Oppenheimer
Directed by Christopher Nolan (R)
★★★★ A portrait of a modern-day Prometheus
Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster biopic “deserves the title of masterpiece,” said Matthew Jackson in The A.V. Club. “A step up to a new level for one of our finest filmmakers,” it fashions “a uniquely American tragedy” from the biography of the father of the atomic bomb, combining brilliant nonlinear storytelling with filmmaking “so thunderous that it just might knock you through the back wall of the theater.” Cillian Murphy’s “superbly restrained” lead performance gives us a J. Robert Oppenheimer who is at once “visionary and shortsighted, arrogant and convivial,” said Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. Two 1950s hearings that dig into Oppenheimer’s past provide dual frames for revisiting the theoretical physicist’s life, capturing both the brilliance that enabled him to unleash unprecedented destructive power and the burden he lived with for the rest of his life. Given the story’s gravity, the showy cleverness of the storytelling “can seem too engineered.” But that barely diminishes the movie’s impact.
Too much attention is paid to an Oppenheimer antagonist played by Robert Downey Jr., said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. Even so, Nolan’s three-hour epic proves to be “one of the few standout works of cinema released this decade.” Though it’s “as talky as a math seminar,” it generates crackling suspense. Its big bomb-test sequence engenders “a level of awe we rarely experience at the movies anymore.” And when news spreads that the bomb has been deployed in war, “Nolan beautifully captures what was going on inside Oppenheimer’s tortured mind: pride, triumph, horror.”