A bomb trial demonstrates the enormousness of the weapon's capabilities, with fire, noise, and smoke. But viewers are told about, rather than shown, the horror that unfolded after the bomb was ultimately dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are references to mass assassination and to suicide, and a brief hallucination of a young woman's skin appearing to blow off. Language includes a few uses of "f--k," plus "goddamn," "s--t," and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (72)
• Kids say (97)

Based on 72 parent reviews

I wouldn't ever take my kids (even when they were teenagers)

So unfortunate, what's the story.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan , OPPENHEIMER follows brilliant scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) as he studies and masters quantum physics. As the United States enters World War II, Oppenheimer is tapped to assemble and lead a group of allied scientists to create a war-ending bomb.

Is It Any Good?

Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nolan is a genius -- and, also like Oppenheimer, he may be too close to his subject matter to realize that he lost the thread. It's now abundantly clear that Nolan is fascinated with World War II, but it may be hard for many viewers (even those who love history) to follow this story with ease. If you need a reference card, captions, the ability to pause and rewind the film, and Wikipedia on standby to understand what's going on, it's an issue. And if some viewers' thoughts start drifting to wondering how Aaron Sorkin , Ron Howard , or Steven Spielberg might have made this movie better, that's a big problem.

The atomic bomb is just part of the story in Oppenheimer -- the plot is actually more about whether the leader of The Manhattan Project will get his security clearance renewed a decade after the end of World War II. Really. And given that Oppenheimer apparently wasn't the greatest guy (the film softens the fact that he apparently tried to murder his teacher), it's difficult to invest or care. Nolan is beloved for creating cinematic puzzles that challenge viewers' intellect and keep us on our toes -- we may sometimes be confused, but we know it's part of the long game. Here, he tries to play that game with viewers again, but it doesn't really work in a biopic that's directed at having audiences examine the morality of innovation. Nolan seems to intend for us to question our present race into artificial intelligence, but the film only leaves us questioning him.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the real-life moral dilemma of building a weapon of mass destruction. Given the circumstances, do you think the scientists had another choice? If you create something powerful, can you be sure it won't be misused in someone else's hands -- and should that worry impede innovation?

Nolan flips between color and black-and-white cinematography as a storytelling device in Oppenheimer . What do you think that choice means?

Discuss the fears and accusations related to Communism in the 1950s. Who were the victims? How does Oppenheimer show how McCarthyism was used to target opponents? Do you see any modern parallels?

How do you think history should judge J. Robert Oppenheimer? Do you think he's depicted accurately or fairly here?

How are drinking and smoking portrayed? Is substance use glamorized? Does the historic setting affect the impact of seeing characters smoke and drink?

Movie Details

• In theaters : July 21, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : November 21, 2023
• Cast : Cillian Murphy , Emily Blunt , Matt Damon
• Director : Christopher Nolan
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters , History , Science and Nature
• Run time : 180 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : some sexuality, nudity and language
• Awards : Academy Award , BAFTA - BAFTA Winner , Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Winner
• Last updated : September 7, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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What to watch next.

The Imitation Game

Grave of the Fireflies

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Oppenheimer review: Christopher Nolan overreaches and underdelivers

Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Photo / Universal Pictures

Movie reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch the second-most-hyped movie of the year.

Of course Hollywood had to balance out the overtly feminine energy that the Barbie movie has been sending out into the universe with the giant ejaculating atomic bomb that is Oppenheimer . At the risk of sounding like a broken record, would someone please stop these ageing white men from making preposterously long movies? Not two weeks ago it was Cruise/McQuarrie’s two hour and 43 minute chase sequence ( Mission Impossible 7 ), this week it’s three hours of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer , and soon it will be Martin Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon , which tops them all at three hours and 26 minutes. We hear you, you’re feeling silenced and you’d like us all to know that you’ve still got lots - and lots - to say.

Oppenheimer is a detailed retelling of the story behind the physicist tasked with setting up and overseeing the secret lab in Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was designed. It’s based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird and it feels like Nolan may have included every one of the 700 pages of that book in his script, because this is a dense film. There are a lot of characters to keep track of and while I’m flattered that Nolan thinks that I could keep up with that number of players, I couldn’t.

However, while the film is long, it isn’t boring. It’s often compelling, quite complicated and jumps around timelines so frequently you cannot afford to wonder what you’re having for dinner tonight, even for a minute. Cillian Murphy is formidable as Oppenheimer, a man who is hard to know. He’s grappling with the morality of creating a weapon of mass destruction, though not entirely a good man doing what he thinks is right for his country. He wasn’t afraid of killing, having attempted to poison his tutor as a young man at Cambridge University.

The film acknowledges the devastation the US would inflict, juxtaposing scenes of celebratory triumph with Oppenheimer’s visions of terror, but still clings firmly to the American ideal that an atomic bomb was a necessary means to an end: the end of war forever. It’s an American story, told from an American perspective. There isn’t a Japanese person on the cast and, when Oppenheimer watches footage of the aftermath of the explosion, we don’t ever see the real horror, only the wincing of Murphy. Understandably, it will likely never open in Japan.

You can’t spoil this movie, we all know what happens with their invention, so I highly recommend doing some background reading before heading into the cinema. Pay particular attention to the story of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey jnr), on whom there are already countless explainer articles. Bring hydration and snacks and maybe even a bedpan, because you’re in for the long haul.

I’m morally opposed to three-hour-long films. If you’re going to make something so long that half the audience members are engaged in all-out war with their bladders for much of the second half, you’d better have a powerful argument as to why.

If I had to guess at Christopher Nolan’s explanation, I would say he felt it necessary to include story arcs for every one of the men even tangentially connected to the Manhattan Project, along with verbatim recreations of every conversation they ever had, with just enough time left over for a scene in which a woman has a meaningful conversation, albeit with her boobs out.

If Nolan’s aim was to make us understand how long it takes to develop a working atomic bomb, this film was a triumph. We moved towards the movie’s climax in what felt like real time. By the third hour, I increasingly found myself wondering who all these characters were and what they - and I - were still doing there.

A cult of genius has grown around Nolan over the last decade or two. Part of this is because dudes love Batman, but an even bigger part of it is that his films are often narratively complex and are therefore seen as “intelligent”.

Because of this, he has entered the pantheon of directors revered as geniuses, but we should always be wary of revering people as geniuses - there’s a reason we have so often ended up in thrall to demagogues and the products of Steve Jobs.

Making a complex movie is a good way to make people think you’re smart, but it actually requires much more intelligence to tell a complex story simply. While the real-life political machinations around Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project were no doubt also quite complex, at least you didn’t have to pay $24 to be bored by them while feeling increasingly hungry.

There are many films that could have been made about this man and his bomb, and Nolan has here tried to make all of them. In doing so, he overreaches and underdelivers. To take just the most important example, the film only briefly and roughly explores the edges of the moral conundrum of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki – sacrificing some lives in order to save others – but in doing so it fails to adequately capture the horror. That was perhaps best done, in print, in 1956, when Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe wrote:

“Come now: if you had to choose between boiling one baby and letting some frightful disaster befall a thousand people — or a million people, if a thousand is not enough — what would you do?”

Whatever you believe about the relative entertainment value of Anscombe’s moral philosophy and Nolan’s films, you can’t deny that, in the case of the work of Oppenheimer, she, and she alone, got to the point.

Oppenheimer is in cinemas now.

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TIFF Review: Joshua Oppenheimer’s Bunker-Set Musical The End Offers Earnest Look at Redemption

Chatting with the head of a prominent documentary-production company recently, I asked if hybrid filmmaking had reached its natural limit. Could it conceivably be pushed further? He posited these limitations might be behind a recent trend of documentarians pivoting to fiction: Kirsten Johnson is making a Susan Sontag biopic with Kristen Stewart; Frederick Wiseman made his first narrative feature A Couple after half a century spent in non-fiction; Roberto Minervini’s The Damned and Sandhya Suri’s Santosh both premiered at Cannes this past Spring; most recently, RaMell Ross adapted the Pulitzer-winning novel Nickel Boys . Documentarians are realizing that if fiction and non-fiction are both highly constructed, then why not work this construction openly, with the added perks of larger budgets and access to stars?

Joshua Oppenheimer ( The Act of Killing , The Look of Silence ) joins that cohort with The End , a bunker-bound musical set at the end of the world. From the jump, The End embodies a more classical filmmaking mode. Following an establishing shot of an unspeakably beautiful underground salt mine, a lush orchestral score plays over close-ups of oil paintings while opening credits roll. A remarkable level of craft is visible at once and maintained throughout the extended 148-minute runtime. This cohesiveness of vision across all departments with no visible lapses at any moment would be remarkable for a seasoned fiction filmmaker, let alone one making his first foray into narrative-feature storytelling. 

The End ’s bunker is occupied by an immensely wealthy energy magnate (Michael Shannon), his wife (Tilda Swinton), and their son (George MacKay). Maintaining an allegorical bent, the trio are credited as Father, Mother, and Son. A few lucky others get to join them in waiting out the apocalypse––also nameless, their titles, their vocations: Butler (Tim McInnerny) and Doctor (Lennie James). Bronagh Gallagher has a meatier role as Mother’s best “Friend,” who also functions as the chef. The latter trio help maintain a certain level of upper-class comfort for the family, even when relegated deep underground. I’m reminded of a friend who once led a whitewater rafting trip for Tom Cruise and they relayed the curious detail that Cruise brought his private chef along––allowing for fine dining served with nice cutlery throughout the otherwise-rugged trip. 

Whereas life in a bunker typically conjures no-frills images of canned goods and military rations neatly arranged on metal shelving from Home Depot, the subterranean decadence in The End was inspired by Oppenheimer’s visit to a billionaire’s emergency bunker replete with a swimming pool and art gallery (two details he retains). Influential tech giant Peter Thiel is responsible for jump-starting this billionaire-bunker trend, and many have followed him to construct compounds in New Zealand . 

A few slice-of-bunker-life excerpts set the scene up top. Son fails an in-house emergency drill, a sequence which directly recalls Chas Tenenbaum emphatically telling sons Ari and Uzi they’re “dead” after a similar drill in The Royal Tenenbaums . Mother hangs a priceless piece of art, dismissing it as “trashy” in the way only one terrified of their hidden working-class roots can do. Son helps Father ghostwrite his memoir, workshopping ways to spin his father’s role in the world’s demise as an energy tycoon with zeal. To whom this memoir will be addressed––since the world is ending (or has already ended)––recalls our innate human desire to leave a legacy, to tell one’s own side of the story even when it’s clear folly.

The stable repetition of routines is disrupted by the arrival of an outsider, Girl (Moses Ingram). It’s a familiar setup that the film wastes little time setting into motion. Born and raised in this bunker, Son is immediately intrigued by interacting with someone his own age for the first time, even if he eagerly takes part in an early plot to remove her.

Despite her tenuous position in the tight-knit community, Girl works delicately––sometimes not so delicately––to challenge Son’s wrong-footed belief systems, reinforced by his parent’s propagandist teachings. Despite an intense naivety and devotion to his parents, Son’s budding affection for Girl allows him to begin to slowly consider her perspective. In this way, Son’s coming-of-age follows a common trajectory concerning that often-devastating moment in adolescence when one realizes their parents aren’t infallible. But to Son in The End , the implications are much more damning. To cope with the realization that his parents might not just be liars, but also directly responsible for the pain and suffering that has destroyed the outside world, nearly breaks him. Yet Son’s indomitable spirit prevails and acts as the catalyst for the soul-searching introspection that begins to slowly infect the rest of the bunker. In another touching moment, Son’s love for Girl seeps into the memoir-writing sessions and inspires Father to try reigniting the romantic spark with Mother. 

To MacKay’s––and the script’s ––credit, Boy is never presented as a caricature of a coddled boy raised in complete isolation. On paper, there are similarities to Yorgos Lanthimos’ work––specifically Dogtooth ––but they end there. Whereas Lanthimos is content to push stilted human interaction to an extreme where his characters are no longer recognizably human, Oppenheimer seeks every opportunity to ground his characters, even when the absurdism is ramped-up. Lanthimos’ cynicism is swapped here for an overwhelming earnestness, a persistent hopefulness.

As an actor, Shannon can often dial up the crazy, with mannered expressions that recall Jack Nicholson at his most unwieldy. But Oppenheimer wisely reins him in––though a few trademark Shannon moments do appear. The actor embodies this complicated man who hails from a generation that blindly lionizes titans of industry. To Son and whoever will listen, he explains his company provided critical services and infrastructure to developing nations. He can’t comprehend those who can only see the bad, even if the bad is all that’s left to see. 

The End is also a musical, and lovers of the genre can rest easy that Oppenheimer is not trying to remake the musical here. Like the filmmaking itself, these numbers are played straight as traditional songs backed by an orchestral score. That The End ’s most daring formal component is largely its most forgettable is a shame. MacKay is an exception, his singing and dancing a natural extension of his exuberant Son. While lacking anything approaching a “Let It Go”-level banger, the musical numbers are tonally in step with what Oppenheimer is doing stylistically and emotionally elsewhere, an achievement in itself––if only they were more memorable in song and verse. There are a few musical highlights outside MacKay: Mother singing in the bathroom mirror, her red robe reflecting endlessly, and other songs make strong use of the stunning salt-mine setting (shot on location in Sicily). Even so, a real showstopper or two could’ve elevated the central narrative; it’s hard not to see this element as a bit of a missed opportunity. 

Contrasted with another recent big-swing musical, Annette , in which budgetary constraints were felt throughout (crowd scenes appeared to comprise approximately four extras), The End carries that rare sense of a lack of compromise––a fully realized world from a visionary director. It’s exhilarating to simply exist in this world that Oppenheimer and his team (including co-writer Rasmus Heisterberg) craft. Lengthy runtime be damned; I could’ve stayed inside this bunker with these characters for longer.

Consisting largely of off-whites and indigo blue––with subtle inclusions of some greens and reds––the carefully considered wardrobe recalled the uniform natural tans and olive greens worn in Woody Allen’s Interiors . Red was saved for the garish Pearl in Allen’s film, just as red is worn by Swinton’s Mother here. The lighting and color-grading lend the family’s skin a ghostly, near-translucent blue hue––the result of decades spent underground––a play on how fair skin was once a sign of wealth in Victorian times. I suspect Shannon’s hair might have even been given a hint of blue dye––that’s how considered every aspect of this movie feels. A gleam of Spielberg is sometimes present in the character lighting, and there is an inherent perversity in giving Shannon’s wealthy tycoon this signature wax-figure treatment, lighting reserved by Spielberg to deify uncomplicated men and children who persevere to do the right thing in the face of adversity––characters often hailing from the Greatest Generation.

In last year’s The Zone of Interest , a final-act retching recalled a key moment in Oppenheimer’s 2012 debut The Act of Killing . The Zone of Interest was frequently mislabeled as an examination of the banality of evil, and it would be incorrect to categorize The End as that too. At Telluride this past weekend, Oppenheimer discussed his fascination with the lies we tell ourselves and how dangerous that can be. Humans are uniquely equipped to compartmentalize and keep going––it is perhaps our primary survival skill. With The End , Oppenheimer pushes beyond subconscious involuntary retching, forcing his characters to more squarely come to grips with their actions and their lingering effects. It’s not subtle, but the film’s complete lack of cynicism shines brightest in these direct moments. It is undeniably provocative to present a wealthy white family directly responsible for the world’s end, whose supreme wealth has made it so that they have experienced little-to-no consequences for this destruction––then to say these people deserve love, the chance to reconcile their past and move forward with renewed hope.

It might prove a bitter pill for audiences to swallow. It’s simply much easier to digest over-the-top “Eat the Rich” satires, with their buffoonish characters who ultimately get their just comeuppance. Look at the recent successes of Triangle of Sadness , The Menu , and Don’t Look Up . But while those function as empty calories, a way for audience laughter to act as an absolution of responsibility, The End seeks to probe something deeper: to examine the evil in all man, then offer up hope and a path for redemption.

The End screened at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.

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‘The End’: Toronto Review

By Tim Grierson, Senior US Critic 2024-09-06T22:48:00+01:00

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Joshua Oppenheimer’s first drama is a singular musical which details how one family passes through the end of the world

Source: TIFF

Dir: Joshua Oppenheimer. Denmark/Germany/Ireland/Italy/UK/Sweden. 2024. 150 mins

In his acclaimed documentaries about mass killings in Indonesia,  The Act Of Killing and The Look Of Silence , Joshua Oppenheimer examined the darkest aspects of human nature. On its face, his feature debut would seem equally bleak, following a family that has lived underground for decades after the destruction of the planet. But while there is certainly much that is despairing about The End , what is remarkable is how much the film focuses on the beauty in such a grim scenario — and that’s before the characters start breaking into song. A mixture of domestic drama, apocalyptic fable and old-fashioned (and unironic) Hollywood musical, The End is an audacious and frequently enrapturing experience, with superb performances at its emotional heart.

A meditation on how we all rationalise the terrors right outside our door

A who’s who of arthouse stars, including Tilda Swinton, George MacKay and Michael Shannon, head up the cast, and The End ’s ambitious approach will make this a must-see for discriminating audiences. Greeted with mostly respectful reviews after its Telluride premiere, the picture may struggle to cross over into the mainstream, and likewise awards-season consideration could be a challenge. But anyone interested in a story about the end of the world which is far different from other such films would do well to seek out this picture.

It has been approximately 25 years since Earth has become uninhabitable, but a well-to-do family has thrived in a bunker loaded with priceless art as they try to maintain a traditional daily existence. The family members are identified only as Mother (Swinton), Father (Shannon) and Son (MacKay), who was born after the environmental catastrophe that laid waste to the planet. One day, though, they are visited by a stranger, Girl (Moses Ingram), a lone survivor who made her way to their home. Initially, they want to send Girl off, but Father takes pity on her, and soon she and Son develop romantic feelings for one another.

The End ’s production design, courtesy of Jette Lehmann, thrusts us convincingly into this claustrophobic realm in which there is no life outside of the family’s domicile, an upscale manor home that seems elegant – until one remembers what has happened to the rest of humanity. Not surprisingly, this is precisely what the family — as well as a few people they brought along, including Doctor (Lennie James) and Butler (Tim McInnerny) — have achieved over the last quarter-century, carefully manufacturing an elaborate facade of normalcy.

But there’s also an element of revisionist history going on as Father, a former executive in the energy field, tasks Son with writing his biography — one in which he is not complicit in the global warming that killed off the Earth’s inhabitants. However, Oppenheimer, who co-wrote the screenplay, doesn’t settle for cheap satire at the expense of the clueless one-percent, instead thoughtfully investigating the poignancy of this family who want to keep the horror of their situation out of their consciousness.

With that in mind, the use of original musical numbers is inspired, further emphasising the unreality in which these characters dwell. With music by Joshua Schmidt and lyrics by Oppenheimer, the songs recall the golden age of Broadway and Hollywood musicals, the tunes full of lilting strings and swooning melodies. Whether it’s Son and Girl falling in love or Father reflecting on his past mistakes, The End is lit up by these soaring songs, the choreography often very simple but effective. Because Oppenheimer is not trying to parody musicals — or mock the characters’ disconnect from reality — something far more moving transpires. Quite cannily, The End becomes a meditation on how we all rationalise the terrors right outside our door, immersing ourselves in music, routine and other distractions. This family may be deluded, but their inner lives are so rich that we come to care about their plight as the fragile last remnants of humanity.

The performances are uniformly stellar, with Ingram an especially powerful singer. As the sheltered Son, MacKay plays his character’s naivety with disarming sweetness, while Swinton and Shannon portray a long-term couple who have had to accept the choices they’ve made — including which family members and friends they would allow in the bunker with them. Oppenheimer’s Indonesia documentaries suggested a filmmaker who refused to look away from the cruelty humans inflict on one another. With The End , he manages to find a few scraps of hope, even though the picture’s devastating final sequence argues that optimism can only take our doomed species so far.

Production company: Final Cut for Real

International sales: The Match Factory, [email protected]

Producers: Signe Byrge Sorensen, Joshua Oppenheimer, Tilda Swinton

Screenplay: Rasmus Heisterberg, Joshua Oppenheimer

Cinematography: Mikhail Krichman

Production design: Jette Lehmann

Editing: Niels Pagh Andersen

Music: Joshua Schmidt, Marius de Vries

Main cast: Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, Lennie James, Michael Shannon

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The End – first-look review

Joshua Oppenheimer returns with an ambitious, post-apocalyptic musical whose thematic flights of fancy are always just a little too strident.

T o make his feature documentary debut The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer enlisted surviving perpetrators of the Indonesian state murder campaign of 1965-66 — thugs, torturers, killers — to discuss and re-enact the crimes they carried out against their countrymen, neighbours, and even family members.

The film and its sequel, The Look of Silence, were renowned portraits of political impunity and the complicity of everyday people in scarcely imaginable sadism and exploitation — an interest Oppenheimer continues to pursue in his feature-length fiction debut, The End, albeit by other means. Set entirely in an underground bunker complex, about a quarter-century post-apocalypse, the film explores survivor guilt arising from the accumulation of finite resources. And it’s a musical.

Several years in the making, and preceded by frame-filling title cards displaying the logos and names of dozens of funding bodies and executive producers, the film takes place entirely underground, deep in a salt mine; the cavernous set, with its white powdery whorls and ridges extending far off in a perpetual twilight, seems to have been the biggest expense. Inside the cold, cozy bunker, the walls are the blue-gray colors of the unseen sky, and in large part covered with paintings by Renoir and other masters from across the totality of art history. Fish swim in tanks and plants grow under artificial light, for dinners of dover sole and cake; there’s a lap pool, an excellent wine cellar, and enough luxury watches to circulate as gifts, and as reminders of the importance of keeping up standards of promptness and respectability. One of the first things we see in the film is an elaborate toy train set: The characters, like their director, are world-building in miniature.

Who can afford to ride out ecological and social catastrophe in such abundance? Why, the people who caused it, of course. Dad (Michael Shannon, in pleated cords and nubby sweaters) is a patrician oil executive; his son (George MacKay), has lived his whole life underground, and is learning about the world by editing his father’s memoir, which is to say he’s learning that the extraction of natural resources by multinational corporations is an engine of social progress creating infrastructure and raising standards of living all over the the developing world, and that the climate of our planet changes all the time, actually, for reasons that have nothing to do humans. Mom (Tilda Swinton) was a dancer, and now curates the art collection: as the line from De Palma’s The Black Dahlia goes, the rich don’t own art – they safeguard it, for future generations to enjoy.

The others are an ambiguous combination of friends and servants: a doctor (Lennie James); the mother’s best friend (Bronach Gallagher), also a renowned cook, who lost her own son and is nannyishly close to the kid; and a gruff dogsbody (Tim McInnerny), who, many years ago, took a bullet fending off invaders trying to breach the cave. There’s no more room at the inn, and the hard, necessary (or so everyone agrees) choices about who to include and who to exclude weigh on everyone, especially on mom, who still has old photos of her family on an iPad no one else is supposed to look at.

Everyone in the bunker can just about live with themselves, as long as they only have to live with each other. But the arrival of an outsider, a young woman (Moses Ingram) recently separated from her own family, throws things out of balance. Initially the plan is to throw her out to fend for herself, but the boy takes a liking to her. (The 32-year-old MacKay gives his 20-year-old character intermittent bursts of feral naivete, in a script with inconsistent ideas about his developmental age and emotional and intellectual maturity.)

She enlivens everyone’s existence with the hopeful blush of romantic love, and possibly, eventually, the continuation of the family bloodline. But also pierces the bubble of their self-perception, in line with the clichéd role of the nonwhite outsider who serves as a mirror revealing the main characters’ blind spots. (She and the son argue when she questions why he made the Chinese workers on the model railroad appear happy, it’s because, he says, they were making sacrifices to build something great.) Her presence reopens old wounds from the time when the survivors decided who would and would not be saved, and reveals the hollowness of their justifications for murderous inequality both before and after the collapse.

The film opens with an epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and its end credits identify the characters as “Mother,” “Father,” “Son,” and so forth, all of which is to say that Joshua Oppenheimer is a former recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant. He wrote the lyrics to the songs, giving his cast of nonsingers wordy soliloquies to navigate with their largely plangent, dry and reedy voices. There’s rudimentary choreography in the musical numbers, and precious little fantasy in the stagings, aside from some lightly motivated shifts in the lighting.

In a musical, music is used to give the characters a way to express what they mean to say when the scene and the dialogue is not enough; but the film’s dramatic and philosophical framework is so schematic, its dialogue so italicized with subtext, that the songs feel superfluous as well as prosaic. Between numbers, it’s easy to forget that the film is a musical. Rumoured to have been rejected from Cannes and Venice, the two-and-a-half-hour The End seemed poised to be an apocalyptic hot mess. That it has ended up being a tepid success is almost more of a disappointment.

Published 7 Sep 2024

Tags: George McKay Joshua Oppenheimer Tilda Swinton

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Review: thomasin mckenzie shines in film noir 'eileen'.

Thomasin McKenzie in the movie Eileen. Photo: Jeong Park

It's always a mystery to me which movies get a run at the cinemas before they get snapped up by the streaming services, and which ones go straight to Netflix or whatever.

Obviously, a theatrical release is no guarantee of quality. But you can understand why a low-budget horror film would work better in a crowded, screaming theatre than on your phone.

Dramas are more of a gamble at cinemas though, even one with the apparent pedigree of Eileen .

It features New Zealand star-on-the-rise Thomasin McKenzie, opposite another quality act, Anne Hathaway.

Director William Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth launched Florence Pugh to stardom. And Eileen is based on a novel that was shortlisted for a Booker Prize.

But Netflix it is, despite some festival successes in America last year.

Eileen (McKenzie) works at a juvenile prison in early 1960s, upstate New England. She feels trapped there, partly because she has to look after her invalid alcoholic father - played by another interesting actor, Shea Wigham.

One day, something happens. The prison replacement psychiatrist arrives - flash red car, blonde hair, chain-smoking, as impossibly glamorous as her name: Doctor Rebecca St John.

It's Hathaway in full femme-fatale mode.

Eileen is smitten - especially when, against all odds, Rebecca actually notices her.

In a prison full of loser inmates and contemptuous workmates, Rebecca clearly thinks Eileen is worth cultivating.

But first Eileen has to get out of a prison of her own - the tyranny of life with her awful father. He'd been forced into retirement from the police force because of his drinking. Now he takes it out on the daughter forced to look after him.

Eileen and Rebecca become fascinated - for different reasons - by a prisoner called Lee Polk, a kid who shot his own father, also a policeman.

Rebecca seems to be just as interested in Eileen, inviting her to dance at the local bar. For a rural community in 1962, this is the height of decadent sophistication.

You don't need to be Patricia Highsmith to suspect that Rebecca may be luring the naïve, lonely Eileen down a primrose path to who knows where.

Eileen is clearly standard film noir territory, which doesn't bode well for anyone who crosses the path of the two women - or, indeed, for either of them.

It's dark, it's dangerous, it's bleak and it's heading into unknown territory, without the security of the original novel's framing device some 50 years later.

It's a bold, if not totally successful, twist on a classic noir story. But it's made more interesting as the next step in the career of its star McKenzie.

After some terrific performances in cult movies - Jojo Rabbit , Last Night in Soho , Leave No Trace (her best to date) as well as starring in the TV version of a favourite novel Life after Life - McKenzie is long overdue for actual Anya Taylor-Joy-level stardom.

I suspect she now needs a comedy, preferably a romantic one, and possibly a role that requires her to speak louder than her usual whisper.

Actually, if she needs a good role model, she could do a lot worse than the woman standing next to her. Hathaway has done it all over the years - including playing Richard Nixon once at the Oscars.

She's an object lesson that the cheapest and most effective special effect in movies is a talented actor. Eileen certainly benefits from two of them.

Copyright © 2024 , Radio New Zealand

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EXCLUSIVE: The Fall Guy is off to a strong start on Peacock , launching over the holiday weekend as the streamer’s biggest film debut since Oppenheimer .

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