'Looking back, 2023 was a year of wild swings. And two big strikes (if you’ll forgive the pun) — first the Writers Guild and then the Screen Actors Guild took the studios and streamers to task, forcing production to a halt. Yet whatever was going on behind the scenes, Hollywood had a grand-slam year, asserting its audacious cultural relevance with the historic double-header that was “Barbenheimer.”
Variety’s two chief film critics agree that Christopher Nolan’s portrait of the man behind the Manhattan Project is one for the ages — a “Lawrence of Arabia”-level feat about a turning point in human history, as seen through the haunted blue eyes of one of our finest actors...
Peter Debruge’s Top 10...
2. Oppenheimer
I admit to being underwhelmed by “Oppenheimer” on first viewing. (Hard to imagine, considering the scale, but it didn’t help that the Imax print broke at the film’s press screening, forcing the theater to switch over to a lower-res backup projector — a twist that must have horrified control freak Christopher Nolan.) Grand as anything David Lean ever directed, this massive, awe-powered biopic had been marketed as the making of the atomic bomb, the detonation of which occurs at the two-hour mark, with a third of the movie still to go. Turns out, that last hour holds the (moral) key to why Nolan had to tell this story. After racing to beat the Germans, Manhattan Project super-brain J. Robert Oppenheimer (a never-better Cillian Murphy) faces the terrifying ramifications of what he’s wrought: We now live in a world of nuclear weapons, whose secrets inevitably fell into dangerous hands. I should have known that “Oppenheimer” would demand multiple viewings, as that was true of “Memento,” “Inception” and nearly all Nolan’s films. My advice to you: See it as big as possible as many times as it takes...
Owen Gleiberman's Top 10
1. Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan’s mesmerizing drama became a testament to the promise that serious movies for adults can, and will, have a future in movie theaters. In the wake of its success, however, many have asked: How is it that a densely packed three-hour movie about the father of the atomic bomb became a big-ticket blockbuster on the level of films featuring superheroes, avatars, and Tom Cruise? The answer lies in Nolan’s wizardry as a storyteller. He stages “Oppenheimer” as a coruscating light show of history, dazzling in every detail. It’s a film that draws you in with centrifugal force, even at it both celebrates and interrogates the fabled figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy as a charismatic mandarin whose scientific genius is matched by his self-justifying insolence. If you think the movie falls off in its last third, you haven’t watched it closely enough. Long after the bomb has been dropped, Nolan uses both the extended 1954 security hearing and the amazing performance of Robert Downey Jr. to place Oppenheimer in the crosshairs of judgment, revealing that his delusions were nearly as large as his heroism...'
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"Everyone knows that i'm the most fucking memed awkward person on the internet”
- Cillian Murphy for FTHTSI magazine.
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