Christopher Nolan, one of the most influential directors of the 21st century is here with his next film. Perhaps his most important film. Perhaps the most important film of this decade. Perhaps his best. We don’t know, the moment of truth is in two days. However, we could just get a glimpse of the overall vibe around the film with the critics’ reviews. We were kept in the dark for a long time by Universal Pictures as they set an embargo lift-up date just two days before the film’s release. Although, now the day has finally come where we get to know the critics’ thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus. Spoiler alert, this might be his best work. Oppenheimer could be the film of the year.
Oppenheimer Reviews Round-Up: Nolan’s Best?
First of all, The Rotten Tomatoes score of the film is outstanding currently standing at 96% from 98 review but it is fluctuating between 94 and 98%. Also, its Metacritic score stands at 91% from 41 reviews which is an achievement in itself. Following are the reviews for the film from all the major outlets, however, the the real moment of truth would be how you yourself perceive it.
Stephen Romei (The Australian) – “Christopher Nolan has done it again. He’s taken a historical story we know a bit about and turned it into an edge-of-the-seat, heart-in-the-mouth drama.” Original Score: 4/5
Michael Phillips (Chicago Tribune) – “This is a film about terrible risks and a planet likely destined to destroy itself someday. And we see it, and feel it.” Original Score: 3.5/4
Charlotte O’Sullivan (London Evening Standard) – “The simultaneously old-school and new-school gorgeousness of Oppenheimer can’t be overstressed.” Original Score: 5/5
Jake Wilson {The Age (Australia)} – “[An] often laborious yet genuinely strange and gripping movie — a grand spectacle inspired by some of the grimmest events in human history, and itself an invention meant to blow us all away.” Original Score: 3.5/5
Liz Shannon Miller (Consequence) – “Its best moments stand out as some of the most original and exciting filmmaking of the year, highs that do a lot to counterbalance the sequences which dive back into bureaucracy and comparatively petty rivalries.” Original Score: B
Caryn James (BBC.com) – “Downey is the crucial supporting player, and he gives a shrewd, dynamic performance as the wily, insecure, powerful Strauss.” Original Score: 5/5
Danny Leigh (Financial Times) – “Nolan taps the full sensory potential of moviemaking, pushing picture and sound to meet the scale of the story: clever lines dot the script; the whole project is admirably willing to wrestle with matters of great weight through cinema.” Original Score: 4/5
Manohla Dargis (New York Times) – ““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.”
Ann Hornaday (Washington Post) – “[Nolan] has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end. Oppenheimer boldly posits that those arguments are still worth having, in a film of magnitude, profundity and dazzling artistry.” Original Score: 4/4
Tim Grierson (Screen International) – “Nolan demonstrates his usual prowess for impeccable visuals and stunning craftsmanship within a deeply despairing portrait of an arrogant genius who, too late, realised the impact of his monstrous creation.”
Chris Hewitt (Minneapolis Star Tribune) – “Oppenheimer is a movie with power, texture and grace. By the end, we begin to understand its subject, even if we remain baffled by a genius who somehow divorced himself from the damage his theoretical project would do.” Original Score: 3.5/4
Ed Potton {Times (UK)} – “The movie around Murphy is simultaneously breathtaking and mind-melding.” Original Score: 4/5
Dylan Roth (Observer) – “Simultaneously a biography, a mystery, a polemic, and a dense character study, Oppenheimer feels like the film Christopher Nolan has been preparing to make his entire career, and it may very well be his best work.” Original Score: 4/4
Cary Darling (Houston Chronicle) – “That rare summer movie with ideas as big as its ambition and budget…But “Oppenheimer” isn’t a movie that is dependent on special effects for its power. In a film aimed squarely at adults, Nolan keeps the focus as much on the man as the magic.” Original Score: 4.5/5
Justin Chang (Los Angeles Times) – “One of the many satisfactions of Oppenheimer, Nolan’s intellectually thrilling and morally despairing new film, is that it succeeds in locating some of those conventions within another of his ingeniously constructed narrative labyrinths.”
Philip De Semlyen (Time Out) – “Only Nolan could make this potentially forbidding subject matter so thrilling.” Original Score: 5/5
David Fear (Rolling Stone) – “Any filmmaker can create a cinematic universe. (Many have. Too many, some might say.) Very few can show you how a genius perceives the building blocks of our universe, right before that same person imagines something that threatens our existence in it.”
Bill Goodykoontz (Arizona Republic) – “The acting is uniformly brilliant, with Murphy, Downey and Blunt simply astounding.” Original Score: 5/5
Tara Brady (Irish Times) – “The filmmaker’s technique generally counterpoints any caveats and script imperfections. The ensemble cast is starry and strong. … “Brilliance makes up for a lot,” Murphy’s Oppenheimer tells us. It sure does.” Original Score: 4/5
Richard Roeper (Chicago Sun-Times) – “Magnificent. Christopher Nolan’s three-hour historical biopic Oppenheimer is a gorgeously photographed, brilliantly acted, masterfully edited and thoroughly engrossing epic that instantly takes its place among the finest films of this decade.” Original Score: 4/4
David Jenkins (Little White Lies) – “A juggernaut historical biopic that you’ll want to see again asap, even if it doesn’t all work on the first sweep.” Original Score: 5/5
Robbie Collin {Daily Telegraph (UK)} – “It’s at once a speeding roller-coaster and a skin-tingling spiritual portrait; an often classically minded period piece that only Nolan could have made, and only now, after a quarter-century’s run-up.” Original Score: 5/5
Clarisse Loughrey {Independent (UK)} – “Large swathes of the film play out as political thriller, the fuel in its engine being Downey Jr’s titanic colouring of Strauss, all boorishness and manipulative charm.” Original Score: 4/5
Jake Cole (Slant Magazine) – “Oppenheimer joins the ranks of Christopher Nolan’s best work not for preserving some essential inexplicability of nuclear physics but by undermining the idea of science’s objectivity.” Original Score: 3.5/4
Dan Jolin (Empire Magazine) – “A masterfully constructed character study from a great director operating on a whole new level. A film that you don’t merely watch, but must reckon with.” Original Score: 5/5
Brian Truitt (USA Today) – “Cillian Murphy turns in a haunting career-best performance as theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Robert Downey Jr. astounds in a way we haven’t seen in quite some time.” Original Score: 3.5/4
Jake Coyle (Associated Press) – “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.” Original Score: 4/4
Alonso Duralde (The Film Verdict) – “Like its protagonist, Oppenheimer is a work in constant conflict with itself, with most of its problems rooted in Nolan’s screenplay.”
Johnny Oleksinski (New York Post) – “Oppenheimer is a movie that makes you say “Oh my God” over and over again — in awe and in terror.” Original Score: 4/4
Jake Kleinman (Inverse) – “Oppenheimer is a tour de force. An unmatched director at the top of his game throwing off the shackles of science fiction and superheroes to tell the raw story of one man’s transformation into something both more and less than a human being.”
Owen Gleiberman (Variety) – “Cillian Murphy, with a thousand-yard beam, the half-smile of an intellectual rake, and a way of keeping everything close to the vest, gives a phenomenal performance as Oppenheimer, making him fascinating and multi-layered.”
Alison Willmore (New York Magazine/Vulture) – “Its scope comes from Murphy’s haunted performance, and the way that the movie (with help from Ludwig Göransson’s panic attack of a score) submerges you in the mindset of its protagonist as though it can create a psychic connection to the past.”
Richard Lawson (Vanity Fair) – “Oppenheimer is a mainstream offering of uncommon resonance, sending the viewer out of the theater head-spun and itchy-eyed, ears ringing from all its sophisticated, voluble explosion.”
Matt Singer (ScreenCrush) – “Intelligent non-IP-driven filmmaking on a scale we simply don’t see in movie theaters anymore.” Original Score: 8/10
Peter Bradshaw (Guardian) – “This is the big bang, and no one could have made it bigger or more overwhelming than Nolan.” Original Score: 4/5
David Rooney (Hollywood Reporter) – “This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios. It fully embraces the contradictions of an intellectual giant who was also a deeply flawed man.”
Jordan Hoffman (The Messenger) – “The most breathtaking film of the year.” Original Score: 9.2/10
David Ehrlich (indieWire) – ““Oppenheimer” offers an indelible portrait of the age when people began wielding power they couldn’t necessarily control, and few movies have so disturbingly crystallized the horror of opening Pandora’s box.” Original Score: B
Nick Schager (The Daily Beast) – “A divided epic of awe and horror, fission and fusion. It’s simultaneously a unified portrait of a conflicted man and a singular achievement for Hollywood’s reigning blockbuster auteur.”
The story of Oppenheimer is adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer will be the first film to be shot in B/W and IMAX. The film is made on a hefty budget of $185 Million. The film basically has half of Hollywood in it including Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Alden Ehrenreich, David Krumholtz, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, Casey Affleck, Michael Angarano and without a doubt Michael Caine.
The World Changes Forever on 21st July 2023.
If you have any questions regarding Oppenheimer, feel free to ask in the comments below. For more content, stay tuned. As usual, like, subscribe and share our articles as we here are trying to build a community of people High on Cinema!
