Is ‘Oppenheimer’ Christopher Nolan’s Best Movie? Here’s How It Ranks

I’ve seen many viewers saying they believe that Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is his best work. Robert Downey Jr. says it’s the best movie he’s ever been in. Despite going up against the Barbie behemoth, it is about to set a record for his best non-Batman opening ever, even being rated R.

So, how does it rank, mathematically? What are critics and audiences saying? Given that the tallies are in, we can now see how it’s stacking up against his others, though of course whether it’s actually “better” is up to the individual viewer, and everyone has their own lists.

I’ll do two lists, one with Rotten Tomatoes critic and audience scores, another that’s Metacritic with more specific numbers rather than just positive/negative. If there’s a tie, it goes to the movie with more reviews in. So, here. we. go:

1. The Dark Knight (94% critics, 94%, audience)
2. Oppenheimer (94% critics, 94% audience)
3. Memento (93% critics, 94% audience)
4. Dunkirk (92% critics, 81% audience)
5. Insomnia (92% critics, 77% audience)
6. The Dark Knight Rises (87% critics, 90% audience)
7. Inception (87% critics, 91% audience)
8. Batman Begins (84% critics, 94% audience)
9. The Prestige (76% critics, 92% audience)
10. Interstellar (73% critics, 86% audience)
11. Following (83% critics, 85% audience)
12. Tenet (69% critics, 75% audience)

And here’s the Metacritic list for more fine-tuned numbers:

1. Dunkirk (94 critics, 8.3 users)
2. Oppenheimer (89 critics, 9.1 users)
3. The Dark Knight (84 critics, 8.9 users)
4. Memento (83 critics, 8.9 users)
5. The Dark Knight Rises (78 critics, 8.8 users)
6. Insomnia (78 critics, 8.0 users)
7. Interstellar (74 critics, 8.5 users)
8. Inception (74 critics, 8.7 users)
9. Batman Begins (70 critics, 8.3 users)
10. Tenet (69 critics, 7.4 users)
11. The Prestige (66 critics, 8.6 users)
12. Following (60 critics, 8.1 users)

So, what are the takeaways from both these lists? The main one is that Chris Nolan has never made a truly bad move. Every single one on both lists is about the 60 “positive” threshold. Generally speaking, audiences like Nolan movies just a little more than critics. Every Metacritic score is higher except Dunkirk. 10 out of 12 movies on Rotten Tomatoes are either higher with audiences or tied. But often they’re very close.

Out of his most recent movies, it seems that Tenet is the closest he has to a miss. Dunkirk tops the overall critic scores while The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer are tied in both critic and audience score right now. Oppenheimer is the highest user-rated movie of all of them on Metacritic, though it’s still early.

So, you can make the argument that Oppenheimer might be Nolan’s best movie based on the “objective” charts here. But again, it’s really up to you. I’m still going with Memento, personally, but it was definitely great, and one of his best.

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