Viewing entries tagged
Oppenheimer
The world might be falling apart by almost any metric you can imagine, but one thing (maybe the only thing?) that gave me solace this year was the amazing slate of films that 2023 provided. To my mind, 2023 was the best year in cinema since 2007, another banner movie year with an incredibly rich set of releases.
As you’ll see, 2023 offered up a similarly seemingly bottomless well of great cinema.
With Oppenheimer, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has made nothing less than the Lawrence of Arabia of the 21st century. Like David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece, Nolan’s picture is epic and grand in both scope and scale, while delicately humanizing a figure about whom most of the populace – myself included, at least, until I saw the movie – know little-to-nothing.
While the grandeur of recreating the first human-made atomic reaction has transfixed media coverage and those anticipating the film’s release, Oppenheimer’s true triumph is in unlocking the mystery of the man. By the time we reach its conclusion, Nolan’s film has given us a crystal-clear understanding of who J. Robert Oppenheimer was. We understand what drove him to unleash an unimaginable weapon upon mankind and how that work tortured him for the rest of his life.
