Since breaking through with his second feature Memento in 2001, Christopher Nolan has been one of the most critically and commercially popular filmmakers on the planet. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards (he won Best Picture and Best Director in 2024 with Oppenheimer) and is currently ranked seventh on the list of highest grossing directors of all time (not adjusted for inflation). Career-wise, you can't do it much better than Nolan: He started out with two indies, dipped his toe in the studio waters before tackling a major franchise with Batman Begins, overstayed his welcome with said franchise. and is now the very brand of Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. With his experience, he can make almost any film he wants at the studio of his choice.

Now that he's about to embark on feature number 13 (a currently untitled film starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland and Zendaya), you'd think we'd be able to look back on his 26-year career and find at least one film that drew incredible of critical and auditory restlessness. Up to this point in their filmographies, Spielberg caused critical outrage with '1941' and Hook, while Lucas took the heat for producing Howard the Duck. All of these films receive rave reviews on Rotten Tomatoes from critics (although Hook users give it a favorable 76%).

So what about Nolan? Does he have a stinker in his opus?

According to Rotten TomatoesNolan's lowest-rated feature is 2020's Tenet, the sci-fi/action epic that's been his biggest box office disappointment to date — but with an asterisk given that it was released amid the Covid pandemic. But with a 70% fresh from critics and a 76% rating from RT users, it's a far cry from the offensiveness of movies like Hook and Howard the Duck (or even Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace ). .

If you look at the negative reviews of Tenet, you won't find many pans. Almost everyone has to admit that Nolan's gravity-defying and time-defying sets are mind-boggling, while his sense of scale remains unmatched among his peers. According to the unrated, the sometimes cold Nolan failed to fully engage the audience's emotions this time. The characters played by John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki and Robert Pattinson too often feel like chess pieces being moved counterintuitively across the board. AA Dowd of the AV Club compared the experience of watching Tenet to solving a Rubik's Cube that "revealed a little more of the complexity of its design."

While I agree that Tenet is definitely the most emotionally cold film in Nolan's filmography to date, I believe this is by design. I really love that it's cut like a diamond and so dizzyingly layered that you have to take a second look to fully understand how it all fits together. No matter how you feel about the movie (/Film Chris Evangelista found it frustrating), if that's what counts as a mistake for Nolan, he'll likely remain in extraordinarily high demand for years and years to come.