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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Zoller Seitz

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

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Oppenheimer (2023)

Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language.

181 minutes

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt as Katherine 'Kitty' Oppenheimer

Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock

Benny Safdie as Edward Teller

Michael Angarano as Robert Serber

Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence

Rami Malek as David Hill

Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr

Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols

Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer

David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi

Alden Ehrenreich as Senate Aide

Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush

Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman

Alex Wolff as Luis Walter Alvarez

Casey Affleck as Boris Pash

Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman

Emma Dumont as Jackie Oppenheimer

Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg

David Dastmalchian as William L. Borden

Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs

Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge

Tony Goldwyn as Gordon Gray

Olivia Thirlby as Lilli Hornig

James Remar as Henry Stimson

Christopher Nolan

Writer (based on the book by)

Martin Sherwin

Cinematographer

Hoyte van Hoytema
Jennifer Lame
Ludwig Göransson

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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: 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.

A man in shadow stands beside an atomic bomb inside a shed in a desolate desert.

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Oppenheimer

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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.

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Christopher Nolan

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Movie Clips

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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A man wearing a suit and a porkpie hat surrounded in what appears to either be clouds or flames.

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.

A still photo from the film Oppenheimer.

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 Makes a Riveting Historical Psychodrama, but It Doesn’t Build to a Big Bang

Cillian Murphy gives a phenomenal performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw creation of the atomic bomb, in a film that's ruthlessly authentic and, for much of its three hours, gripping.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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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.

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

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

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Oppenheimer review: Christopher Nolan's 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 Delivers His Most Colossal and Mature Film Yet

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The Big Picture

Christopher Nolan's twelfth film, Oppenheimer , is a culmination of his remarkable career, showcasing his talents and techniques in storytelling, editing, and building tension and anticipation.
Cillian Murphy gives an incredible performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, portraying the complexities and emotions of the character through subtle mannerisms and expressions.
Oppenheimer boasts an exceptional cast, with notable performances from Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh, although Nolan still struggles with providing substantial roles for female characters.

Few filmmakers have had the rapid, impressive rise to success that Christopher Nolan has had over the last 25 years. Out the gate, Nolan has been ambitious, making twisty, unique films like his debut Following and his breakthrough Memento despite extremely small budgets. Within a decade of making his first film, he would revitalize action movies, origin stories, and superhero films with both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight —still widely considered the greatest superhero film of all time. In his first dozen films, Nolan has taken us deep inside the mind ( Inception ), to the darkest reaches of space ( Interstellar ), and explored war in a way we’ve never seen before ( Dunkirk ). While his experiments haven’t always been entirely successful, like with his last film, 2020’s Tenet , it’s hard not to admire Nolan’s attempts to push the boundaries of what film and storytelling can do on such a large scale .

Nolan’s twelfth film, Oppenheimer , feels like the culmination of everything the director has done so far in his already remarkable career . From the multiple timelines of Memento and Dunkirk , and the staggering abstract footage in Interstellar , to his ability to build tension and anticipation through stunning scores and impeccable editing, Nolan uses all of the talents and techniques that have made him such a noteworthy auteur to bring to life the extraordinary accomplishments, pains, and life of J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ). In bringing this expansive and gargantuan true story to the screen, Nolan has created not just one of his best films, but easily the most mature film of his career.

Oppenheimer

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

In telling the story of Oppenheimer, Nolan returns to a technique he used in Memento , by showing one man’s experience through varying timelines. Like that film, one timeline is told in color, while the other uses black-and-white photography. In the color timeline, Oppenheimer explores his past through his perspective via a hearing where he must run down his years running The Manhattan Project and the creation of the first atomic bomb, his communist ties, and his affairs, all while the people from throughout his life come to testify about his actions. In the black-and-white segments, Nolan follows Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey Jr. ), as he discusses his involvement with Oppenheimer over the years, all during Strauss’ questioning to secure the nomination for Secretary of Commerce. Through these dueling timelines, each showing important moments from different perspectives, Oppenheimer peels back multiple layers of Oppenheimer, a man who did unbelievable things, and then feared the potential of what his research could eventually bring.

Cillian Murphy Gives One of the Best Performances Ever in a Nolan Film

Murphy, who has been a supporting player in five of Nolan’s previous films, finally gets the starring role here and the result is incredible . Oppenheimer is shown as a relatively quiet man, and despite that, Murphy allows us to see every moment of trepidation, every moment of fear for what his ideas could eventually mean, and every glimmer of joy at some new revelation, all through tiny mannerisms and the worry in his eyes. Murphy is beautifully restrained here, and even though his actions are world-changing, we can feel the implications of Oppenheimer’s achievements simply through a look in Murphy’s eyes, or the way he hesitates in a sentence. After years of working with Nolan, Murphy's take on Oppenheimer will go down as one of the best performances ever captured by Nolan’s camera.

'Oppenheimer' Boasts One of the Best Casts in Modern Film

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Matt Damon as General Groves standing in a hallway in Oppenheimer

While it might sound like hyperbole, Nolan has gathered one of the most unbelievable casts in modern film , a flabbergasting amount of talent that puts actors like Oscar-winners Rami Malek , Gary Oldman , and Kenneth Branagh in small supporting roles, but gives actors like Murphy who might often be put in more minor roles into greater positions. While there are too many exceptional performances to point out, it’s excellent to see actors like Alden Ehrenreich , Benny Safdie , and David Krumholtz get major positions in this film, and it’s wonderful to see Josh Hartnett and Jason Clarke in substantial roles. Even though there are plenty of great actors in blink-and-you-miss parts, Nolan does all he can to give as many of these performers at least one scene that will stick with the audience long after the movie is over.

But it’s Downey Jr. who makes the biggest impression of the entire cast , other than Murphy’s Oppenheimer. While Oppenheimer mostly wears his feelings on his sleeve, Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss keeps his secrets close to his chest, making him an absorbing counter to the title character. His more subjective take on Oppenheimer’s life and career gives us a perspective we rarely see in films about real-life personalities, and Downey Jr. gives one of his best performances as well, and it’s wonderful to see him explore this type of role after years in the MCU pipeline.

Also noteworthy is Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, who puts Oppenheimer in his position at The Manhattan Project. The relationship between Oppenheimer and Groves is one of the most complex in the film , and it’s fascinating to watch how it shifts over the years. Plus, if you’re making a film about an impossible goal that needs to be met in a shocking amount of time ( Ford v. Ferrari , The Martian , Air ), there’s no better person to call than Damon.

Alas, Nolan still has problems with substantial female roles , and that does continue in Oppenheimer . Like many of the male scientists, the apparently lone female scientist—played by Olivia Thirlby —doesn’t get as much screen time as she deserves. Similarly, the women in Oppenheimer’s life certainly should’ve received more attention, however, that doesn’t stop Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, and Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s on-again-off-again partner Jean Tatlock from making the most of their time onscreen. Pugh only gets a few scenes, but her impact resonates with Oppenheimer long after his last scene. Blunt’s role is far more substantive, as we see her beg Oppenheimer to fight back as he’s raked over the coals by his own government. It’s hard not to relate to her utter rage at his treatment, and her frustrations over her position in life show sides to Blunt that we’ve never seen before from her.

Christopher Nolan's Script and Directing Are Stunning

But beyond this embarrassment of riches that is this cast, it’s Nolan that truly makes Oppenheimer a gargantuan achievement , and how he’s able to find just the right people to work with—both in front of and behind the camera—to make this phenomenal vision come to life in all its glory. This all, naturally, begins with Nolan’s script, based on the book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin . In bringing this 700+ page book to the screen, 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. It’s almost akin to what Tony Kushner had to cram into Lincoln by adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin ’s “Team of Rivals.” There is so much life and story to be told here, and the fact that Nolan can navigate all of this succinctly and without getting in over his head is astounding.

Behind the camera, again, Nolan is returning to some of his old techniques and talents, but in a way that feels more refined and careful than ever before . He knows he can impress—he’s done that before—but now, he knows how to utilize these skills in a way that puts story first, not as a way to awe the audience. All of these tools come together to the point that it almost feels as if Nolan’s entire career has been building to this film. Oppenheimer allows Nolan to be bombastic, but never over-the-top in a manner that distracts from the narrative. The performances and Oppenheimer’s troubled story is more important than the technical achievements Nolan creates, and while he has frequently felt like he’s the true star of his own films, he knows how to stand aside here to let the story take precedence over bombast.

This, of course, doesn’t happen without an incredible team behind him, and Nolan has gathered remarkable support in telling this story. Hoyte van Hoytema , who Nolan has worked with since 2014’s Interstellar , knows exactly how to beautifully shoot every scenario Nolan throws at him, whether it’s New Mexico at dusk, two lovers having a conversation in a dark hotel room, or the explosion of bombs and stars in shocking fashion. 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 . The way the two build the tension leading up to the dropping of the first bomb is astonishing, but just as monumental is the way the camera shakes around Oppenheimer when the repercussions of his research become too much for him to handle, almost as if the world around him could come crashing down, as that could both literally and figuratively be happening at any moment.

Oppenheimer ’s ever-present score by Ludwig Göransson accompanies nearly every moment of the film, knowing exactly when to pull back, or when to provoke the audience with the sounds of a ticking clock or static underneath the onslaught of an orchestra fully enveloping the viewer in sound. Nolan and van Hoytema’s visuals are always impressive, but it’s Göransson’s score that takes Oppenheimer to another level , and continues to prove that he’s one of the most exciting composers working in film today.

But Oppenheimer ’s success since this summer has also been a welcome change for the box office landscape . As franchise films have waned in their popularity over the course of this year , it’s been exciting to see a film like Oppenheimer (currently the fifth highest-grossing film at the domestic box office in 2023), which relies on great filmmaking and excellent performances to gather a crowd. While Marvel and DC films have failed to meet expectations, Nolan has shown that all an audience really wants is to be told a fascinating story that they’ve never seen before on the screen, and hopefully, studios in the future will learn the right lessons from Oppenheimer ’s success.

Oppenheimer is a towering achievement not just for Nolan, but for everyone involved . It is the kind of film that makes you appreciative of every aspect of filmmaking, blowing you away with how it all comes together in such a fitting fashion. Even though Nolan is honing in on talents that have brought him to where he is today, this film takes this to a whole new level of which we've never seen him before. With Oppenheimer , Nolan is more mature as a filmmaker than ever before, and it feels like we may just now be beginning to see what incredible work he’s truly capable of making.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a tremendous accomplishment for the writer-director, a massive film that feels like Nolan's most mature work so far.

Christopher Nolan brings a scope to the biopic that makes this story grander than other films in the genre.
Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, and Robert Downey Jr. lead an incredible cast that brings this story to life.
Everything from Nolan's directing to Ludwig Göransson's score are pitch perfect, making one of the best films of 2023.

Oppenheimer is now available to stream on VOD in the U.S.

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Oppenheimer, common sense media reviewers.

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

Oppenheimer Movie Poster: Oppenheimer stands against the image of a nuclear bomb explosion

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

You may have the knowledge and skill to create som

Scientists are elevated to celebrity status, and t

Most characters -- historical figures from the 193

Death by suicide. Massive fiery, loud bomb explosi

Several sex scenes with partial nudity, including

Strong language includes a few uses of "f--k," plu

Frequent drinking, including by a character who's

Positive Messages

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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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Silhouette of a man in a suite standing in front of a massive ball of fire

Community Reviews

Parents say (71)
Kids say (94)

Based on 71 parent reviews

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

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 : June 20, 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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‘oppenheimer’ called the “best” and “most important film this century”.

Writer-director Paul Schrader offers some strong praise for Christopher Nolan's science epic.

By James Hibberd

James Hibberd

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The official review embargo for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer isn’t lifted until Wednesday, but writer-director Paul Schrader has some strong words about the World War II science epic.

Writing on Facebook, the Taxi Driver , Raging Bull and Last Temptation of Christ screenwriter called Oppenheimer : “The best, most important film of this century. If you see one film in cinemas this year it should be Oppenheimer . I’m not a Nolan groupie but this one blows the doors off the hinges.”

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Oppenheimer

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

Christopher Nolan
Martin Sherwin
Cillian Murphy
Emily Blunt
4.1K User reviews
481 Critic reviews
90 Metascore
347 wins & 358 nominations total

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Kitty Oppenheimer

Leslie Groves

Lewis Strauss

Senate Aide

Thomas Morgan

Gordon Gray

Lloyd Garrison

Patrick Blackett

Senator McGee

Chairman Magnuson

Senator Bartlett

Senator Pastore

Senator Scott
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Engineering 'Oppenheimer'

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Trivia In order for the black and white sections of the movie to be shot in the same quality as the rest of the film, Kodak produced a limited supply of its Double-X black and white film stock in 70mm. This film stock was chosen specifically for its heritage - it was originally sold to photographers as Super-XX during World War II and was very popular with photojournalists of the era.
Goofs The stop signs are yellow in the film, which is accurate. The United States used yellow stop signs until 1954.

J. Robert Oppenheimer : Albert? When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world...

Albert Einstein : I remember it well. What of it?

J. Robert Oppenheimer : I believe we did.

Alternate versions To get a U/A rating certification in India, the movie was edited to remove or censor all nudity using CGI. For example, the scene where Tatlock and Oppenheimer have a conversation and the former character was topless, the nudity was censored with a CGI black dress. Many Middle Eastern countries use this exact same censored version for release.
Connections Featured in Louder with Crowder: Going Out with a Bang! (2022)
Soundtracks Holiday in Big Band Land (uncredited) Written by Gerhard Narholz Performed by Les Brown and His Band of Renown

User reviews 4.1K

maison-van-cleers
Jul 26, 2023
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July 21, 2023 (United States)
United States
United Kingdom
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Oppengeymer
Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA (only interiors, Los Alamos facilities interiors, including Oppenheimer's house, Fuller Lodge Interior and Exterior)
Universal Pictures
Atlas Entertainment
Gadget Films
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$100,000,000 (estimated)
$329,862,540
$82,455,420
Jul 23, 2023
$975,134,850

Technical specs

Runtime 3 hours
Black and White
IMAX 6-Track
Dolby Digital

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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

Oppenheimer Is More Than a Creation Myth About the Atomic Bomb

Christopher Nolan’s ambitious film explores the heated conversations and private anxieties that led to the unleashing of a terrible power.

Almost all of Oppenheimer is composed of conversation. There’s academic back-and-forth among theoretical physicists as they scribble nuclear equations on chalkboards; heated conversations between American politicians and military leaders about World War II and the fate of the country should the Nazis win; terse, loaded exchanges at panels and congressional hearings, with investigations sifting through rumors and conjecture in an effort to determine these scientists’ loyalty to the United States. The director Christopher Nolan rarely slows down to let his protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), actually think. When he does, the audience sees particles swirling in Oppenheimer’s mind, neutrons smashing and sparking, elemental forces being harnessed through intelligence and will.

It’s mesmerizing but also quite inscrutable—a beautiful representation of the terrible power Oppenheimer channeled in his involvement with the Manhattan Project, which created (and detonated) the first nuclear weapons. Nolan’s film encompasses far more than that, cramming almost all of the doorstop-size biography American Prometheus into a three-hour running time by moving at breakneck speed. It covers Oppenheimer’s beginnings as a student and his postwar battles with the government over his alleged Communist past. The result is a talky biopic with the intensity of an action movie, a series of meetings in offices and bunkers that somehow drives the planet to the brink of apocalypse. Although the visual scale is smaller than the many widescreen epics Nolan has made—save for the part where the bomb goes off— Oppenheimer might be his most ambitious work as a filmmaker to date.

It’s also a fascinating companion piece to the only other Nolan movie that’s rooted in real-life events: 2017’s Dunkirk . That film, which depicted the evacuation of Allied troops during World War II, was light on dialogue and heavy on complex action set pieces, bombarding the viewer’s eyes and ears with the fury of the front lines. Much of Oppenheimer is set during the same war, but it focuses on the behind-the-scenes figures who sought to end the war without firing a bullet. Nolan’s chief fascination, of course, is Oppenheimer himself, whom Murphy plays as a grand enigma—icy at times and effortlessly charming at others, sympathetic to leftist revolutionary causes but happy to bury those sympathies as he begins steering the Manhattan Project.

The film’s first hour barrels through his student years and his early days as a physicist in England and Germany; Oppenheimer crosses paths with legends in his field such as Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), and Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer). Their energetic discussions of quantum mechanics and atomic theory are difficult to keep up with, but as the plot thundered on, I realized that was part of the point: Even these esteemed men of science can’t quite grasp what they’re dealing with. The viewer knows where things are headed—the total success of the Manhattan Project, and the consequences of the weapons it produced—but there’s a frightening lack of awareness as, spurred by a fear of the Nazis reaching the same consequential milestone first, the development of the bomb is set in motion.

Read: The surprising legacy of Inception , 10 years later

Throughout the action, Nolan ping-pongs between timelines, as he has in many films past. In painstaking detail, he depicts the humiliating 1954 hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance and dredged up both his past associations with Communists and his overactive love life. A more daring element, told in black and white, follows the former Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (a tremendous Robert Downey Jr.) as he undergoes a Senate confirmation hearing for a Cabinet post, digging through the politician’s tense relationship and eventual enmity with Oppenheimer. The majority of the story, shown in color and centered on Oppenheimer, fizzes with energy and possibility; the Strauss-centric sequences are slow, seething, and obsessed with the past, representative of the conservatism and paranoia that calcified around the atomic society Oppenheimer helped to create.

Nolan’s ambition is to intertwine multiple biographical threads about his subject and his historical context. There’s the mad dash to create nuclear weapons, a thrilling race against time with an explosive conclusion: the Trinity bomb test that proved their theories correct. There’s the larger moral conflict that emerged especially after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as scientists such as Oppenheimer started begging governments to back away from the deadly arms race that politicians like Strauss were effectively pushing for. And then there are the deepest mysteries of Oppenheimer himself, a man who pleaded for peace later in life but who never fully held himself publicly accountable for the hundreds of thousands left dead by his invention.

As Oppenheimer zips toward its conclusion and switches perspectives with increasing mania, it becomes clear how carefully Nolan is working to keep the audience’s attention on his story’s lofty scope without losing sight of its cryptic protagonist. Murphy, with his frost-blue eyes fixed in a permanent thousand-yard stare, keeps the viewer (and the people around him) at arm’s length. But as the years pile on, it’s obvious how the guilt has stacked up too. The film lets reality start to crack around Oppenheimer as a result, turning the Trinity test into a haunting, invasive specter he can never quite shake.

Nolan is best known for spectacle, and some viewers will be able to see Oppenheimer in bone-rattling IMAX, projected on a skyscraper-size screen. But it’s more impressive for how the director has made such a personal narrative feel epic, not just in visual breadth but in dramatic sweep, presenting a story from the past that feels knotted to so many present anxieties about nuclear annihilation. After racing his way to scientific progress and achievement, Oppenheimer is confronted with an amoral world he had previously ignored; that existential horror, and the way it echoed into the 21st century, is the real hammer wielded by this tale.

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DVD & Streaming

Oppenheimer

Biography/History , Drama

Content Caution

In Theaters

July 13, 2023
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer; Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer; Matt Damon as Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves; Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss; Macon Blair as Lloyd Garrison; Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence; Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock; Jefferson Hall as Haakon Chevalier; Josh Zuckerman as Rossi Lomanitz; David Krumholtz as Isidor Rabi; Guy Burnet as George Eltenton; Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr; James D’Arcy as Patrick Blackett; Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer; Tom Conti as Albert Einstein; David Dastmalchian as William Borden; Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols; Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs; Benny Safdie as Edward Teller; Casey Affleck as Boris Pash; Gary Oldman as Harry Truman

Home Release Date

November 21, 2023
Christopher Nolan

Distributor

Universal Pictures

Movie Review

“Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown,”Jesus said in Luke 4:24

That can certainly be said of J. Robert Oppenheimer, too. The theoretical physicist is called a prophet among physicists in the field. But despite his advancements in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, very few people in America seem to like him.

In fact, when Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves comes to Oppenheimer’s classroom, looking to recruit him for a secret experiment called the Manhattan Project, Groves tells him as much: People around him see Oppenheimer as a “dilettante, womanizer, suspected communist.”

“Oppenheimer couldn’t run a hamburger stand,” Grove quotes.

Oppenheimer smirks. “I couldn’t,” he admits. “But I can run the Manhattan Project.”

From a technical standpoint, Oppenheimer’s selection as the director of the Project was an obvious choice. His awards and accolades made him the perfect man for the job.

But from a political standpoint, Oppenheimer garners a lot of suspicion.

That’s because while Oppenheimer might never say that he’s a Communist sympathizer, he’s sure got a lot of friends and family who are. And sure , maybe the Russians are technically fighting on the same side of World War II as the Americans, but that doesn’t mean the two superpowers truly see each other as allies.

So when someone leaks information to the communist-dominated country, it’s not long until the finger points at Oppenheimer. And that’s only the tip on an iceberg of evidence against the man.

And those accusations about his character and conduct will threaten to sink the father of the atomic bomb professionally in the years to come.

Positive Elements

The dropping of an atomic bomb is not an easy topic. Characters debate the morality of such an action. Someone warns that the creation of the atomic bomb will result in the deaths of many innocent people. “You drop a bomb,” he says, “and it falls on the just and the unjust.”

In one scene, officials argue about whether the bomb would result in fewer deaths on both sides of the conflict than a ground invasion of Japan. And so those involved continue to press forward with their grim “gadget” because they believe an invasion would be deadlier for all.

Characters furthermore debate the morality of creating a bomb itself. Some feel that such a weapon will force countries to get along, since people will finally realize that a future war could now end the human race with a single button push. And when physicists theorize that the bomb could ignite the world’s atmosphere in a chain reaction, some push to share the findings with Russia and the Nazis in order to warn them about that potentially world-ending consequence.

Though the film’s depiction of Oppenheimer tends to sit more towards the middle of the political spectrum, unwilling to fully commit one way or another, such a mentality makes him a prime suspect during the Red Scare. Indeed, many of Oppenheimer’s family members and friends sympathized with the Communist party, and the government fears that Oppenheimer might leak information to the Russians. But when Oppenheimer comes under fire for his alleged beliefs, many people, including those who disagree with him, stick up for him, expressing that they believe he’s loyal to the country.

Early in the movie, Oppenheimer and many of the scientists he recruits to his team seem particularly motivated by the plight of the Jews in Germany. Oppenheimer himself is Jewish, though not particularly devout. But he and many of his peers are primarily motivated not just by the desire to beat Germany in the production of the atomic bomb, but to save Jews and to keep Hitler from potentially using the invention upon them should his scientists succeed first (which they don’t).

Not all of those German scientists, we learn, want to serve Hitler’s research, and at least one of them is liberated from Nazi-held territory and then encourages Oppenheimer’s team.

Spiritual Elements

Oppenheimer is compared to an Old Testament prophet by another Jewish man, and the man warns Oppenheimer that such a title means he can’t be wrong—not once. He’s also compared to Prometheus, a Greek deity who stole fire from the gods to give it to humanity.

Oppenheimer also has a few visions or hallucinations. While some of these visions are depicted as something like traumatic moments of PTSD for the physicist, others show Oppenheimer seemingly looking into the cosmos to divine deeper meaning.

We additionally hear some other brief mentions of spirituality. Oppenheimer’s famous quote, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” comes from the Hindu sacred writing the Bhagavad Gita and is spoken there by the Hindu god Vishnu.

A passing comment references Albert Einstein’s objection to quantum physics: “God does not play dice.” A man is described as the “son of a Russian Orthodox priest.” When thinking about the code name for the nuclear test, Oppenheimer offers “Trinity,” referencing a poem by John Donne. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” Oppenheimer recites.

After Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, learns of one of her husband’s affair, she tells him that he doesn’t “get to commit a sin and have us all feel sorry” for him. A thermonuclear reaction is described as “a terrible revelation of divine power.”

Sexual Content

Oppenheimer is described as a “womanizer,” and we endure some scenes of his escapades. In several scenes, Oppenheimer has sex with a woman. They’re both naked, and her breasts are visible, as are sexual movements. There’s also post-coital conversation afterward in which the woman’s breasts are again visible.

In one case, when a board questions Oppenheimer’s visits to a woman who was a known member of the Communist party, he suddenly appears naked in the room as the woman has sex with him there in front of everyone. The scene is meant to artistically symbolize how Kitty feels betrayed while she listens to Oppenheimer discuss the moment.

And on the subject of Kitty, the two initially meet at a party, and Oppenheimer continues to flirt with her despite discovering that she’s already married. The two engage in an affair (something we’ll hear is a relatively common thing for Oppenheimer). Kitty soon reveals that she’s pregnant, and she resolves to divorce her husband and marry Oppenheimer before the pregnancy begins to show. And even after Oppenheimer marries Kitty, we see him have an affair with another woman, and we hear of another that is spoken about during the testimony against him.

Someone crudely and sarcastically references doing violence to a man’s male anatomy. When a male scientist argues with a female scientist regarding how radiation exposure might affect her reproductive system, she quips, “Your reproductive system is more exposed than mine.” Two people kiss in celebration of the bomb’s success. Oppenheimer and Kitty kiss as well.

Violent Content

As Oppenheimer and his team cheerfully celebrate the successful dropping of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer has a disturbing vision of sorts in which he imagines the people in the audience suffering the effects of the bomb: One woman’s skin begins peeling from her face, and Oppenheimer accidentally steps into the chest cavity of a charred corpse. We later hear reports of the bomb’s gruesome effect on the Japanese people. We’re also told of a firebombing which killed an estimated 100,000 people, “mostly civilians.”

The number of casualties ultimately reported by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are perhaps bigger than what had been estimated, and we have the sense that at least some of the Manhattan Project team members are struggling to come to grips with the violence that they they’ve unleashed.

When Oppenheimer tries to articulate a sense of responsibility for those deaths in a conversation with President Harry Truman, Truman himself chides the scientists and says that he was the one who’ll be remembered as responsible for those casualties, not Oppenheimer.

A woman is briefly seen dead, her head submerged in a bathtub. She’s overdosed on pills and committed suicide by drowning herself. A man suggests torturing someone to death. Oppenheimer injects someone’s apple with potassium cyanide, but he intercepts it before a victim could eat it.

And, of course, we watch the test of the bomb go off.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word is used eight times, and the s-word is heard four times. We also hear the occasional uses of “a–,” “d–n,” “h—” and “crap.” God’s name is used in vain six times, three of which take the form of “g-dd–n.” Jesus’ name is abused three times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

People drink an assortment of alcoholic beverages. Oppenheimer smokes cigarettes almost continually, and there’s smoking by him and others throughout the movie. Someone notes that the bar at Los Alamos is “always running.”

Other Negative Elements

A man vomits. In a couple of scenes, Kitty and Oppenheimer neglect their children, who always seem to be crying. Both would say that they’re lousy parents; in fact, they ask a set of friends to care for their firstborn for several months so that Oppenheimer can focus exclusively on the Manhattan Project.

Robert Oppenheimer is a theoretical physicist. But, he admits, the problem with theory is that, until it’s tested, that’s all it’ll be.

The problem with actually testing an atomic weapon is that it risks the end of the world. Physicist Edward Teller suggested that such a weapon could (once again, in theory) cause a chain reaction that might destroy the world. His concern was that the bomb could produce temperatures so hot that it would cause the world’s hydrogen to fuse together into helium in an explosive way—similar to how our sun creates energy. This chain reaction would quickly envelop the whole world and end life as we know it.

Of course, we’re still here. Obviously, that theory didn’t immediately bear fruit. But Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan suggests that when the first atomic bomb exploded, it did ignite a chain reaction—but not the one Teller theorized. The movie grimly suggests that nuclear annihilation is still a possible outcome, and perhaps even an inescapable one. It just hasn’t come to pass … yet.

That chain reaction is illustrated by some early scenes that show Oppenheimer averting a tragic outcome at the last possible moment. In a moment of wrath, Oppenheimer poisons his professor’s apple, only snatching it away once he realizes what he’s done.

But Oppenheimer cannot snatch away the atomic bomb. Because, as one character explains, the bomb “isn’t a new weapon. It’s a new world.”

Oppenheimer paints a bleak picture of the future of humanity. But let’s be clear: A bleak worldview isn’t why Nolan’s latest drama has an R-rating. That’s where the content comes in.

For a film set primarily during World War II, the violence of the bomb is only hauntingly hinted at here. Jean Tatlock’s suicide by drowning should also be noted.

But Oppenheimer ’s biggest content issues arise from its sexual content and crude language, the latter of which is due to the film’s many uses of the f-word. A couple of scenes contain explicit sex and nudity—most prominently when Oppenheimer has a nude conversation with his ex-lover, the camera showing off the woman’s breasts and barely hiding the two’s lower bits.

That’s not to say that Oppenheimer doesn’t provide some interesting and important perspective into a monumentous moment in American history. It definitely does. But prospective viewers will need to prepare themselves for a film that, while not world-ending, certainly leans into content that easily could have been suggested far less graphically.

Kennedy Unthank

Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”

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‘Oppenheimer’: Christopher Nolan’s Starry Biopic Is Big, Loud, and a Must-See

By David Fear

This is what Christopher Nolan does in Oppenheimer , a biopic on the “father of the atomic bomb,” and in terms of getting you into the mindset of its subject, these bursts of abstract imagery are a brilliant move on his part. It’s not the only ace the writer-director has up his well-tailored sleeve, mind you — there are somewhere between four to five timelines bumping against each other at any given moment, it’s shot in both saturated color and stark black & white, its sound design equally prizes dead silence and deafening booms, and the cast is comprised of seemingly every third actor with a SAG card. Not to mention a depth-charge performance by Cillian Murphy as the Man Who Would Be Destroyer of Worlds, one that allows the tiniest surface ripples to communicate the agony and the ecstasy of changing the world.

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So let us now praise movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. Oppenheimer is most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars alike. When Nolan is on, he is on , as evidenced by the early scenes of Oppenheimer and his military liaison, General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon , all mustache and bluster), assembling the eggheads. Their plan is to turn the small New Mexico burg of Los Alamos into a self-sufficient, family-friendly town for a group of scientists and a top-secret think tank for a weapon of mass destruction. The military need the end result of the Manhattan Project to win WWII, preferably before the Germans develop their own version of “the gadget.” Oppenheimer, both compelled by and wary of the opportunity, wants them to maintain the “moral advantage” after the world sees what this thing can do.

And these sequences, in particular, reinforce the notion of Nolan as a great director of actors, even if the performances overall are across the board in terms of screen time and effectiveness. Not just Murphy, who’s worked with The Dark Knight director before and delivers an Oppenheimer that goes far beyond the there-goeth-the-great-man clichés associated with many biopics. There’s Damon, whose repartee with Murphy approaches screwball levels. There’s Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who turns a perceived slight into a postwar vendetta against Oppenheimer. (It’s not an exaggeration to say that Downey does some of the best work of his long career here.) There’s Gary Oldman as President Harry S. Truman, who turns a single scene in the Oval Office into a damning portrait of the POTUS as a complete bastard.

There’s Florence Pugh , and Emily Blunt , and Benny Safdie , Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek , Kenneth Branagh , Casey Affleck , Jason Clarke, Matthew Modine, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich … it’s actually quicker to list who’s not in Oppenheimer. Nolan has said he wanted to cast recognizable faces so that audiences could keep track of who’s who easier, but he also gives them opportunities to flex, whether it’s for a minute or the majority of the running time. And given that there are so many scenes of people conversing, reading, lecturing, interrogating, handwringing and musing over the morality of mass destruction, they have to keep things afloat as much as their ringmaster.

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It’s also where the movie starts to waver in terms of storytelling, cutting back and forth to create a tapestry of the 20th century that’s meant to enrich the scenes of science being used and abused in the name of warfare (Nolan’s politics are a moving target in this film, as they are in much of his work, though it’s safe to say he’s solidly anti-nukes here). They end up drawing both the focus and the momentum away from the movie, even if they do flesh some aspects out and give Downey a primo showcase. You suddenly become more aware of Nolan’s tendency to favor giant compositions and conceptual overreaches over connecting narrative dots in certain places, which has been a longstanding criticism. There are some questionable bits of business that play out as well. It’s one thing to let Pugh’s Jean Tatlock, whose Communist affiliation would still haunt J. Robert decades after their torrid affair ended, to be the one who hands him the Sanskrit poem that would be his response to Trinity: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” It’s another to have her do it while she’s writing topless on top of him, which is… a choice. And the less said about her and Murphy getting hot and heavy during an interrogation-session hallucination, the better — we can now say that sex scenes are not Nolan’s forte.

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'Oppenheimer' is a Christopher Nolan masterpiece. The contemporary echoes are terrifying

The next time one of those government committees is being waylaid by some grandstanding blowhard senator or representative essentially arguing against science for political motives — you’ll remember COVID-19, perhaps — whoever is chairing the meeting should halt the proceedings for three hours and make everyone watch “Oppenheimer.”

Now that’s the kind of civics lesson I can get behind. Sen. Rand Paul can sit right up front. And it might actually do the country some good.

Then again, it might not. History has a way of repeating itself.

Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is nothing if not a cautionary tale, a stunning film about brilliance and betrayal, arrogance and willful ignorance. It’s powerful, a technically dazzling achievement; so audacious is Nolan’s filmmaking that if it didn’t serve the story you’d think at times he was just showing off.

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Is Oppenheimer based on a true story?

The movie is essentially a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist often called the father of the atomic bomb. Nolan adapted “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.

If that sounds dry and scholarly, well, have you ever seen a Christopher Nolan movie? “Inception?” “The Dark Knight,” maybe? It’s anything but boring; by the end it’s practically a horror movie and a thriller combined. After all, for a time, Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein and others wondered if exploding the bomb might actually ignite the atmosphere and destroy the Earth.

The stakes don’t get much higher than that.

Cillian Murphy is stunning as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Cillian Murphy, somehow still underrated despite “28 Days Later” and “Peaky Blinders” and several other Nolan films, plays Oppenheimer. He does not lack self-confidence. Nor does he lack the ability to earn it. “You’re not just self-important,” one character tells him. “You’re actually important.”

Or, as someone questions how his boorish actions might be taken, Oppenheimer says, “Brilliance makes up for a lot.”

Murphy’s line reading is perfect. He makes Oppenheimer seem not so much boastful as just aware of his gifts and what they let him get away with. This is an amazing performance. Nolan’s signature jumps through time require Murphy to portray Oppenheimer at different stages of his life. Each is convincing.

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What is 'Oppenheimer' about?

Oppenheimer gets tapped to lead the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, to develop a nuclear bomb. (Matt Damon is funny as the blunt Gen. Leslie Groves, who hires him.) He surrounds himself with his own small army of physicists. The excitement of the theoretical becoming actual is intoxicating — so much so that it’s easy to lose sight of the consequences.

Nolan juxtaposes the Los Alamos work with a confirmation hearing in which Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr., never better and it’s not even close), seeks a Cabinet position. Nolan shoots this in black and white (a new type of IMAX film was created for the scenes). Strauss should be a shoo-in, except for one thing: his early association with Oppenheimer, who has fallen out of favor with the government.

Why? Because while he supported the creation of the atomic bomb for use in Japan, Oppenheimer feared an arms race and where it would lead, and opposed the creation of a hydrogen bomb. During the Joseph McCarthy era, simply expressing a dissenting opinion based on science was tantamount to treason.

Sound familiar?

Other scenes show a rigged committee laughably questioning Oppenheimer in order to deny him his security clearance renewal. Laughable if it weren’t so absurd. The truth is unimportant here, only the preordained outcome. Again, the contemporary echoes are chilling.

Why 'Oppenheimer' is the best movie of the year, so far

It’s all chilling. When Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) speaks to the renewal committee, you want to stand and cheer. Finally, someone is willing to tell the truth. Not that it matters.

Throw in bits and pieces of Oppenheimer’s tempestuous personal life, including his relationship with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and his marriage to Kitty, and the three-hour running time starts to seem not just reasonable, but necessary.

Nolan pulls out all the stops. He’s ably assisted by Ludwig Göransson’s score, which amps up the tension.

The testing of the bomb in Los Alamos is a cinematic pressure cooker. Everything works.

The acting is uniformly brilliant, with Murphy, Downey and Blunt simply astounding. Downey is getting a lot of buzz for his performance, and deservedly so. Tony Stark, this ain’t. His portrayal of the slow evolution of Strauss’ character is subtle and devastating.

Blunt’s scene in front of the committee is a marvel of controlled fury, spitting in the face of hypocrisy while never breaking a sweat.

But Murphy shoulders the biggest burden among the cast, and does so beautifully. His Oppenheimer is arrogant, of course. But Murphy’s portrayal is complex. When the bomb testing commences, he quietly intones the words from the Bhagavad-Gita he has studied (he read it in the original Sanskrit, because of course): “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

He took those words to heart, and it cost him. And maybe, Nolan’s film argues, all of us.

'Oppenheimer' 5 stars

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

Director: Christopher Nolan.

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt.

Rating: R for some sexuality, nudity and language.

How to watch: In theaters Friday, July 21.

Reach Goodykoontz at [email protected] . Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm . Twitter: @goodyk .

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‘oppenheimer’ review: christopher nolan’s explosive, must-see movie.

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Director Christopher Nolan’s seismic “Oppenheimer” is that rarest of things: a sophisticated and bracing movie that’s made for adults and makes nobody say, “I’ll wait till it’s on streaming.”

See it in IMAX on 70-millimeter film — you’ll be very glad you did.

Many unbelievable scenes fill the entire screen.

OPPENHEIMER

Running time: 180 minutes. Rated R (some sexuality, nudity and language.) In theaters July 21.

Only the brilliant mind behind “Memento,” “Inception” and the “Dark Knight” trilogy would conclude that a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, could be both a morally complex, informative, gripping drama and a mind-blowing visual feast.

Nolan pulls off the mash-up in characteristically unexpected ways.

Of course, we anticipate that the first-ever nuclear bomb test, outside Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945, will justify the movie’s massive scale. And that paralyzing scene definitely does. But “Oppenheimer” is explosive well before and well after the actual explosion.

What keeps all three hours of the film so breathlessly tense is the title physicist’s internal tug of war: Can the valiant quest for scientific advancement — his great passion — lead to the total destruction of the planet?

And is he culpable for whatever happens, as the leader of the team who created the A-bomb over three years in secret in the Southwest? Or is it the person who decides to push the button, a k a the leader of the free world?

“Just because we’re building it doesn’t mean we get to decide how it’s used,” he tells his frightened colleagues rather unconvincingly.

Cillian Murphy is mesmerizing as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.

As the chilly man considers these thorny questions — and also has moments of euphoric inspiration — Nolan throws in loud images from Oppenheimer’s mind, of atoms violently splitting, or of flames engulfing the screen.

The cacophony shown inside Oppenheimer’s head fascinatingly clashes with Murphy’s outwardly stoic, privately vulnerable performance. He mesmerizingly journeys from intellectual force of nature to a guilt-plagued, damaged shadow of a man.

Oppenheimer was a fascinating guy, as geniuses often are.

“You’re a dilettante, womanizer and suspected Communist!” says Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, a smart foil), the military director of the Manhattan Project.

Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in "Oppenheimer."

Like many of those on college campuses in the first half of the 20th century, Oppenheimer socialized with socialists, and the government attempted to use his past against him when he became outspoken against the hydrogen bomb after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that climaxed World War II.

Throughout the movie, we jump in and out of the infamous, behind-closed-doors kangaroo court to decide if he was a Communist who had been disloyal to the United States.

Another part of the film, the relevance of which becomes clear in the end, involves the Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss to become President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce, shot in time-machine black and white. Playing the ambitious man who once served as chair of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Robert Downey Jr. sneakily does some of the best work of his career.

Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss in "Oppenheimer."

Even history buffs who know every beat of what happened will be riveted by the inventive ways Nolan recounts it.

But what separates the director from most of his fellow auteurs nowadays is he knows vision alone cannot make a great movie — you need terrific performances to carry it out. And every supporting turn here is a smash.

Emily Blunt is focused and biting as Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, who’s fiercely supportive even though he gives her plenty of reasons not to be, such as his Commie ex Jean, played with frayed wires by Florence Pugh.

Emily Blunt and Matt Damon in "Oppenheimer."

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.

The movie also marks a welcome return to form for its director, whose “Tenet” was, well, “Tenet.”

The three-hour runtime will scare off some people (even though that’s breezy these days if you’re James Cameron or Martin Scorsese), but the subject matter and artfulness of Nolan’s approach earn our attention every single second.

“Oppenheimer” is a movie that makes you say “Oh, my God” over and over again — in awe and in terror.

Oppenheimer Review

21 Jul 2023

Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is not an easy movie. To say its subject matter and theme are inherently downbeat is something of an understatement. It flings you into a very specific, crowded world and refuses to hold your hand, with a notable absence of date- or location-providing subtitles. It is three hours long, densely packed with info-rich dialogue, and mostly plays out, to paraphrase one character, in “shabby little rooms far from the limelight”. Its story unfurls along two oscillating lines – one titled “Fission”, in vivid colour; the other titled “Fusion” in high-contrast black-and-white – and cuts between their beats and revelations like an anxious channel-hopper. It is, of course, a Christopher Nolan movie.

However, despite being deeply stamped with Nolan’s hallmarks (anti-chronological, shot with IMAX cameras, avoids CGI, stars Cillian Murphy ), Oppenheimer feels like something new from the writer-director. While it has a logline-level similarity to Nolan’s favourite Spielberg film, Raiders Of The Lost Ark (a man in a hat is racing the Nazis for control of an existentially powerful weapon), its release — and impact — feel more like we’ve reached Nolan’s Schindler’s List moment: a step into deadly serious, portentously resonant, adult material. With one fundamental difference: this difficult historical figure is on a very different trajectory to Oskar Schindler. One might even say the exact opposite trajectory.

Oppenheimer is based on American Prometheus , Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s wide-spined biography of the theoretical physicist who “fathered” the atomic bomb. But it is not a biopic. No time is spent on J. Robert’s childhood, with his disturbingly troubled early academic life tackled only briefly. Instead, the film moves briskly from his establishment of quantum theory on US curricula to his recruitment as director of the Manhattan Project (by take-no-shit Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, played with avuncular appeal by Matt Damon).

At the film’s pulsing nucleus is Murphy as Oppenheimer, and he is compelling throughout.

Interestingly, Nolan does devote some time to Oppenheimer’s romantic entanglements, allowing Florence Pugh to elegantly dominate her few scenes as communist activist Jean Tatlock, the physicist’s first lover (which also involve a Nolan first: sex scenes with prolonged nudity). Meanwhile, Emily Blunt thankfully busts out of the supportive/suffering wife archetype as the alcoholic but sharp-witted Kitty Oppenheimer, who gives us one of the film’s most rousing scenes in an intense verbal duel with bullish lawyer Roger Robb (Jason Clarke).

Given the sheer extent of the dramatis personae, it’s no exaggeration to say that Oppenheimer features Nolan’s most impressive cast yet. Playing admirably against type, Robert Downey Jr. leads the “Fusion” strand as haughty US Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss, whose attempt to join Eisenhower’s cabinet as Secretary of Commerce becomes intriguingly more relevant as the film progresses. Then we have a supporting cast like no other: Benny Safdie as Edward Teller (the inspiration for Dr Strangelove ), Kenneth Branagh as Oppenheimer’s Danish mentor Niels Bohr, Josh Hartnett as his close colleague Ernest Lawrence — plus the likes of Olivia Thirlby, Rami Malek, Jack Quaid, Macon Blair, Casey Affleck, David Krumholtz and Alden Ehrenreich popping up in sometimes the smallest of roles. Not to mention Gary Oldman’s acidic cameo as President Truman, who famously dismissed Oppenheimer as “a cry-baby scientist”.

At the film’s pulsing nucleus is Murphy as Oppenheimer, and he is compelling throughout. Given the movie’s hefty import, you’d have expected him to infuse every ounce of his talent into this performance, and that is certainly evident from his every moment on screen — often with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s IMAX lens focused squarely and unsparingly on his face, as he conjures the conflicting emotions that rage beneath Oppenheimer’s surface. This is, after all, a uniquely complex man: praised as a hero for ending the war, wracked with guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and perhaps desperate to cleanse his soul through martyrdom.

Nolan complements this exquisitely tuned performance by using his subject’s memories and visions as a kind of visual punctuation, from raindrops rippling ominously in puddles like bomb blasts, to a chilling, briefly glimpsed depiction of “atmospheric ignition”: a posited world-ending outcome of the first A-bomb test. The Trinity sequence itself, in which Nolan’s SFX team somehow create a CG-free approximation of a nuclear explosion, is truly shock-and-awesome, featuring what might just be cinema’s most intense countdown scene. But the film is never visually stronger than when it is inside Oppenheimer’s head, especially during its lengthy closing act, when apparitions of his creation’s life-snuffing effects bleed into his waking life with such nightmarish potency, they’ll be hard to shake for days.

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Christopher nolan's oppenheimer : release date, trailer, cast & more, get the inside scoop on oppenheimer learn about the plot, cast, release date, imax format, and watch the trailer on rotten tomatoes..

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Billboards and movie theater pop-ups across Los Angeles have been ticking down for months now: Christopher Nolan’ s epic account of J. Robert Oppenheimer , the father of the atomic bomb, is nearing an explosive release on July 21, 2023.

Nolan movies are always incredibly secretive, twists locked alongside totems behind safe doors, actors not spilling an ounce of Earl Grey tea. But there are always curtains to pull to glimpse the magic behind the prestige, even with a Nolan film based on real events. So with more than five months left until IMAX theaters are packed to the brim, here’s everything we know about Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer :

Behind the Film

Christopher Nolan on the set of Interstellar

Christopher Nolan returns after three years and Tenet’ s rocky pandemic-delayed release for his 12th feature film, Oppenheimer . The biopic about the infamous theoretical physicist represents a number of transformations for Nolan’s career. First and foremost, the film is his first with Universal Pictures following his dramatic split with his previous studio partner, Warner Bros., which had released all of his films since Insomnia . (Paramount and Warner Bros. shared distribution on Interstellar .)

In 2021, WB opted to debut their entire feature slate in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously . In response, Nolan, an avid defender of the theatrical experience, called them “ the worst streaming service .” Numerous studios — Sony, Paramount, Apple among them — engaged in a war to land production and distribution for Oppenheimer . Universal acquiesced to Nolan’s conditions, which included total creative control and a traditional theatrical window, and won out at the end of the day.

(Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)

Nolan’s production team has solidified, but slightly changed, too. Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson , who is only a Tony away from an EGOT, returns after his first collaboration with Nolan on Tenet , furthering the question of whether Nolan’s famed partnership with Hans Zimmer is over or just on pause. Oppenheimer will mark the fourth Nolan picture shot by Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema , who can literally carry an IMAX camera on his shoulders . And visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson ( Mad Max: Fury Road , Dunkirk , Tenet ) tag-teamed with long-time Nolan special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher to simulate the nuclear tests. (More on those later.)

The newcomers, however, are 45-year veteran costume designer Ellen Mirojnick ( Behind the Candelabra , The Greatest Showman , Bridgerton ) and production designer Ruth De Jong, who worked with Van Hoytema and Universal on Nope .

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer (2023)

Roughly 20 years after Cillian Murphy’ s screen test for Nolan’s Batman Begins , which was so entrancing to the director that it led to Murphy’s casting as the villainous Scarecrow, the Irish actor finally steps into a leading role for one of his greatest cinematic partners. And if the trailer is any indication, with close-up after close-up, Murphy’s hypnotic eyes will be the window into one of the most complex minds in human history.

Matt Damon also steps up from secret role in Interstellar to mustached general Leslie Groves Jr. And the reunions run deep overall, as Oppenheimer features Casey Affleck ( Interstellar ), Kenneth Branagh ( Dunkirk , Tenet ), James D’Arcy ( Dunkirk ), Matthew Modine ( The Dark Knight Rises ), David Dastmalchian ( The Dark Knight ), and Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight Trilogy) as President Harry S. Truman.

Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, and Emily Blunt

(Photo by Emma McIntyre, Karwai Tang, Mondadori Portfolio, Kevin Mazur/Getty Images)

It seems that there wasn’t a place for a return of Harry Styles , but Nolan is tapping into younger audiences through Oscar nominee Florence Pugh . And there’s an unexpected additional avenue into the social media generation: Josh Peck , whose casting echoes Topher Grace’ s appearance in Interstellar , begging the question of whether the Nolan household is a fan of early 2000s sitcoms.

The remainder of the cast is a who’s who of Hollywood stars. Robert Downey Jr. , Rami Malek , and Emily Blunt are the remaining big names, while Alex Wolff , Dane DeHaan , and Devon Bostick bring a bit of the indie darling vibe. And then there’s a deluge of That Guys, headlined by premiere That Guy Jason Clarke , but also including young Han Solo Alden Ehrenreich and Josh Hartnett , who, like Murphy, was nearly cast as Batman but turned down the role .

Perhaps the most tantalizing piece of the acting puzzle, however, is Tom Conti as Albert Einstein. The casting was not heavily reported on, but then, in the IMAX exclusive trailer ahead of Avatar: The Way of Water , bam, there was Einstein, a bombshell cameo to rival the obsessive superhero cameo culture.

At first glance, the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, presents itself as a departure from the Nolan norm. He’s never done a biopic. He’s only directed two period films, both more explicitly in his wheelhouse. And he’s not usually one to tell a story based on real events. (The exception, Dunkirk , has close personal ties to Nolan’s British upbringing.) But upon closer inspection, the film is a culmination of Nolan’s most prominent interests.

Nolan is principally a materialist. In The Dark Knight trilogy, he envisions Batman as empowered by military technology and Gotham as simply Chicago. In Interstellar , his sci-fi is simply an expansion of what the world’s top theoretical physicists are discussing. In The Prestige , the fantastical takes a backseat and the big twist is that — spoilers! — there was simply a twin brother. In that lens, it only makes sense that Nolan would make a film about the man who made the most powerful object in human history.

Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer (2023)

Nuclear weapons, in particular, have been present in Nolan films for over a decade. The Dark Knight Rises revolves around a neutron bomb. When promoting Interstellar , the director told The Daily Beast that such weapons are one of his greatest fears. And Tenet even namedrops Oppenheimer. When Oppenheimer producer Charles Roven (The Dark Knight trilogy) suggested the book to Nolan, it’s easy to see why the director signed on so quickly.

And while this is Nolan’s first biopic, the director nearly made one about Howard Hughes two decades ago. Jim Carrey was to star and Nolan calls it “the best script I’ve ever written,” but it was scrapped once Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator went into production. Nolan put many of those thematic interests into Bruce Wayne. And if certain lines in the IMAX exclusive trailer are any indication — “You’re a dilettante, you’re a womanizer, unstable, theatrical, neurotic” — some may have also found a place in Oppenheimer .

IMAX and Explosions

Oppenheimer will feature footage in color and in black-and-white, harkening back to the director’s breakout film, Memento . But the IMAX-obsessed Nolan encountered an immediate technical hurdle: no one had ever shot on IMAX film in black-and-white before .

“So we challenged the people at Kodak and Fotokem to make this work for us,” Nolan told Total Film. “And they stepped up. For the first time ever, we were able to shoot IMAX film in black-and-white. And the results were thrilling and extraordinary.”

However, no hurdle would be greater for the practical-forward director than simulating the Trinity Test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. Details are sparse, but Nolan confirmed to Total Film that his team accomplished it without CGI. Given how unprecedented even a tiny fraction of an atomic explosion would be for a film production, one must ask if miniatures and/or forced perspective were used. But as with all Nolan movies, only time will tell.

Oppenheimer opens in theaters on July 21, 2023. Get your tickets now .

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Oppenheimer (2023) - Movie Review

Oppenheimer has to he Nolan’s best film, absolute virtuoso. Cillian Murphy was masterful and a surprisingly great performance from Robert Downey Jr, which I haven’t seen since he played the titular character in Chaplin. We get such a great character study and a look into the mind of Oppenheimer, really creating this antithesis of a man that is carrying moral and intellectual dilemmas, I’d venture to say this was thanks to Murphy’s mournful eyes, you just feel this weight that he carries. Nolan does get a little too cute with the science and technicalities, which can be a bit of a bore fest trying to understand. There was also some unnecessary plot points and characters that really just didn’t serve the character much more, and I’m talking about Florence Pugh’s character. I understand what Nolan was TRYING to do, which was show us Oppenheimer’s moral compass, but it actually fell flat and added unnecessary time to the film and the Pughster was underutilized. There is so much happening in this film that Nolan throws at you but he is so masterful in creating this beautiful web of plot and characters that turns into this well tuned symphony. It’s a long film, way longer than it should be but it’s excellently crafted and beautifully acted. This might be Nolan’s masterpiece that I can’t rewatch right away haha Sad that I couldn’t see this in 70mm because it would’ve been such a great experience, but I’m so happy to see Cillian Murphy in leading role, a vastly underrated and under appreciated actor.

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What was the chevalier incident oppenheimer's communist connection explained.

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Oppenheimer's Ending Explained - Can We Forgive J. Robert Oppenheimer?

The incredible 3-hour western epic that united john wayne, james stewart & henry fonda, one of mike flanagan's favorite stephen king books is ripe for a remake after movie with 49% on rt.

The Chevalier Incident ruined Oppenheimer's reputation, shedding light on his ties to communism.
The incident surrounded Chevalier giving Oppenheimer suspicious information.
Oppenheimer's lies led to the outcome of his 1954 security hearing.

Among the countless names thrown around in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer , one of the most pivotal is Chevalier, whose incident ruined Oppenheimer's career. Back in 2023, Oppenheimer was released with incredible anticipation. The three-hour epic boasts an incredible cast and impressive visuals thoughtfully planned by Nolan. The film is also full of significant historical moments that shed light on the true story of J. Robert Oppenheimer . By doing this, Oppenheimer showcases different sides of its titular character.

While the creation and detonation of the atomic bomb are massively important to Oppenheimer, these events are one part of a larger puzzle. The movie delves into Oppenheimer's early years at the University of Cambridge and his move to California, along with the decades after Los Alamos and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, what may be the biggest plot point surrounding Oppenheimer's later years is the Chevalier Incident and the 1954 AEC security hearing that lost the scientist his Q clearance. Though the incident itself seems minimal when it happens, it ends up snowballing into an act that costs Oppenheimer everything.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer follows its titular subject — before & after he created the atomic bomb. We break down the biopic's ending in detail.

Oppenheimer's Connection To Haakon Chevalier Explained

Oppenheimer met chevalier at berkeley.

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer looks at the camera dishevelled in Oppenheimer.

J. Robert Oppenheimer first met Haakon Chevalier in 1937 (via Broad). At that time, the men both worked at the University of California, Berkeley , with Oppenheimer working in the physics department and Chevalier teaching Romance languages. Haakon Chevalier was born in New Jersey in 1901 to Norwegian and French parents (via Federal Bureau of Investigation). Before meeting Oppenheimer, he was beginning to establish himself as a writer and translator. In 1937, Oppenheimer and Chevalier bonded over their shared beliefs. This led them to found a branch of the Berkeley teacher's union which held events supporting leftist ideas (via Broad).

In the years after the Chevalier Incident, this kinship between Oppenheimer and Chevalier came under serious fire. This was because Chevalier was one of many people that Oppenheimer befriended who had communist ties (via Herken). Along with Chevalier, Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, and his brother, Frank, were both former members of the Communist Party USA. Oppenheimer's girlfriend, Jean Tatlock , was also a known communist. Therefore, when anti-communist sentiment increased following World War II, Oppenheimer's relationship to communism was brought into question. Ultimately, these bonds led to the security hearing that stripped him of his Q clearance (via American Prometheus).

What Happened During Oppenheimer's Chevalier Incident

Chevalier told oppenheimer about a spy.

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer.

The Chevalier Incident is a small moment considering how much trouble it ended up causing Oppenheimer. According to Herken, in the early months of 1943, Chevalier joined Oppenheimer at his home for what Oppenheimer presented as a dinner party with friends. However, the night takes a surprising turn when Chevalier meets Oppenheimer in his kitchen and tells him a disturbing fact. Chevalier tells Oppenheimer that a scientist named George Eltenton is capable of getting information to the Soviet Union . Oppenheimer quickly tells his friend he's uninterested in this concept, and Chevalier drops it. Yet, the "incident" lived on.

The Chevalier Incident spiraled when J. Robert Oppenheimer tried to hide that it happened

The Chevalier Incident spiraled when J. Robert Oppenheimer tried to hide that it happened. In August 1943, Oppenheimer told authorities at the Manhattan Project that three men at Berkeley had been pressured to reveal nuclear secrets. He blamed the incident on an individual who worked at Shell Oil named Eltenton. Months later, when he was probed about this revelation, Oppenheimer revealed that the culprit was actually Chevalier, who had approached Oppenheimer's brother. Three years later, Oppenheimer gave yet another foggy representation of the facts before admitting that Chevalier had approached him about transmitting nuclear information to the Soviet Union (via Herken).

How The Chevalier Incident Played A Role In Oppenheimer's Hearing

Chevalier made oppenheimer suspicious.

In the 1940s, Oppenheimer's strange behavior surrounding the Chevalier Incident was dismissed because of his role in the Manhattan Project (via Herken). In 1954, the same wasn't true. When J. Robert Oppenheimer was called into a private security hearing in front of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Chevalier Incident played a significant role in proving Oppenheimer's suspicious nature . According to American Prometheus, investigators used Oppenheimer's lies to argue that the scientist was trying to hide his communist ties. They theorized that the information leak at Los Alamos was Oppenheimer's fault and that he had given the information to Chevalier.

In Oppenheimer, it is revealed that the information leak at Los Alamos was actually caused by Klaus Fuchs.

In reality, Oppenheimer was simply trying to protect his friend (via American Prometheus). Though he likely would have benefited from telling the truth all along, his lies were simply a result of preserving Chevalier's reputation . Unfortunately, Oppenheimer's actions led to his security clearance being revoked in 1954. If the Chevalier Incident had not happened, it is unclear whether the same result would have occurred. In this way, the Chevalier Incident is a brief but incredibly momentous scene in the grand scheme of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer , and the real life of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Sources: Federal Bureau of Investigation , Broad, Herke

Oppenheimer

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Oppenheimer is a film by Christopher Nolan, which follows the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind the atomic bomb. Cillian Murphy will play the titular role, with the story based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

Will Oppenheimer 2 Ever Happen? The Studio Has The Perfect 3-Word Answer

"Oppenheimer" blew away box office expectations , taking in nearly $1 billion worldwide. The fact that a three-hour dramatic biopic about the creation of the atomic bomb brought in superhero movie numbers is a testament to the fact that audiences are still willing to give more mature films a chance. Naturally, Hollywood will try to make a franchise out of just about anything, but luckily, it sounds like "Oppenheimer" will remain a one-and-done affair — unless something truly horrific happens.

Donna Langley, Chief Content Officer and Chairman for NBCUniversal Studio Group, spoke with Variety about the studio's future projects, which included a reflection on Christopher Nolan's latest film. It may have been a surprising juggernaut at the box office, but Langley stated how the film's success just shows that "there are no rules in cinema." Jokingly, the prospect of whether Universal would pursue "Oppenheimer 2" came up, with Langley succinctly stating, "Let's hope not."

At three hours in length, Nolan's historical epic does a good job of showcasing the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his role in the development of nuclear warfare. There were a number of disturbing things that didn't make it into "Oppenheimer," but it's a fairly comprehensive story that leaves nothing else to say in a prospective sequel. The only possible follow-up would be if something new happens involving atomic bombs, and if that occurs, there will be bigger things to worry about than box office numbers.

Oppenheimer may get a different kind of follow-up

"Oppenheimer" follows the creation and aftermath of the atomic bomb's creation, ending with a chilling conversation that features Oppenheimer reflecting on how he and his team may have just doomed the world. It's a foreboding finale, indicating that sooner or later, life as we know it could come to a scorching, violent end if any global superpower decides to unleash chaos. The brilliant scientist's story may have been at the heart of Christopher Nolan's film, but the possibilities of nuclear warfare are ripe for movie storytelling, and another modern filmmaking auteur has a project in the works that could become an unofficial companion piece to Nolan's opus.

Denis Villeneuve is set to make "Dune 3," though audiences shouldn't expect it any time soon . But while the follow-up to the recent hit, which will likely draw from "Dune: Messiah," gets going, Villeneuve is working on another film project, an adaptation of the book "Nuclear War: A Scenario" by Annie Jacobson. The thriller offers a hypothetical yet realistic minute-by-minute play-through of what could occur if North Korea attacked the United States with nuclear weapons, drawing from interviews with military personnel and other experts. It's effectively a worst-case scenario of what might transpire should a nuclear war break out, bringing Oppenheimer's chilling visions of the future to fruition.

While "Oppenheimer" presents the past and present of atomic weaponry, Villeneuve's project could showcase the potential future. When considering whether the events of "Nuclear War: A Scenario" could actually transpire, it's good to keep in mind the words of Donna Langley: "Let's hope not."

'Oppenheimer' sex scene with Cillian Murphy sparks backlash in India: 'Attack on Hinduism'

Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh 's sex scene in " Oppenheimer " has sparked backlash in India over the use of a sacred text.

The Christopher Nolan film details the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist whose stewardship of the Manhattan Project led to the atomic bomb, the death of tens of thousands and the end of World War II.

India’s Information Commissioner and Save Culture Save India Foundation founder Uday Mahurkar called the sex scene between Murphy, who plays the titular character, and Pugh, who plays his lover Jean Tatlock, a “ scathing attack on Hinduism ," on social media Saturday.

In "Oppenheimer," Tatlock pauses in the midst of intercourse and asks Oppenheimer to read the Bhagavad Gita. "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," the scientist reads from the text as the pair resume sex. The quote from one of Hinduism's most sacred scriptures is repeated throughout the film.

"The Bhagwad Geeta is one of the most revered scriptures of Hinduism. Geeta has been the inspiration for countless sanyasis, brahmcharis and legends who live a life of self-control and perform selfless noble deeds," Mahurkar wrote in a lengthy statement. "We do not know the motivation and logic behind this unnecessary scene on life of a scientist."

He continued: "But this is a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus."

Mahurkar called for Nolan to remove the scene from the movie.

'Oppenheimer' review: Christopher Nolan's epic is a crafty blast of nuclear doomsday dread

"We urge, on behalf of billion Hindus and timeless tradition of lives being transformed by revered Geeta, to do all that is needed to uphold dignity of their revered book and remove this scene from your film across world," he concluded. "Should you choose to ignore this appeal it would be deemed as a deliberate assault on Indian civilisation."

Murphy told Indian film critic Sucharita Tyagi ahead of the "Oppenheimer" premiere that he read the Bhagavad Gita in preparation for filming.

"I thought it was an absolutely beautiful text, very inspiring," he said. "I think it was a consolation to (Oppenheimer), he kind of needed it and it provided him a lot of consolation, all his life."

'Oppenheimer': Emily Blunt got 'withering' looks from Christopher Nolan for wearing Uggs

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‘house of the dragon’ season 2, episode 3 recap and review: old feuds and bad blood.

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House of the Dragon

Sunday night’s episode of House of the Dragon opens on an old feud. A group of Brackens and a group of Blackwoods argue over the border of their lands. One side has committed to Rhaenyra’s cause; the other, to Aegon’s. It seems likely that the only reason they’re supporting different sides is out of spite. Hotter heads prevail when it comes to a kingdom on the precipice of war, even if no bloodshed is as appalling to the gods as that of kin slaying kin.

This petty squabble ends with words and shoving. One young man draws his sword. Then the scene cuts to sometime later and the same field littered with the corpses of both Houses as far as the eye can see. The countryside is slick with blood and wreckage. The old windmill has seen better days.

So the first real battle of the Dance of Dragons has finally taken place, albeit offscreen (I think to great effect). It won’t be the last. It seems that much of Season 2, or at least its first half, will be devoted to the early rumblings of war rather than to the war itself, and to the cooler heads’ attempting to call the whole thing off. Daemon (Matt Smith) and Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) want war, clearly, but what about Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Allicent (Olivia Cooke)?

Allicent and Rhaenyra

Rhaenyra discusses the coming bloodshed with her aunt, Rhaenys (Eve Best) and decides she must go to King’s Landing to meet with Allicent face-to-face. She asks Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) for help, and the White Worm gives her the one location the Queen Dowager visits without anyone watching: The Great Sept, where she goes to light candles and say her prayers.

Best Nintendo Switch Games: It’s Mario’s World, We’re Just Visiting

Rhaenyra disguises herself as a nun and makes her way to the Sept where she finds Allicent and kneels beside her, much to her once-friend’s shock. She pleads with Allicent to do whatever she can to avoid war, and then the conversation turns to what exactly King Viserys I said in his dying moments. It’s a pretty big revelation to both of them when it turns out he was discussing “the prince that was promised” and the Song of Ice and Fire—not Aegon his son at all. But Allicent, though clearly shaken, says it’s too late. War is coming and there’s nothing she can—or will—do about it.

Allow me a moment to complain, not about this show but about Game Of Thrones. I’m reminded of just how desperately silly the ending was and the many foibles made especially in Season 8. I maintain, though I’m not sure George R.R. Martin will ever finish his books to prove me right, that Jon Snow is the Song of Ice and Fire. He is the prince that was promised—not Daenerys, as the show kept hinting at, stupidly, before making it clear she was anything but.

In fact, the show simply discarded all prophecy as gracelessly and clumsily as possible. Jon didn’t fight and kill the Night King. Arya swooped in at the 11th hour and managed that because the show gave her massive superpowers for no good reason whatsoever, making her far, far less interesting as a character in the process.

Then Jon kills Dany and is exiled, while Bran of all people becomes king! Jon was the heir to the Iron Throne! He was the blood of Stark (ice) and Targaryen (fire)! House of the Dragon makes it clear that this prophecy is a big enough deal to include in a prequel but it just reminds me of how badly Thrones screwed up.

Anyways . . . Rhaenyra’s attempt to avoid war was only a half-baked one at best. She never offered Allicent anything as a bargaining chip. All she did is insist that she was the rightful heir, that her father loved her and that Allicent was mistaken. Did she hope that simply stating her belief about the throne over again would somehow convince the Queen Dowager, and that she would then—empty-handed—be able to avert war? Convince Aegon to what—give up the throne? There was a time for that, when Aegon clearly didn’t want it, but that ship has sailed.

A few other very significant things happened this episode. Rhaenyra sends her youngest boys away with Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) Daemon’s daughter and younger sister to Beala, to go to the Vale. Rhaena, as you may recall, is the one family member who still doesn’t have her own dragon. This makes her feel very left out of all the fun, especially the “fly a dragon around patrolling for enemies” fun. But along with the children, Rhaenyra sends Rhaena off with a clutch of unhatched dragon eggs. This mollifies her to some degree.

(It turns out that these are, indeed, Dany’s eggs in Game Of Thrones, though this is a major departure from Martin’s Fire and Blood. I go into further depth in this piece on how this is different from the book and what it means).

Daemon, meanwhile, makes his way to a very wet, very dreary and mostly unoccupied Harrenhal where he meets with the steward, Ser Simon Strong (Simon Russell Beale) and takes up residence, eager to raise armies and rebuild the massive fortress. The Riverlands, it appears, are the key to the entire war and both Team Green and Team Black are making their preparations to bring the lords of the Riverlands to their respective sides. Old Grover Tully is ancient and infirm, however, and his bannermen fractious and unruly as a result.

At this dark castle, Daemon has a strange vision of a young Rhaenyra—Milly Alcock’s first appearance on the show since the first half of Season 1 and quite a surprise!—sewing young prince Jaehaerys’s head back on.

Side-note: I love you, George R.R. Martin, but if you had made these names easier to spell, you might have finished Winds of Winter by now. Sigh.

Daemon in Harrenhal

This is not a normal run-of-the-windmill vision, but one that a witch lends the taciturn prince—er, my pardon, your Grace— and mark my words, this particular witch will have a much larger part to play as this story progresses. “You will die in this castle,” she tells Daemon. Witches are always prophesying the dourest things in Westeros.

I don’t think the show conveys this well, but Daemon effectively just captured Harrenhal for Team Black without shedding a drop of blood. Landing his dragon, Caraxes, on the roof certainly helped. Strong’s dislike of his relative, Larys Strong (Matthew Needham) doesn’t hurt. Larys, meanwhile, becomes Master of Whispers this same episode, thanks to his endless good advice for young Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney).

We also meet two other significant new characters. The first is Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox of Slow Horses who plays this type of character too well) Alicent’s brother who has apparently spent all this time in Oldtown rather than at court. I’d say he showed up offscreen in the past but since he’s only first introduced to Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) this episode, I suppose he’s just never been to King’s Landing before. He comes across as arrogant and spoiled, and even the Lord Commander is irritated with him—and I hate agreeing with the Dornishman about anything!

Ser Criston Cole

Speaking of Cole, he’s off with an army to the Riverlands and Harrenhal. He’s tired of all the talk, of all the hand-wringing. He wants action, and so he takes action. Ser Gwayne accompanies him and as they make their way west, Gwayne and his retainers leave the body of the army to find a nearby inn. Cole follows, annoyed at the young knight’s lackadaisical nonsense, and it’s at this point, in an open field, that he spots the dragon high above.

He urges his mount forward and tells the others to ride hard for the trees. Up in the sky, Baela (Bethany Antonia) is on her dragon, Moondancer. She spots the glint of armor and descends as the knights gallop for their lives. Later, we learn that she was close enough to identify Criston Cole, though the Hand and his men do make it into the cover of the forest before any harm can come to them, and Gwayne expresses his gratitude, earning the Lord Commander another loyalist.

The other new character we meet in this episode identifies himself as a Dragonseed—that is, a Targaryen or Valyrian (including House Velaryon) bastard fathered in the Blackwater Bay region. In this series and in Martin’s Fire and Blood, these include (and yes, this is spoilery but I think it will help to understand):

Hugh Hammer (Kieran Bew) the blacksmith we’ve met earlier this season;
Addam (Clinton Liberty) and his younger brother, Alyn of Hull (Abubakar Salim) both Velaryon bastards, though their parentage remains in doubt.
Ulf White (Tom Bennett) the man we meet at the brothel tavern in this latest episode, though we spotted him by the ratcatcher gallows last week. He exposits some on his lineage, which is why I thought it worth expounding upon in this post.

There are others we haven’t met yet who I will leave off the list, but these will all be very important characters as the war unfolds thanks to their unique lineage even as bastards. We also hear, once again, about young Daeron and his dragon Tessarion. Alicent’s youngest has yet to show his cherubic face on House of the Dragon, but he’s on his way.

In that same tavern that very same night, two brothers come to visit. One is loudmouthed and obnoxious; the other is cool as a cucumber. Neither really ought to be there.

We learn earlier that Aegon has replaced the dead Kingsguard with his lackeys, showing all the wisdom and foresight of a lump of coal. None of these slouching ingrates appear to have much training or discipline, another annoyance for Criston Cole, who I’m almost starting to feel empathy toward (yuck). As they dress him for battle—he insists on following after Cole’s army against the wishes of the Small Council—they mention going out to the brothels with a squire who has yet to lose his virginity. “But you swore vows of chastity,” Aegon tells them, sternly. They laugh at first, but are quickly quiet as their king seems to be totally serious. (This is just after Larys convinces the king not to go to battle, after all, through some clever little lies that play right into Aegon’s lack of self-confidence).

Perhaps he was serious about those vows, but hours later we see him stumble into the brothel drunk as a skunk, laughing and shouting, like some scrawny young Robert Baratheon. Perhaps he’s more like Robert than he is Joffrey, but either way he’s hardly acting the part of king, or grieving father. He finds his brother, Aemond, laying on the lap of the older prostitute and mocks him mercilessly. Aemond ends up leaving, a look of grim determination on his face, but not before we see him completely nude. It’s not the only somewhat shocking bit of nudity we get in this scene, as there’s a bit of (dare I say unnecessary) felatio just before. It’s almost as though HBO is trying to balance the scales when it comes to male and female anatomy shown across Game Of Thrones and House Of The Dragon. It’s perhaps mildly ironic that this season of The Boys is showing so much full-frontal male nudity at the same exact time.

In any case, lots and lots of moving pieces and characters both great and small this episode. Nothing quite so violent and shocking as the Blood and Cheese incident, or the battle of the Cargyll twins, Erryk and Arryk, but still a terrific episode that continues to build, however slowly, toward all-out war. It appears next week’s episode is called A Dance Of Dragons which suggests that the war will kick off in earnest soon enough.

A Council of War

Scattered Thoughts:

The exchange between Alicent and poor Helaena (Phia Saban) was very interesting, especially when the daughter tells her mother she forgives her. “What?” Alicent asks, taken aback. “I forgive you,” Helaena says again, clearly of the mind that it needs no explanation.
We see Seasmoke, Laenor’s dragon, and wonder “Who will claim this majestic beast as their own?” Hint: We’ve already met the character, but only just this season.
I already miss Rhys Ifans even if Otto Hightower is a right bastard. Other characters I miss: Graham McTavish’s Ser Harrold and King Viserys I, played so perfectly by Paddy Considine.
Both Aegon’s Small Council and Rhaenyra’s annoy me. I suppose they’re meant to since they annoy both Aegon and Rhaenyra to no end. The gall of Rhaenyra’s lords trying to shuffle her off to “safety” so they can lead the war planning. Then again, I’m not sure Rhaenyra is really up to the task, either.
I’ll add more scattered thoughts as they come to me.

Here’s my video breakdown of the episode :

What did you think of this episode and how are you enjoying the season so far?

Let me know your thoughts on Twitter , Instagram or Facebook . Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog . Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.

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Oppenheimer movie review & film summary (2023)
Christopher Nolan's biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, is a film about faces and their reactions to the consequences of his actions. The review praises the close-ups, the editing, and the metaphorical use of images, but criticizes the lack of direct depiction of the bombing of Japan.
'Oppenheimer' Review: A Man for Our Time
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 ...
Oppenheimer (2023)
Page 1 of 6, 11 total items. During World War II, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. appoints physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer and a team of ...
Oppenheimer review: an unrelenting stream of bombastic vignettes
Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer — in theaters July 21st — is a big, bombastic, and busy play at profundity that never coalesces into a cohesive story. ... Movie Review; Oppenheimer is an ...
'Oppenheimer' Review: Christopher Nolan's Riveting Historical ...
Oppenheimer, Robert Downey Jr. 'Oppenheimer' Review: Christopher Nolan Makes a Riveting Historical Psychodrama, but It Doesn't Build to a Big Bang. Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, July 17 ...
Oppenheimer review: Christopher Nolan's powerful, timely masterpiece
The movie event of the summer is worthy of the hype. Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' deserves the biggest screens possible to show off both its atomic fire and its passionate performances.
'Oppenheimer' Review: Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan's Epic Drama
Oppenheimer. The Bottom Line A haunting film about the past that casts a fearful eye toward the future. Release date: Friday, July 21. Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey ...
'Oppenheimer' Review
Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a tremendous accomplishment for the writer-director, a massive film that feels like Nolan's most mature work so far. 9 10. Pros. Christopher Nolan ...
Oppenheimer First Reviews: Breathtaking, Ballsy, and One of the Best
According to the first reviews of Nolan's latest, Oppenheimer is a remarkable achievement, and it's sure to go down as one of the best films of 2023. The biopic stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the American effort to create the first atomic bomb. His performance is being celebrated, though many in the movie's cast ...
Oppenheimer Movie Review
July 23, 2023. age 18+. I wouldn't ever take my kids (even when they were teenagers) We enjoy movies based on historical events but were disappointed in Oppenheimer. The story was okay but the infidelity, sex scenes, and lingering frontal nudity had me giving the film "thumbs down". Hollywood is so frustrating to me.
'Oppenheimer' Called the Best and Most Important Film This Century
The official review embargo for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer isn't lifted until Wednesday, but writer-director Paul Schrader has some strong words about the World War II science epic ...
Oppenheimer (2023)
Oppenheimer: Directed by Christopher Nolan. With Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Alden Ehrenreich. The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.
'Oppenheimer' Review: A bomb and its fallout
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 ...
'Oppenheimer' review: Cillian Murphy is searingly good in history epic
'Oppenheimer' review: Christopher Nolan's epic is a crafty blast of nuclear doomsday dread. ... packs a whole lot of movie into three hours, with a dense narrative and an outstanding cast. Cillian ...
Oppenheimer Is More Than a Creation Myth About the Atomic Bomb
July 19, 2023. Almost all of Oppenheimer is composed of conversation. There's academic back-and-forth among theoretical physicists as they scribble nuclear equations on chalkboards; heated ...
Oppenheimer
Movie Review "Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown,"Jesus said in Luke 4:24. That can certainly be said of J. Robert Oppenheimer, too. The theoretical physicist is called a prophet among physicists in the field. But despite his advancements in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, very few people in America seem to ...
'Oppenheimer' Review: Christopher Nolan Epic Falls Short of Greatness
Inception filmmaker's extensive, exhaustive portrait of the "father of the atomic bomb" is both thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and not enough. By David Fear. July ...
Oppenheimer (film)
Oppenheimer is a 2023 epic biographical thriller drama film written, directed, and produced by Christopher Nolan. ... Kate Gardner in a review of the film for physicsworld writes, The one glaring omission from the film is in fact 19,000 omissions - the number of people, mostly Indigenous, who lived near the Trinity test site in New Mexico. ...
'Oppenheimer' movie review: A thrilling, terrifying true story
Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" is nothing if not a cautionary tale, a stunning film about brilliance and betrayal, arrogance and willful ignorance. It's powerful, a technically dazzling ...
'Oppenheimer' review: Christopher Nolan's masterpiece
00:00. 03:06. Director Christopher Nolan's seismic "Oppenheimer" is that rarest of things: a sophisticated and bracing movie that's made for adults and makes nobody say, "I'll wait ...
Oppenheimer
by Dan Jolin |. Published on 19 07 2023. Release Date: 20 Jul 2023. Original Title: Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer is not an easy movie. To say its subject matter and theme are inherently downbeat is ...
Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer
Billboards and movie theater pop-ups across Los Angeles have been ticking down for months now: Christopher Nolan's epic account of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, is nearing an explosive release on July 21, 2023. Nolan movies are always incredibly secretive, twists locked alongside totems behind safe doors, actors not spilling an ounce of Earl Grey tea.
Oppenheimer, review: Cillian Murphy dazzles as the destroyer of worlds
Playing Oppenheimer from his early 20s to late 50s, the 47-year-old Murphy gives the performance of his life, imbuing Oppenheimer's body with an enthralling nervous eroticism and his voice with ...
Oppenheimer (2023)
Oppenheimer (2023) - Movie Review . Oppenheimer has to he Nolan's best film, absolute virtuoso. Cillian Murphy was masterful and a surprisingly great performance from Robert Downey Jr, which I haven't seen since he played the titular character in Chaplin. We get such a great character study and a look into the mind of Oppenheimer, really ...
What Was The Chevalier Incident? Oppenheimer's Communist Connection
The movie delves into Oppenheimer's early years at the University of Cambridge and his move to California, along with the decades after Los Alamos and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, what may be the biggest plot point surrounding Oppenheimer's later years is the Chevalier Incident and the 1954 AEC security hearing that lost the scientist his Q ...
Will Oppenheimer 2 Ever Happen? The Studio Has The Perfect 3 ...
"Oppenheimer" blew away box office expectations, taking in nearly $1 billion worldwide.The fact that a three-hour dramatic biopic about the creation of the atomic bomb brought in superhero movie ...
'Oppenheimer' sex scene sparks backlash over use of sacred Hindu text
Mahurkar called for Nolan to remove the scene from the movie. 'Oppenheimer' review:Christopher Nolan's epic is a crafty blast of nuclear doomsday dread "We urge, on behalf of billion Hindus and ...
'Inside Out 2' is the first movie of 2024 to top $1 billion ...
"Inside Out 2" has become the fastest-ever animated film to surpass $1 billion globally, shooting past the box office milestone this weekend, just 19 days after its release.
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The found footage-style horror film stars David Dastmalchian ("The Suicide Squad," "Oppenheimer") as Jack Delroy, the host of a fictional 1970s talk show.
'House Of The Dragon' Season 2, Episode 3 Recap And Review ...
House of the Dragon. Credit: HBO. Sunday night's episode of House of the Dragon opens on an old feud.A group of Brackens and a group of Blackwoods argue over the border of their lands. One side ...

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50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Common Sense Selections for Games

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Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

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Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

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How to Help Kids Spot Misinformation and Disinformation

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

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A Lot or a Little?

Positive Messages

Positive Role Models

Diverse Representations

Violence & Scariness

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Parents Need to Know

Where to Watch

Community Reviews

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

Is It Any Good?

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