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Oppenheimer

The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

• Christopher Nolan
• Martin Sherwin
• Cillian Murphy
• Emily Blunt
• 4.1K User reviews
• 481 Critic reviews
• 90 Metascore
• 346 wins & 357 nominations total

• J. Robert Oppenheimer

• Kitty Oppenheimer

• Leslie Groves

• Lewis Strauss

• Senate Aide

• Thomas Morgan

• Gordon Gray

• Lloyd Garrison

• Patrick Blackett

• Senator McGee

• Chairman Magnuson

• Senator Bartlett

• Senator Pastore

• Senator Scott
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Engineering 'Oppenheimer'

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• Trivia In order for the black and white sections of the movie to be shot in the same quality as the rest of the film, Kodak produced a limited supply of its Double-X black and white film stock in 70mm. This film stock was chosen specifically for its heritage - it was originally sold to photographers as Super-XX during World War II and was very popular with photojournalists of the era.
• Goofs The stop signs are yellow in the film, which is accurate. The United States used yellow stop signs until 1954.

J. Robert Oppenheimer : Albert? When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world...

Albert Einstein : I remember it well. What of it?

J. Robert Oppenheimer : I believe we did.

• Alternate versions To get a U/A rating certification in India, the movie was edited to remove or censor all nudity using CGI. For example, the scene where Tatlock and Oppenheimer have a conversation and the former character was topless, the nudity was censored with a CGI black dress. Many Middle Eastern countries use this exact same censored version for release.
• Connections Featured in Louder with Crowder: Going Out with a Bang! (2022)

User reviews 4.1K

• Orlando_Gardner
• Jul 18, 2023

Everything New on Prime Video in June

• How long is Oppenheimer? Powered by Alexa
• Why did Niels Bohr not help with the Manhattan project?
• Did Truman really call Oppenheimer a "crybaby?"
• Were there black people working for the Manhattan project?
• July 21, 2023 (United States)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Official Facebook
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• Oppengeymer
• Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA (only interiors, Los Alamos facilities interiors, including Oppenheimer's house, Fuller Lodge Interior and Exterior)
• Universal Pictures
• Atlas Entertainment
• Gadget Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $100,000,000 (estimated)
• $329,862,540
• $82,455,420
• Jul 23, 2023
• $974,799,171

Technical specs

• Runtime 3 hours
• Black and White
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Digital

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Movie Reviews

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For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film's most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face. 

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) is a film about faces. They talk, a lot. They listen. They react to good and bad news. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads—none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan's primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico's desert panoramas but contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. Close-up after close-up shows star Cillian Murphy's face staring into the middle distance, off-screen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, and waking nightmares. "Oppenheimer" rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others. 

Sometimes the close-ups of people's faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven't happened, or already happened. There are recurring images of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don't just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer's team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer's life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The "fissile" cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer's career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact). 

The weight of the film's interests and meanings are carried by faces—not just Oppenheimer's, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon ), Los Alamos' military supervisor; Robert's suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer ( Emily Blunt ), whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey , Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer's post-Los Alamos career. The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer's Mozart, regularly and often pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, back in the day, and that he's a good person, unlike Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This film asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a third party who then wrote to the bureau's director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The film speaks quite often of one of the principles of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the results of this experiment. The editing illustrates it by constantly re-framing our perception of an event to change its meaning, and the script does it by adding new information that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a character did something, or whether they even knew why they did it. 

That, I believe, is really what "Oppenheimer" is about, much more so than the atom bomb itself, or even its impact on the war and the Japanese civilian population, which is talked about but never shown. The film does show what the atom bomb does to human flesh, but it's not recreations of the actual attacks on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines Americans going through it. This filmmaking decision is likely to antagonize both viewers who wanted a more direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those who have bought into the arguments advanced by Strauss and others that the bombs had to be dropped because Japan never would have surrendered otherwise. The movie doesn't indicate whether it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides more with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that point in World War II and would have eventually given up without atomic attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No, this is a film that permits itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we expect it to do: Dramatize the life of Oppenheimer and other historically significant people in his orbit in an aesthetically daring way while also letting all of the characters and all of the events be used metaphorically and symbolically as well, so that they become pointillistic elements in a much larger canvas that's about the mysteries of the human personality and the unforeseen impact of decisions made by individuals and societies.

This is another striking thing about "Oppenheimer." It's not entirely about Oppenheimer even though Murphy's baleful face and haunting yet opaque eyes dominate the movie. It's also about the effect of Oppenheimer's personality and decisions on other people, from the other strong-willed members of his atom bomb development team (including Benny Safdie's Edwin Teller, who wanted to skip ahead to create the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, and eventually did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer's mistress Jean Tatlock ( Florence Pugh , who has some of Gloria Grahame's self-immolating smolder); General Groves, who likes Oppenheimer in spite of his arrogance but isn't going to side with him over the United States government; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (played in a marvelous cameo by Gary Oldman ) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic "crybaby" who sees history mainly in terms of his own feelings.

Jennifer Lame's editing is prismatic and relentless, often in a faintly Terrence Malick -y way, skipping between three or more time periods within seconds. It's wedded to virtually nonstop music by  Ludwig Göransson  that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd but distinctive sort of scientifically expository aria that's probably what it would feel like to read American Prometheus  while listening to a playlist of  Philip Glass film scores. Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do, and they also capture what it's like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling). It also paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually. The mind stays anchored to the text. But it also jumps outside of it, connecting the text to other texts, to external knowledge, and to one's own experience and imaginings.

This review hasn't delved into the plot of the film or the real-world history that inspired it, not because it isn't important (of course it is) but because—as is always the case with Nolan—the main attraction is not the tale but the telling. Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stories. But whether that characterization was true (and I'm increasingly convinced it never entirely was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it's been applied to a biography of a real person. "Oppenheimer" could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director's filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he'd been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward.

The movie is an academic-psychedelic biography in the vein of those 1990s Oliver Stone films that were edited within an inch of their lives (at times it's as if the park bench scene in " JFK " had been expanded to three hours). There's also a strain of pitch-black humor, in a Stanley Kubrick  mode, as when top government officials meet to go over a list of possible Japanese cities to bomb, and the man reading the list says that he just made an executive decision to delete Kyoto from it because he and his wife honeymooned there. (The Kubrick connection is cemented further by the presence of "Full Metal Jacket" star  Matthew Modine , who co-stars as American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush.) It’s an example of top-of-the-line, studio-produced popular art with a dash of swagger, variously evoking Michael Mann's " The Insider ," late-period Terrence Malick, nonlinearly-edited art cinema touchstones like "Hiroshima Mon Amour," "The Pawnbroker," "All That Jazz" and " Picnic at Hanging Rock "; and, inevitably, " Citizen Kane " (there's even a Rosebud-like mystery surrounding what Oppenheimer and his hero Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti , talked about on the banks of a Princeton pond). 

Most of the performances have a bit of an "old movie" feeling, with the actors snapping off their lines and not moving their faces as much as they would in a more modern story. A lot of the dialogue is delivered quickly, producing a screwball comedy energy. This comes through most strongly in the arguments between Robert and Kitty about his sexual indiscretions and refusal to listen to her mostly superb advice; the more abstract debates about power and responsibility between Robert and General Groves, and the scenes between Strauss and a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) who is advising him as he testifies before a committee that he hopes will approve him to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet.

But as a physical experience, "Oppenheimer" is something else entirely—it's hard to say exactly what, and that's what's so fascinating about it. I've already heard complaints that the movie is "too long," that it could've ended with the first bomb detonating, and could've done without the bits about Oppenheimer's sex life and the enmity of Strauss, and that it's perversely self-defeating to devote so much of the running time, including the most of the third hour, to a pair of governmental hearings: the one where Oppenheimer tries to get his security clearance renewed, and Strauss trying to get approved for Eisenhower's cabinet. But the film's furiously entropic tendencies complement the theoretical discussions of the how's and why's of the individual and collective personality. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are appearing before a tribunal and bring called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The tribunal is out there in the dark. We've been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

Oppenheimer (2023)

Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language.

181 minutes

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt as Katherine 'Kitty' Oppenheimer

Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock

Benny Safdie as Edward Teller

Michael Angarano as Robert Serber

Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence

Rami Malek as David Hill

Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr

Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols

Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer

David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi

Alden Ehrenreich as Senate Aide

Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush

Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman

Alex Wolff as Luis Walter Alvarez

Casey Affleck as Boris Pash

Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman

Emma Dumont as Jackie Oppenheimer

Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg

David Dastmalchian as William L. Borden

Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs

Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge

Tony Goldwyn as Gordon Gray

Olivia Thirlby as Lilli Hornig

James Remar as Henry Stimson

• Christopher Nolan

Writer (based on the book by)

• Martin Sherwin

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Jennifer Lame
• Ludwig Göransson

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History | July 18, 2023

The Real History Behind Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’

The “father of the atomic bomb” has long been misunderstood. Will the new film finally get J. Robert Oppenheimer right?

Since the end of World War II, historians and artists alike have been fascinated by the brilliant, enigmatic J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project laboratory that developed the atomic bomb. Beginning as early as 1946, d ocumentaries , television miniseries , plays , books , graphic novels , f eature f ilms and even an opera have explored the scientist’s life, work and legacy. In recent years, however, much of that complexity has been reduced to a single popular image: the broken genius, haunted by his own invention, reciting a line from the Bhagavad Gita in a 1965 NBC News documentary . “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer intones.

But Oppenheimer’s life was about far more than regret. “[He] was interesting as the father of the bomb,” says Kai Bird , co-author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer . “But the real arc in the story is the tragedy.”

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer , which opens in theaters on July 21, will be the first feature-length film to tackle the scientist’s life in its entirety, and it promises to be spectacular . Starring Cillian Murphy of “ Peaky Blinders ” fame in the title role alongside an ensemble A-list cast, the film (which uses American Prometheus as its main source material ) will reintroduce the scientist and the top-secret bomb project he helmed to a new generation of Americans. Oppenheimer provides an opportunity to revisit this charismatic, contradictory man and reconsider how previous attempts to tell his story have succeeded—and failed—at fathoming one of the 20th century’s most fascinating public figures.

Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project

Born into a secular Jewish family in New York City in 1904 and educated at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture School, Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in just three years. If Harvard was easy, growing out of his awkward adolescence was harder. He struggled with mental health issues while pursuing a graduate degree at the University of Cambridge—“I was on the point of bumping myself off,” he later recalled —and ended up on probation after lacing an apple with chemicals and leaving it on his tutor’s desk. But by the time World War II broke out in 1939, Oppenheimer had transformed himself into a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “He was sort of a caricature of the eccentric professor,” Bird says, an intellectual omnivore who read Sanskrit, loved Elizabethan poetry , rode horses and made a great martini.

He had also fallen in love with Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh in Nolan’s film), a dues-paying member of the Communist Party who awakened his interest in politics. Oppenheimer was “likely sympathetic to … communist goals,” according to the nonprofit Atomic Heritage Foundation , but he never officially joined the party. (“Any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a party member is a futile exercise—as the FBI learned to its frustration over many years,” wrote Bird and co-author Martin J. Sherwin , who died in October 2021 at age 84, in American Prometheus .) But many of his closest friends and family were party members at one point or another: his brother, Frank Oppenheimer ; his friend Haakon Chevalier ; and his future wife, Kitty Oppenheimer . These associations would cast suspicion on the physicist himself later in his life.

Oppenheimer’s political leanings didn’t prevent him from being recruited, in early 1942, for a secret project authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that was drawing scientists from all over the country. Three years earlier, Albert Einstein had written a letter to Roosevelt warning that breakthroughs in nuclear fission promised “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Now, the race was on to figure out how to build one of these bombs before Germany did.

In the summer of 1942, Oppenheimer organized a series of secret seminars at Berkeley, where the United States’ top physicists roughed out the outlines of a possible bomb. As it turned out, Oppenheimer was a natural manager. “I don’t know how he had acquired this facility for handling people,” said Edward Teller , a colleague who would later testify against him. “Those who knew him well were really surprised.”

That September, General Leslie Groves (played by Matt Damon in the new film), an Army engineer who’d previously overseen construction of the Pentagon, took over as head of what was by then called the Manhattan Project, after its inaugural offices in lower Manhattan. Groves knew construction but not physics, so the charming Berkeley physicist caught his eye. “Oppenheimer was the first scientist Groves had met on his tour who grasped that building an atomic bomb required finding practical solutions to a variety of cross-disciplinary problems,” wrote Bird and Sherwin. He wasn’t an obvious choice—“He couldn’t run a hamburger stand,” said a Berkeley colleague—but in October 1942, Groves named Oppenheimer the project’s scientific director.

The government operation brought hundreds, and eventually thousands, of scientists, civilians and Army personnel to a mesa in Los Alamos, New Mexico . Their ranks eventually included Teller, Hans Bethe , Richard Feynman , Seth Neddermeyer , Robert Serber , Kenneth Bainbridge , Enrico Fermi and many others. (Nolan’s film portrays each of these figures and, judging by the full cast list , more or less recreates the entire field of theoretical physics in the 1930s and ’40s, including Kenneth Branagh as Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr .) The scientists reported directly to Oppenheimer, who, at 38, was learning on the job how to run a lab.

Oppenheimer’s lab was only one part of the Manhattan Project. Built on the site of a former boys’ school, Los Alamos was one of three “ secret cities ” seized and transformed by the U.S. government in late 1942 and early 1943. The other two— Oak Ridge, Tennessee , and Hanford, Washington —accounted for the vast majority of the manpower, expense and industrial scale of the project, which employed an estimated half a million people between 1942 and 1945. At Oak Ridge, uranium was refined at the largest factory in the world , newly built for that purpose. In Hanford, an area half the size of Rhode Island was cleared of residents , their houses bulldozed to make way for reactors to produce plutonium . “I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory,” Bohr said to Teller in 1944. “You have done just that.”

At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer came into his own as a gifted leader. “[He] had a very distinctive voice that was very soft,” says Bird. “You had to listen very carefully, but he was magnetic.” That magnetism kept the lab productive even after an initial design for the bomb, known as Thin Man , had to be scrapped in July 1944. Ultimately, the scientists settled on two workable designs for a bomb, which they called Fat Man and Little Boy. At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, almost three years of work culminated in the first nuclear detonation in history. Known as the Trinity test, it lit the hills of the New Mexico desert.

Oppenheimer, already famously thin, had lost weight during the project, and during the countdown, he reportedly barely breathed. Later dramatizations had the scientist reciting the line from the Bhagavad Gita during the moment of detonation (Oppenheimer himself later claimed the line had come to him then), but he reportedly said something closer to “It worked.”

After the test, Oppenheimer was transformed by relief. “I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car,” fellow Manhattan Project scientist Isidor Isaac Rabi later said. “His walk was like High Noon … this kind of strut. He had done it.”

On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, Bockscar dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Estimates of deaths from the two bombings vary widely , from a contemporary figure of around 110,000 to a later estimate of closer to 210,000. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender.

The battle over the bomb

In the years immediately following the war, public opinion about the use of the atomic bomb hadn’t yet solidified. The first time Oppenheimer appeared on the big screen was in August 1946, when he starred in the 18-minute documentary “Atomic Power,” which was part of Time ’s “ The March of Time ” series. Onscreen, Oppenheimer (one of several figures who participated in the film, including Einstein, Groves and Rabi) re-enacts waiting anxiously for the detonation at Trinity with Rabi, who gives a stilted performance as he reassures his boss, “It’s going to work all right, Robert. And I’m sure we’ll never be sorry for it.”

In fact, Oppenheimer was already sorry. In October 1945, he told President Harry S. Truman (played by Gary Oldman in Nolan’s film), “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” The tide of public opinion was also beginning to turn. Three weeks after “Atomic Power” was released, John Hersey’s searing, book-length article “ Hiroshima ” appeared in the New Yorker , awakening many Americans for the first time to the horrors of the bomb .

Fearing they were losing the battle for the history books, Truman and other officials sprang into action, compelling former Secretary of War Henry Stimson to defend the use of the bomb in a Harper’s magazine article published in February 1947. The story, which reads as a simple recitation of the facts, portrays the decision to use the bomb as one made with sagacious care. It introduced the argument—repeated often since —that the bomb prevented an Allied land invasion of Japan that would have cost “over a million casualties, to American forces alone.”

“That article really set the history for most Americans for the next generation,” Bird says. “And the narrative was, ‘Oh, it was a difficult decision. It was terrible. But it was necessary, and it saved perhaps a million American lives.’”

The first major Hollywood film about the bomb, The Beginning or the End , debuted the month after Stimson’s article. Initially conceived by atomic scientists as a way to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear warfare, the movie went through script approvals and retakes ordered by Groves and Truman that turned it into a “pro-bomb celebration—dictated by the Pentagon and White House,” wrote Greg Mitchell in his 2020 book, The Beginning or the End : How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb .

Directed by Norman Taurog, the film “is so instructive because it is the earliest, and one of the most complete, reassertions of the pro-bomb narrative just when doubts were being raised,” Mitchell tells Smithsonian magazine. “Even Truman got involved, to the extent of ordering a costly retake and getting the actor playing him fired. The studio voluntarily handed over control of the film to the Pentagon, via Groves, and the White House. Oppenheimer himself caved to pressure.”

The Beginning or the End claimed the American military dropped warning leaflets about the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and that the Enola Gay came under attack from Japanese antiaircraft missile fire on its bombing run. Like Stimson’s article, it depicted Truman carefully working through the decision to drop the bomb before arriving at a pivotal moment.

In fact, the U.S. did not drop leaflets warning of the atomic bomb specifically, though pilots may have dropped more general notices of impending attacks on Hiroshima, and the Enola Gay did not come under antiaircraft fire . Many historians disagree that there was a single moment of “ decision ” on Truman’s part . In an essay included in the 2020 anthology The Age of Hiroshima , Alex Wellerstein , a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, wrote that Truman “was actually quite peripheral to most of the decisions that led to the use of the weapons.” Wellerstein argued that Truman may have even mistakenly believed that Hiroshima was a military target rather than a city made up largely of civilians. As for that figure of one million projected American casualties , Bird later asked Stimson’s ghostwriter, Mac Bundy , where he got it. “He looked at me,” Bird recalls, “and he says, ‘Oh, we pulled it out of thin air.’”

Oppenheimer described the script of The Beginning or the End as “without purpose or insight.” Another physicist, Leo Szilard , put it even more bluntly: “If our sin as scientists was to make and use the atomic bomb, then our punishment was to watch The Beginning or the End .”

The Oppenheimer security hearing

Almost immediately, Oppenheimer began speaking out publicly about the dangers of atomic warfare, even as he continued to act as a nuclear weapons consultant for the U.S. government. In November 1945, he told an audience in Philadelphia that the bomb was “by all the standards of the world we grew up in … an evil thing.” He gave television interviews starkly elucidating the risk of nuclear war. In 1949, as the head of an advisory committee for the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), he delivered a report warning against developing a hydrogen bomb—a fusion weapon more powerful than the Trinity, Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs—that had been conceived by fellow Manhattan Project scientist Teller. “A super bomb might become a weapon of genocide,” Oppenheimer wrote . “A super bomb should never be produced.” In 1953, he gave a speech likening the nuclear-capable United States and Soviet Union to “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

Oppenheimer’s outspoken warnings made him a target, and in December 1953, amid McCarthy-era paranoia about Soviet spies in the highest levels of government, AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr. in Nolan’s film), who harbored a dislike for Oppenheimer, called the scientist into his office and told him his top-secret security clearance had been revoked. Oppenheimer insisted on defending himself, leading the AEC to call what became a highly publicized security hearing to resolve the matter.

The monthlong hearing, which began on April 12, 1954, amounted to an X-ray of Oppenheimer’s adult life. Transgressions large and small were dragged into the open and held up to exacting scrutiny. Key pieces of the case against Oppenheimer included his close friendship with Chevalier , a scholar of French literature at Berkeley and a card-carrying Communist whom the physicist had once protected from incrimination, as well as Oppenheimer’s opposition to Teller’s hydrogen bomb. The usually persuasive scientist panicked under questioning by AEC lawyer Roger Robb; at one point, caught in a contradiction, Oppenheimer accounted for his defense of Chevalier by admitting bluntly , “I was an idiot.” But he also had to defend personal matters, such as his decision to spend a night with his communist ex-fiancée, Tatlock, in the summer of 1943, while he was working at Los Alamos, six months before she died by suicide in 1944. Why did he have to see her? The committee asked. “Because she was still in love with me,” Oppenheimer responded.

On May 27, the board overseeing the hearings voted 2 to 1 not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s security clearance. “I personally think that our failure to clear Dr. Oppenheimer will be a black mark on the escutcheon of our country,” wrote lone dissenter Ward V. Evans. Either way, Oppenheimer’s relationship with the U.S. government was now officially over. He returned to Princeton, New Jersey, where he’d been the director of the Institute for Advanced Study since 1947. The hearings “destroyed him,” Rabi later said. Another friend, diplomat George Kennan, remembered trying to comfort Oppenheimer by telling him he’d surely be welcome abroad. “His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’”

Oppenheimer tried to minimize the importance of the hearings. “I think of this as a major accident, much like a train wreck or the collapse of a building,” he told a reporter. “It has no relation or connection to my life. I just happened to be there.” As much as he might have wished that to be true, Oppenheimer’s downfall during the hearings came to define him in the public eye. In 1964, the German playwright Heinar Kipphardt drew directly on the published transcripts of the security hearings for his In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer . Discussing the play with the Washington Post , perhaps still trying to prevent his downfall from defining him, Oppenheimer said, “The whole damn thing was a farce, and these people are trying to make a tragedy out of it.”

In an attempt at public rehabilitation, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Oppenheimer with the Enrico Fermi Award, the AEC’s highest honor, in 1963. Nonetheless, the physicist never fully recovered from the blow to his reputation. He lived out the rest of his days in Princeton, where he kept his job at the Institute for Advanced Study until 1966, and died of cancer there in February 1967. As the New York Times wrote in his obituary, “This bafflingly complex man nonetheless never fully succeeded in dispelling doubts about his conduct.”

Oppenheimer’s security clearance remained revoked until December 2022, when the Department of Energy vacated the commission’s 1954 decision. “Oppenheimer occupies a central role in our history for leading the nation’s atomic efforts during World War II and planting the seeds for the Department of Energy’s national laboratories,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in a statement . “As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to, while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country [has] only been further affirmed.”

The myth of Oppenheimer

In the more than 50 years since Oppenheimer’s death, popular culture has taken varied approaches to exploring his life. The Peabody Award-winning 1981 documentary The Day After Trinity focused on his regret over his role in building the bomb. The 1980 BBC TV miniseries “ Oppenheimer ,” by contrast, starred a thin, quietly charismatic Sam Waterston and was more interested in the question of Oppenheimer’s communist ties and his downfall.

Later fictional depictions of Oppenheimer grew less interested in complex readings of his psychology and often flattened him into a character who sometimes bordered on the ridiculous. In 1989, director Roland Joffé made a big-budget bet on the story of the Manhattan Project in Fat Man and Little Boy . Despite an A-list cast —Paul Newman as Groves, John Cusack as a fictional Manhattan Project scientist, Laura Dern as that scientist’s girlfriend—the film flopped. The script was simplistic, the dialogue groan-inducing (“Naked. Isn’t that a beautiful word?” Dern says to Cusack when propositioning him) and veracity an afterthought. But the film suffered most from the performance of Dwight Schultz , best known to viewers from “The A-Team” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” as Oppenheimer. Schultz brought a blankness to his portrayal of a man who famously had charisma to spare. “Schultz is stiff and actorly,” wrote the Washington Post . “Like an irredeemably tone-deaf singer, he hits only false notes.”

In the otherwise excellent TV show “ Manhattan ,” which ran for two seasons in 2014 and 2015, Daniel London played Oppenheimer as an already broken man, as though the actor’s only reference for the character was the famous “I am become death” interview. His Oppenheimer was more interested in self-preservation than the success of the project, whereas the real Oppenheimer of the Los Alamos years was a nimble ball of energy, guiding the complex endeavor toward completion thanks to his keen feeling for the challenges his fellow scientists faced.

No list would be complete without one other fictional depiction of Oppenheimer: Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams’ 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic . If Oppenheimer objected to Kipphardt’s play, he surely would have found Doctor Atomic ’s elevation of his life into an operatic Faustian tragedy ridiculous. But the opera, which centers around the days leading up to the Trinity test and culminates in the detonation of the first atomic bomb, was rapturously received by critics and has been restaged several times since its debut. In the New York Times , science writer Dennis Overbye wrote that the opera had disabused him of his preconceptions about the bomb: “I long ago concluded that there was not much new to say about the atomic bomb. But I was wrong. As I was watching … I began to wonder if anything had yet been said that counted.”

Nolan’s Oppenheimer

Before Sherwin’s death in 2021, he and Bird read several scripts based on American Prometheus . One, Bird says, was boring. Another was just weird: “It had dream sequences, a ghost speaking Oppenheimer’s poetry. It had a scene in which [Oppenheimer] is at a cocktail party in Berkeley and imagines himself dropping a cyanide pill into Edward Teller’s drink and watching him collapse on the floor and die in agony.” Bird and Sherwin sent back a long memo detailing the script’s many historical errors.

So Bird was relieved when, in fall 2021, he became one of a handful of people outside the film’s production to read Nolan’s take on Oppenheimer. “I think it’s a fabulous script,” Bird says. Unlike other recent depictions, it covers scenes from Oppenheimer’s entire life and doesn’t shy away from the moral questions of the bomb. “Nolan covers in a very deft way the argument among the physicists over whether the bomb was necessary or not and has Oppenheimer after Hiroshima saying the bomb was used on a virtually already defeated enemy,” Bird adds. “People who know nothing about Oppenheimer will go thinking they’re going to see a movie about the father of the atomic bomb.” Instead, “they’re going to see this mysterious figure and a deeply mysterious biographical story.”

Regardless of whether subject matter experts believe there is nothing new to say, the general public’s understanding of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project hasn’t changed significantly since Stimson’s 1947 Harper’s article. After all, most people’s sense of history doesn’t come by way of the academy or densely researched biographies. Visiting Los Alamos myself a few years ago, I asked a docent what they thought might renew public interest in the history of the Manhattan Project.

The answer? “A movie.”

“Oppenheimer himself couldn’t make up his mind how he felt about making and helping to use the bomb, right to the end of his life,” says Mitchell. Until now, “filmmakers also couldn’t seem to get a handle on his conflicting emotions and statements. In that sense, he is a valuable audience surrogate, severely divided or conflicted on these questions.”

Nolan’s film arrives at a precarious moment in which optimism about nuclear disarmament is giving way to talk of a new nuclear age . F ew world leaders today have direct experience with the horrors of nuclear bombs, and some younger people are ignorant of even basic facts about World War II. But perhaps our distance from Oppenheimer’s era also presents an opportunity.

“Today, almost 80 years have passed since the end of World War II,” says Cynthia C. Kelly , president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation . Now, she adds, “the public can more openly consider different interpretations of atomic history.”

Why did it take so long for a director of Nolan’s caliber to take on Oppenheimer’s story? Perhaps it’s because we’re only now far enough away from those world-changing events to be open to seeing them—and him—with fresh eyes.

That’s no easy task. As Oppenheimer himself told an interviewer in 1948, “If you’ve lived a life that isn’t free and open with people, it’s almost impossible to unsnarl it, to unravel the ball of twine.”

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Andy Kifer is an ex-New York City literary agent who works as an independent book editor and freelance writer.

• Entertainment

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Grandson on What the Movie Gets Right and the One Scene He Would Have Changed

M oviegoers turned out in droves this weekend for writer-director Christopher Nolan's new film Oppenheimer , fueling an expectations-shattering domestic box office debut of $80 million . The three-hour-long biopic recounts the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), the theoretical physicist widely known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and has been praised by critics for its nuanced examination of a complicated historical figure.

The movie is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer , one of numerous accounts of Oppenheimer's life and legacy. But according to Oppenheimer's grandson, Charles Oppenheimer, the famous physicist's family has their own their own approach to depictions of him and additional nuance to include.

Charles was born near Santa Fe, N.M., in April 1975, after both his grandfather and grandmother, Katherine "Kitty" Puening Oppenheimer (played by Emily Blunt), had passed away. However, he says he grew up having a very open dialogue about his grandfather's work with his father, Peter Oppenheimer, who spent several years of his early childhood at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.

TIME spoke with Charles about what Oppenheimer gets right about his grandfather, what he would have changed, and the work he's doing to further Oppenheimer's legacy today.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

TIME: How was your grandparents' story told to you when you were growing up?

Charles Oppenheimer: Like most kids, I heard about my grandparents through my parents, and there was a marker at one point that stands out in my memory of speaking about Robert Oppenheimer being a famous person who had done his duty during World War II. He might have been a soldier, but his skills were in science, so he used science to do what he had to do during the war. But within the family, we had very open conversations. So my dad was always there if I had a question once I started hearing more about how we were related to a person that other people were talking about. I was always able to initiate a conversation and I do that to this day, especially with my father Peter.

So there was ongoing, open communication about who your grandfather was.

With a very big dividing line. Within the family, we absolutely talked about it as much as possible. With anyone outside of the family, my father doesn't discuss anything [about him] if he can avoid it.

Do you feel there are misconceptions about your grandfather?

There's such an incredible historical record of him. It's impressive, like every detail of every conversation of his spring break in 1924 is analyzed. If you have that much information and enough people writing and rewriting and interpreting, you can pick up any thread of meaning and narrative. The one that's developing right now is about as positive and as famous of an interpretation of him as you could have. And I find that being related to him and having insight into who he was doesn't always seem that interesting to other people. They're happy to ask a historian or a writer, and it's not necessarily true that my impression of his values is taken as the answer. So I kind of struggle with saying that I have a view of who he is and what he cared about and it not always getting across. That being said, I think with as much attention as is put on him, there is a large understanding of the complexity of the stuff he dealt with and the problems and opportunities of ushering science into the world.

Read more: Here's How Faithfully Oppenheimer Captures Its Subject's Real Life

You saw the movie. Were there parts that hit you the hardest, emotionally?

I was bracing myself for not feeling great about it, even though I talked to Chris Nolan and was very impressed by him. I saw him work on the set with an amazing intensity when I visited once or twice, and we had a great conversation. But I didn't know, am I going to love it? Am I going to hate it? I often have that reaction to biographies and pundits when they talk about my grandfather. I feel like they're missing something. And sometimes it really feels personal. Like when somebody wants to start a fight with you on the schoolyard, they'll talk about your family member. But during the movie, I found myself accepting and liking it. I thought it told a compelling story and I could just take it as art that was really engaging. I was really happy to have that reaction. I didn't expect it.

Were there parts that struck you as historically or emotionally inaccurate?

When I talked to Chris Nolan, at one point he said something roughly like, 'I know how to tell a story out of this subject. There are going to be parts that you have to dramatize a bit and parts that are changed. As family members, I think you're going to like some parts and dislike some parts.' That's probably led into my acceptance of the movie, even though I saw it very late, just when it came out. As a dramatized representation of the history, it was really largely accurate. There are parts that I disagree with, but not really because of Nolan.

The part I like the least is this poison apple reference, which was a problem in American Prometheus . If you read American Prometheus carefully enough, the authors say, 'We don't really know if it happened.' There's no record of him trying to kill somebody. That's a really serious accusation and it's historical revision. There's not a single enemy or friend of Robert Oppenheimer who heard that during his life and considered it to be true. American Prometheus got it from some references talking about a spring break trip, and all the original reporters of that story—there was only two maybe three—reported that they didn't know what Robert Oppenheimer was talking about. Unfortunately, American Prometheus summarizes that as Robert Oppenheimer tried to kill his teacher and then they [acknowledge that] maybe there's this doubt.

Sometimes facts get dragged through a game of telephone. In the movie, it's treated vaguely and you don't really know what's going on unless you know this incredibly deep backstory. So it honestly didn't bother me. It bothers me that it was in the biography with that emphasis, not a disclaimer of, this is an unsubstantiated rumor that we want to put in our book to make it interesting. But I like some of the dramatization. I thought Einstein's conversation with Oppenheimer at the end was really effective even though it wasn't historical.

What was your role, if any, in the movie?

The family policy around media, books, and what I'd call the cult of Oppenheimer, is not to participate in it. It's a business to write and talk about Oppenheimer, and the model that my dad chose is: 'It's not very classy, and I'm not going to be involved in publicly representing Oppenheimer in ways that other people do as a business.' But when I saw this movie was coming out, I said, 'Wow, that's going to be really big.' I also have a big interest in representing my grandfather's values for today's world. That's the most important thing in my opinion. So I reached out said, 'Hey, could I get involved?', and Chris Nolan was nice enough to give me a courtesy call through Kai Bird—whose book I just criticized. I do think American Prometheus is really good, I just had a complaint about that one part.

So Chris Nolan gave me a call. He had finished the script and he said, 'I have so much material with American Prometheus .' I explained that my dad probably would be unlikely to talk. But I don't think he needed input from the family. And as an artist, he obviously has every right to do that. You need art to tell this story. And it's just a fact that when somebody writes a biography about our family, we don't have input or the ability to make decisions. The chain of this movie was American Prometheus was published and then Nolan licensed it. I tried to give my perspective, but there wasn't any official involvement.

Is there anything you would have advised them to do differently, had you been asked?

I definitely would have removed the apple thing. But I can't imagine myself giving advice about movie stuff to Nolan. He's an expert, he's the artist, and he's a genius in this area. But one amusing family story is that, if I invited myself to the set, they would entertain me coming, which I did twice. And so one time I visited the set in New Mexico. I saw them film and, in that particular scene, Cillian Murphy walks into a room and part of his line was calling someone an 'asshole.' And when I went back to Santa Fe and told my dad, he was horrified. He said, 'Robert Oppenheimer never swore. He was such a formal person. He would never, ever do that.' And I was like, 'Well, it's a dramatization.' But I was worried that in the movie he would be this swearing, abusive guy. Anyway, I think he said one swear word in the movie and I just happened to be in the room. So there is a chance that if we had been consultants, we could have added some details and depth. But there's such a complete record. It was enough for Nolan to tell the story he intended to.

Did the movie help you come to any kind of deeper understanding of your grandfather?

When I saw how Nolan put this together, I was like, wow, there are thousands of pages of more details than what he put in there. But he was able to summarize it to the effect of: are we going to destroy ourselves as a species? That told as a story is really important. It's not exactly a revelation, but it's an important message. I always look at my grandfather's actual words instead of what other people said about him. And I think his advice is really relevant today, because he was right about how to manage atomic energy. If we had followed his actual hard policy proposals, we could have avoided an arms race right after World War II.

Robert Oppenheimer saw where we should go and he was right at that time. That really counts for a lot. It's not just the fact of like, ‘Oh, I regret something I did.' He put in effort to affect policy that could have literally changed history, and being overruled and discredited, which is what Nolan tells the story of, is important in that light. The way he told this story through [Lewis] Strauss’ perspective was really masterful.

There have always been two facts in tension: on the one hand, Oppenheimer helped create a weapon of mass destruction that was used to kill hundreds of thousands of people . On the other hand, the existence of nuclear weapons has succeeded as a deterrent for nearly 80 years, with superpowers like the U.S., Russia, and China avoiding war for fear of what would happen if those weapons again got into play. What are your thoughts on that complex legacy?

To me, that's the most interesting part and the most relevant today. The movie, while really good, had less emphasis than I would have put on the period of 1945 right before the bomb dropped to 1947, which was the time where we could have avoided an arms race. It is true that he ushered these weapons in, and then we went into an arms race, and we haven't destroyed ourselves. But the difference is him and [Niels] Bohr saw the arms race coming and said, ‘We really must avoid this.' It's not good enough that we just haven't died yet. It was a disaster that we got into an arms race and it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of science, as illustrated in the scene they have in there with Truman where Oppenheimer had been telling people that if we don't co-manage this with our allies, which were the U.K. and Russia at the time, we're going to get into an arms race and it's going to be extremely dangerous.

The gut reaction from Truman and others was, let's just make as many of these bombs as fast as possible and we'll keep it secret and the Russians will never get the bomb. So you have a scientific expert that's telling the government, this is what we need to do, and you have the government doing the opposite. We got into an arms race not because of a hard-nosed, pragmatic understanding of we need to build these bombs, but a scientific misunderstanding that we could keep it secret. Robert Oppenheimer's deepest message is that the world had changed around the atomic bomb dropping. But it wasn't just atomic bombs, it was the fact that the scope of our technologies had increased to the point where we could destroy ourselves and we had to unite in a new way. And that's exactly what he said: Mankind must unite or we will perish. That's the message that we can bring into today's world.

You started the Oppenheimer Project to continue your grandfather's work today. Can you tell me a little bit about what the organization does?

Even though I spent a lot of time in this interview trying to correct some historical detail, you never win that discussion. But if you look at Robert Oppenheimer's values, what he wrote, what he said, how he led scientists, it’s clearly an amazing record. He led scientists to solve a hugely difficult technical problem under the threat of existential risk. And then he talked about, how do we manage the outcome of improving science and technology at that speed? He had a poetic way of talking. So when he spoke about what should we do about it, it wasn't just an engineered answer. He had a really deep, rounded view of it because of his education and interest. And what he said was, we need to unite in a new way—and his policy tried to put that in place.

It's exactly what we need to do today in the world. We can draw dots between the idea that if we hadn't gone into an arms race, we would have actually been able to use that scientific discovery for abundant nuclear energy . The same science could have made unlimited energy. We had a little bit of a push there of making it, but we were making bombs constantly at the same time, and that eventually sabotaged the public acceptance of nuclear energy. Now, we've gotten carbon output and climate change. So if we could use the idea of ushering in technology in an industrial scale effort to affect a really threatening problem, like climate change and lack of enough energy, we could apply the same type of effort that we had in the Manhattan Project towards today's problems. And it wouldn’t include creating a bunch of bombs, because that method of warfare stopped working in 1945. It doesn't work. Our institutions haven't caught up with that insight.

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Oppenheimer

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Watch Oppenheimer with a subscription on Peacock, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

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Oppenheimer marks another engrossing achievement from Christopher Nolan that benefits from Murphy's tour-de-force performance and stunning visuals.

Oppenheimer is an intelligent movie about an important topic that's never less than powerfully acted and incredibly entertaining.

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• HISTORY & CULTURE

Who is Oppenheimer? The controversial man behind the atomic bomb

Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film tells the story of Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the legendary physicist who developed the bomb. Did he really live to regret it?

New scientific discoveries can ignite curiosity, explain the unknown, and even improve the world. But what happens when a scientist comes to regret the knowledge he’s unleashed?

This is the central question of the upcoming film Oppenheimer , which recounts American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s moonshot project to build an atomic bomb in a top-secret lab in the New Mexico desert—and his lifelong qualms about the nuclear age he ushered in.

Did the legendary physicist really regret his nuclear creation? The truth is as complicated as the science behind the bomb. Here’s how Oppenheimer birthed—and questioned—the atomic bomb.

( How the advent of nuclear weapons changed the course of history .)

From child prodigy to the Manhattan Project

Born in New York City in 1904, Julius Robert Oppenheimer was the son of German Jewish immigrants who found wealth in the textile importing trade. He graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude   after just three years of study, then studied theoretical physics at both Cambridge University and the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he gained his doctorate at age 23.

The young physicist “Oppie” had soon rubbed shoulders with the greatest scientific figures of his age, and his academic work advanced quantum theory and predicted everything from the neutron to the black hole. He was a voracious learner outside of the sciences, too, learning Sanskrit, studying religion, and aligning himself with a variety of progressive causes.

For Hungry Minds

After the United States joined the Allies in 1941, Oppenheimer was asked to participate in the top-secret Manhattan Project , whose aim was to develop an atomic weapon. As he endeavored to figure out what would need to happen to trigger and sustain the kind of neutron-chain reaction needed to create a nuclear explosion, Oppenheimer’s superiors were impressed by his wide-ranging knowledge, ambition, and ability to work with, and inspire, other scientists. In 1942, the U.S. Army called on Oppenheimer to head up the secret lab where the bomb would be tested.

( The devastating legacy of U.S. nuclear tests still lingers today .)

Los Alamos and the Trinity test

As Army officials scouted appropriate places for such a lab, Oppenheimer, who loved the American Southwest and owned a ranch in New Mexico, suggested the site of the Los Alamos Ranch School, a private boys’ school near Santa Fe. Soon, he oversaw hundreds, then thousands, of workers at what became known as the Los Alamos Laboratory.

Oppenheimer didn’t just assemble a group of the most brilliant scientific minds of his time—he inspired, goaded, organized, and pushed them to perform. “He was intellectually and even physically present at each decisive step,” physicist Victor Weisskopf later recalled . That presence resulted in “a unique atmosphere of enthusiasm and challenge”—and in a chain reaction of scientific discoveries that produced the world’s first nuclear weapon.

On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and others gathered at the Trinity test site south of Los Alamos for the world’s first attempted nuclear blast. It was a tense moment: the scientists knew that the bomb they’d nicknamed “Gadget” would shape the future of the world.

But they also believed it might bring an end to World War II. Though the war in Europe had ended, U.S. officials feared the war’s bloodiest phase was still ahead of them: assaults against Japan itself. The hope was that the nation could force Japan to surrender instead by threatening to use the new weapon.

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Conducted in secret, the test worked. As Oppenheimer later recounted in a 1965 interview, the moment had called to mind a line from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita : “Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Bombing Japan—and the moral aftermath

On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the U.S. dropped two of the bombs Oppenheimer had helped develop over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A minimum of 110,000 people are thought to have been killed in the blasts, which wiped out both cities on a scale of devastation never seen before or since.

( ‘A ball of blinding light’: Atomic bomb survivors share their stories .)

Oppenheimer had served on the scientific committee that recommended the War Department deploy the bomb as soon as possible against Japan. Historical debates still rage about whether the government listened to scientists’ pleas that the bomb be deployed against military targets only, or even publicly tested beforehand in an attempt to force Japan’s surrender.

The night of the Hiroshima bombing, Oppenheimer was cheered by a crowd of fellow scientists at Los Alamos, and declared that his only regret was that the bomb hadn’t been finished in time to use against Germany.

But though they were thrilled by their accomplishment, the scientists were horrified at the loss of civilian lives in the attack, worrying that the future of the weapons would encourage future wars instead of deter them. A few weeks after the bombing, Oppenheimer wrote a letter to the Secretary of War warning that “the safety of this nation…cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.”

But Oppenheimer also defended the Manhattan Project and the bomb he’d been tasked with building, arguing that it had been necessary to fully understand the possibilities of nuclear science.

Opposition to the hydrogen bomb

Nonetheless, Oppenheimer spent much of his life after the war lobbying for nuclear deterrence, vocally opposing U.S. attempts to develop a more powerful hydrogen bomb after the U.S.S.R. made strides with its own bomb. Instead, said Oppenheimer, the U.S. should consider using nuclear weapons only tactically and pursue other uses of nuclear technology, like generating power, instead.

( What is nuclear energy—and is it a viable resource? )

This earned him political enemies—and put him the crosshairs of the Red Scare, an American political era of anti-Communist hysteria during the Cold War. At a 1954 hearing looking into his supposed Communist sympathies, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked his security clearance. The move was only reversed in 2022 , after government officials revisited Oppenheimer’s case and found the investigation had been flawed and unlawful.

“He doesn't slot into easy categories of pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear or anything like that,” historian Alex Wellerstein told PBS NewsHour . “He's a tricky figure.”

Oppenheimer never returned to government service, instead founding the World Academy of Arts and Sciences and lecturing on science and ethics until his death in 1967. Though he had helped create the “necessary” weapon that ended a war, destroyed two entire cities, and ushered in a dangerous new age, he lobbied against nuclear proliferation for the rest of his life.

“In some crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish,” he said in 1950 , “the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

Related Topics

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Oppenheimer: The secrets he protected and the suspicions that followed him

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Oppenheimer: Everything we know about the atomic bomb creator's epic new biopic

Christopher Nolan’s next movie will study the man who developed the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Here’s the release date, plot, trailers & more.

Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer?

What was the manhattan project, oppenheimer release date, what is the plot of oppenheimer, oppenheimer trailers, oppenheimer cast, oppenheimer director, writer, and crew.

This summer, renowned filmmaker Christopher Nolan returns to the big screen with "Oppenheimer," his second movie based on real wartime events — the first was "Dunkirk" (2017). This time around, however, he's not taking us to the frontlines of World War II, but instead dealing with the complicated process behind the creation of the first nuclear weapons .

The biopic follows the "father of the atomic bomb," J. Robert Oppenheimer. It's being marketed as a cautionary tale of sorts and may be a good reminder of the astounding destructive power of nuclear weapons . 

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist. During World War II, he became the first director of the Los Alamos Laboratory — established by the Manhattan Project — and led the team that created the atomic bomb. He was among those who observed the Trinity test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, when the first atomic bomb successfully detonated.

Oppenheimer later became the chairman of the U.S. government's General Atomic Commission and leading advisor on the future of nuclear weapons, according to the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory . He advised against the accelerated development of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon that's even more powerful than the atomic bomb . 

In 1954, the U.S. government's Atomic Energy Commission revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance with accusations surrounding his loyalty and associations with communist sympathizers. However, in 2022, five decades after his death, the U.S. formally nullified that decision and affirmed Oppenheimer's loyalty , The New York Times reported. 

The Manhattan Project was established in World War II with the objective of producing the first nuclear weapons before Nazi Germany did. While the project was spread across several different locations, the name "Manhattan Project" stuck after an early component of the work began at the U.S. Army's Manhattan District.

The project led to the detonation of an implosion-type bomb during the Trinity test, conducted at New Mexico's Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on July 16, 1945. A month later, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . These are still the only times nuclear weapons have been used in war.  

"Oppenheimer" is scheduled to be released  on July 21, 2023, in IMAX 70 mm, vertical 70 mm, and 35 mm.

Christopher Nolan's Syncopy Inc. co-produced the movie alongside Atlas Entertainment and Universal Pictures. Unless plans change, the film will hit movie theaters on the same day as Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" — from Warner Bros. Pictures.

The movie follows the life and biggest achievements of J. Robert Oppenheimer, putting the main focus on the creation of the atomic bomb and his pivotal role in spearheading the Manhattan Project.

Rumours suggest that the movie will also deal with his personal life during those events and his connections to civilians linked to the Communist Party. Other crucial figures in the development of nuclear weapons for the U.S., such as Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, are also expected to heavily feature.

Universal Pictures released an online trailer for "Oppenheimer" on Dec. 19, 2022, which amps up the wonder behind the scientific breakthrough. A second, more ominous trailer played exclusively in front of IMAX screenings of "Avatar: The Way of Water." 

We got a longer, more detailed trailer on May 8. This three-minute long trailer gives us a better look at the cast and storyline, starting with the race against the Nazis to build the bomb, before hinting at the ramifications of success.

"Oppenheimer" may have one of the most star-studded casts in recent memory. Actors have been lining up to work with Christopher Nolan for years, but the prospect of making a biopic that could earn numerous awards made this project even more attractive for Hollywood's finest.

The cast is led by Cillian Murphy (J. Robert Oppenheimer), Emily Blunt (Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer), Matt Damon (Leslie Groves), Robert Downey Jr. (Lewis Strauss), Florence Pugh (Jean Tatlock), and Rami Malek in an unknown role.

The supporting cast includes Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Modine, Jack Quaid, David Dastmalchian, Jason Clarke, Josh Peck, James D'Arcy, Gary Oldman, Olivia Thirlby, and Casey Affleck, among others.

Christopher Nolan wrote and directed "Oppenheimer." The script is based on "American Prometheus," (Knopf, 2005), a biography of the real-life Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

Nolan produced the film alongside longtime partners Emma Thomas and Charles Roven. He also reteamed with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema ("Interstellar," "Tenet"), editor Jennifer Lame ("Tenet"), and composer Ludwig Göransson ("Tenet") to cook up the movie's audiovisual feel.

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Fran Ruiz is an entertainment freelancer and massive dinosaur nerd. He has a BA of English Studies, focusing on English Literature, from the University of Malaga, in Spain, as well as a Master's Degree in English Studies, Multilingual and Intercultural Communication. On top of writing features and other longform articles for  Live Science & Space.com since 2021, he is a frequent collaborator of VG247 and other gaming sites. He also serves as associate editor over at Star Wars News Net and its sister site, Movie News Net.

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Oppenheimer Is a Mind-Blower, but How Is It as History?

Christopher nolan’s biopic is a complex movie about a complex subject. here’s what you need to know..

The tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer ranks among the most haunting and consequential of the modern era, yet all but its barest outlines are largely forgotten. This makes Christopher Nolan’s eponymous film both vital and challenging: It’s a complicated story, as world-altering sagas tend to be, so who knows whether—even aside from its three-hour length—many moviegoers will stick with it.

You should. It’s a mind-blower, not just for Nolan’s artistic innovations, but also because the story itself is disturbing, tragic, even shocking, and the fact that most of its details will be new to most viewers might make them probe it more deeply. Some are already probing. The magisterial Oppenheimer biography on which the film is based, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus , published in 2005, recently hit the list of paperback bestsellers for the first time ever .

As someone who has read a lot (and written two books ) about nuclear history, I can say that, for the most part and as far as it goes (important qualifiers, which I’ll soon get to), the film is a faithful portrait of what really happened—especially, perhaps, in the scenes that some might assume are made-up or exaggerated.

Oppenheimer was 38 when he was appointed director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the centerpiece of the Manhattan Project, the $2 billion, top-secret World War II program to build the atomic bomb.* Though a brilliant theoretical physicist and a pioneer in the newfangled field of quantum mechanics, he had never managed any project, was inept at experimental (i.e., practical, bricks-and-mortar) physics, and wasn’t even the most talented scientist of any sort among the hundreds who worked around him. But he was enormously charismatic, grasped concepts with preternatural speed, and saw how progress in one department could jolt progress in another department, so he made it work in ways that possibly no one else could have.

After the war, he became the most famous scientist in the world, appearing on the cover of Time magazine and hailed as “the father of the atomic bomb.” A few years later, he raised doubts about his work, opposed production of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, called for international controls on all weapons of mass destruction, and as a result, got blackballed by key figures in the nuclear establishment—his security clearance revoked by a tribunal as rigged and vindictive as any of the Cold War’s various other Red-baiting panels.

Yet as absurd as it was to tarnish Oppenheimer as a Soviet spy, it is equally mistaken to sanctify him—as many of his defenders have done—as a peace-loving martyr. The film avoids that trap, painting a complex portrait: a tortured soul, enthralled by the science, then racked by guilt over the hellscape it unleashed. He’s  insistent on his independence as a scientist, but also pliant in his role as mere adviser to authority. He’s certain of his convictions, but ambivalent about almost everything.

Witnessing the A-bomb’s first test in the desert far outside Los Alamos, the New Mexico town where much of the bomb-building took place, he really did (as the film depicts) recite the line from the Bhagavad-Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” At his meeting with President Harry Truman, after the bombs he helped build incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he really did say “I have blood on my hands.” And Truman, who lost no sleep over his decision to drop the bombs, really said to an aide afterward (though not within earshot of Oppenheimer, as he does in the film), “Don’t let that crybaby in here again.”

Yet Oppenheimer was also gung-ho about the bomb, waving his fist at a rally of the scientists after they heard the news of Hiroshima, bellowing—to applause and laughter—that he was sure the Japanese didn’t like it, and expressing regret only that he and his colleagues hadn’t built the bomb in time to use it on the Germans.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt instigated the Manhattan Project in 1942, after Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, two of the most prominent physicists of the day, wrote him a letter warning that German scientists had figured out how to split an atom, that they could turn this discovery into a very powerful bomb, and that we needed to beat them to it or risk losing the war. As it happened, the Allied armies defeated the Nazis in the spring of 1945, before the German scientists succeeded. But Japan fought on, so Truman—who became president after FDR died—shifted the plans to drop the bomb on Japan.

Some of the Manhattan Project’s scientists—including Szilard—petitioned Truman to drop the bomb on an unpopulated island as a demonstration of its power, giving the Japanese a chance to surrender before it was unleashed on their cities. Oppenheimer urged his colleagues not to sign Szilard’s letter, saying such matters should be left to political leaders and endorsing the official view that if we didn’t drop the bomb, thousands of American soldiers would die in an invasion of the Japanese mainland. (The debate over this question is still unsettled.) The film is clear on all of this. It points out, as well, that Oppenheimer served on the official commission that selected the bomb’s targets.

Oppenheimer fell into a funk after the war, perhaps as a result of viewing footage of the atrocities that his bombs inflicted on tens of thousands of civilians. But many military officers and some scientists, foreseeing a possible war with Russia, pushed to build a hydrogen bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II. Oppenheimer opposed the H-bomb project, but not entirely for moral reasons. At first, he thought it was infeasible. Then, when the math proved it feasible, he dropped his resistance, admitting that it was too “technically sweet” not to develop. (The film does not quote this rather famous line of his.) Still, he remained unenthusiastic, worrying that the H-bomb would divert money from Hiroshima-type A-bombs, which he thought the Army should continue building as weapons to be used on the battlefield if the Soviets invaded Western Europe. He argued that H-bombs were too powerful for battlefield targets—they could destroy only big cities—and, if the Russians built them, as they would if we did, a war would devastate American cities, too. He did eventually come to the view, as portrayed in the film, that this mutual vulnerability might deter both sides from using the weapons or even from going to war at all. But he was not opposed to nuclear weapons in general.

At this point, in the early 1950s, Oppenheimer was still very influential—among fellow scientists, legislators, and the public. He was chairman of the advisory council to the Atomic Energy Commission and director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Einstein still served.* His hedged attitude toward the H-bomb threatened the project’s funding. And so its leading advocates set out to destroy him.

They created a tribunal to investigate whether his security clearance should be revoked. (Without a Q security clearance, he could play no role in setting, or even learning about, atomic policy.) Oppenheimer left himself open to attack. In the 1930s and early ’40s, he had been a “fellow traveler”—probably not a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, but an active supporter of some of its causes, which in the day included racial integration, a minimum wage, and aiding the anti-fascist soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. Not only that, his wife, Kitty (played by Emily Blunt), had once been a party member, as had his brother and several of his close friends, and he attended several meetings of the party’s chapter in Berkeley, where he was teaching physics. Even after he was appointed director of Los Alamos in 1943, his security clearance was held up because of these connections.* The project’s military director, Gen. Leslie Groves (played by Matt Damon), had to force the clearance through.

It was one thing to hold left-wing ideas in the ’30s, during the Depression, or even in the early ’40s, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies in the war against Nazi Germany. But by 1954, when the tribunal held its hearings, we were in the thick of the Cold War. Distinctions between a fellow traveler, a Communist, and a Soviet spy were waved away as trivial.

The FBI had been tapping Oppenheimer’s phone for years. The tribunal obtained transcripts of the taps, and because the hearings weren’t a trial, they didn’t feel the need to share the material with Oppenheimer or his lawyers. They even had phone taps of his calls with his lawyers. They also deliberately humiliated Oppenheimer, catching him on discrepancies between his memory and the record of the phone taps, and at one point—while his wife was in the hearing room—asked about an affair he’d had with a former girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, played in the movie by Florence Pugh. (Kitty knew about it, but was mortified that her husband’s tormentors did too.)

Much of the film is devoted to these hearings. His interrogators are portrayed as so brazenly hostile, you may wonder if the scenes are accurate—and they are. They’re taken, almost verbatim, from the hearing’s transcripts , which were published many years ago.

Nolan is also accurate in depicting the tribunal as an instrument of personal revenge—the creation of Lewis Strauss, a shrewd, self-made financier and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Not only was Strauss (cannily played by Robert Downey Jr.) an ardent advocate of the H-bomb, he had also been humiliated by Oppenheimer, first at a public congressional hearing, then repeatedly at AEC meetings—and Strauss never forgot this.

Oppenheimer’s tendency to badger or ridicule those who weren’t as smart as he was (which included almost everyone) earned him several enemies. And he made a mistake in alienating Strauss, whose capacity for holding grudges was limitless. (One of Strauss’ colleagues later said, “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor .”)

Further damage was done by Edward Teller (played by Benny Safdie), one of the Los Alamos scientists. Teller had been bored by the A-bomb project, even while it was going on, and wanted to move ahead with an H-bomb. He and Oppenheimer quarreled about this. After the war, Teller pushed to create a separate lab dedicated to building H-bombs. Oppenheimer opposed the idea, so Teller defanged him by testifying against him at the hearing.

The tribunal voted 2–1 to revoke Oppenheimer’s clearance. Teller got his money for a new lab in Livermore, California. (Both Los Alamos and Livermore are still in operation.) The episode unleashed a scandal and created schisms within the scientific community—the Teller hawks vs. the Oppenheimer doves, a divide that pushed both sets of partisans to harden their positions. It also drove a rift between scientists and the government. Many scientists doubted they could offer advice without compromising their principles. The loss to the public was incalculable.

Oppenheimer was eventually vindicated, in two stages. In 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower nominated Strauss to be secretary of commerce. But one of the Manhattan Project’s scientists, David Hill (rivetingly played by Rami Malek), testified that Strauss had organized the campaign against Oppenheimer as an act of petty vengeance. As a result, the Senate voted down the nomination, the first time a Cabinet nominee had been rejected since 1925. (This scene is drawn from the Senate hearing’s transcript, which, by the way, was not in Bird and Sherwin’s biography. Nolan dug it up on his own.)

Then, in December 1963, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Oppenheimer the Fermi Award, one of the most prestigious in American science, carrying a cash award of $50,000 (the equivalent of almost $500,000 today). Teller, who was at the White House ceremony, offered his hand to Oppenheimer, who shook it. Kitty did not; she scowled, properly. The film accurately depicts both moments of triumph. (Their marriage was even more tempestuous than the film depicts, though it’s accurate in showing her as repeatedly—and wisely—urging her husband to fight back against his foes.)

Even clocking in at three hours, there are several aspects of this story that go untouched. Don’t expect a group portrait of scientists in collaboration. The Manhattan Project was a vast team effort, but the film won’t show you much of that. Except for Teller, and to some extent Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) and Isidor Rabi (David Krumholtz), all the other scientists—such brilliant, colorful figures as Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, George Kistiakowsky, and many others—are presented as ciphers in walk-on cameos. For a fuller view of the project, watch (if you can find it) the BBC’s 1980 seven-part drama, also called Oppenheimer , with Sam Waterston in the starring role. Or, better yet, read American Prometheus or Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb .

Nor will this film teach you much about fission, fusion, or quantum physics, though that may be asking too much of any movie. Nolan creates split-second images of starbursts, black holes, and galaxy-like explosions, and they have a dramatic effect. His re-creation of the first atom-bomb test is awesomely immersive.

The entire film is an experiment in immersion, an attempt to make us feel what it’s like to be Robert Oppenheimer, and it succeeds to a remarkable degree. Cillian Murphy, in the title role, helps: His lanky frame, awkward gait, and wide eyes convey the impression of an ethereal being, a creature from another dimension, which Oppenheimer sometimes seemed to be. He not only grasped the most arcane new concepts in physics, but also read deeply in history, philosophy, and literature, in several languages, which he mastered with absurd alacrity. (The film is accurate in showing him give a lecture on quantum mechanics to an audience in the Netherlands in Dutch , based on having studied the language for six weeks ahead of time.) We do get a sense of Oppenheimer’s magnetism, his arrogance, and his touch of craziness—and it may be that a man had to have all three to absorb so fully and instinctively the crazy-quilt eeriness of quantum physics. (It is also true, by the way, that as a grad student, he left a poison apple for one of his teachers.)

The film ends with a flashback to soon after the war, Oppenheimer talking with Einstein (charmingly played by Tom Conti) by a lake in Princeton, the two of them wondering whether their joint invention might someday engulf the world in flames. This scene never happened, or at least it’s not in Bird and Sherwin’s biography. But it’s an effective bit of dramatic license, capturing the guilt felt by many of the scientists who worked on the bomb. Some, led by Szilard and to some extent joined by Oppenheimer, became ardent activists for nuclear arms control.

Nolan means for Oppenheimer to be more than a mere biopic or historical drama. At a panel after a screening of the film on Saturday, he said that scientists today are facing their own “Oppenheimer moment,” especially in the development of artificial intelligence, another new technology that seems too technically sweet to resist but may wind up reshaping humanity more than humanity can shape it.

But he also reminded the audience that the hydrogen bomb is still with us, and that just because it has helped deter a war between the major powers for the 78 years since Hiroshima, our luck might not last forever. We are all still living in Oppenheimer’s era.

Correction, July 19, 2023: This article originally described Oppenheimer as the director of the Manhattan Project. He was the director of the Manhattan Project’s central laboratory in Los Alamos.

Correction, July 20, 2023: This article originally described Oppenheimer as the president of the Institute for Advanced Study and suggested that the institute was previously led by Einstein. Oppenheimer was the director, and while Einstein was a leading figure, he wasn’t its director.

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“Oppenheimer” Is Ultimately a History Channel Movie with Fancy Editing

By Richard Brody

Leaving the theatre after seeing “ Oppenheimer ,” I was tempted to call it a movie-length Wikipedia article. But, after a look online, I realized I was giving Wikipedia too little credit—or Christopher Nolan, the movie’s writer and director, too much. A simple fact-heavy article about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist whose leadership of the Manhattan Project, during the Second World War, produced the atom bomb , turns out to offer more complexity and more enticing detail than Nolan’s script does. And it has more to say about the movie’s essential themes—the ironies and perils that arise when science, ambition, and political power mix—than the movie itself does.

Nolan’s bio-pic, three hours long and based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning biography “ American Prometheus ,” charts the two main strands of Oppenheimer’s life: the scientific work that made his career and the leftist sympathies that, thanks to the country’s postwar anti-Communist crusade, were to prove his undoing . We meet Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) as a student making the grand tour of European science capitals, in the nineteen-twenties—Cambridge, Göttingen, Leiden—before returning to the United States and taking up joint appointments at Caltech and Berkeley. At Berkeley, he becomes a union organizer and donates to the anti-Fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War. (The money is conveyed via a Communist-affiliated group.) He hangs out with Communist Party members, including his brother Frank (Dylan Arnold), also a physicist, and Frank’s wife, Jackie (Emma Dumont). Although not himself a Party member, he is spied on by the F.B.I. He meets a Communist medical student named Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and they begin an ill-fated relationship.

In 1942, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), who is in charge of the Army’s effort to develop a nuclear bomb, taps Oppenheimer to oversee the program. Political suspicion clouds Oppenheimer’s name, but Groves vouches for him. Now Oppenheimer’s scientific life and his political one collide. He proves himself a master not only of the scientific aspects of his assignment but also of its administrative and political dimensions. But, once the Red Scare takes hold, his eminence, his proximity to known Communists, and his postwar efforts to prevent a nuclear-arms race make him an easy target. (He was stripped of his security clearance in 1954.)

The movie is structured as a sort of mosaic. Deftly edited by Jennifer Lame, it intercuts the various periods of Oppenheimer’s life—rise, struggle, fall, aftermath—continually connecting the early leftism and later pacifism with the tribulations during the McCarthy era. It’s natural to figure that such a fractured chronology would have a destabilizing effect—Nolan directed “Memento,” after all—but, in fact, the temporal scheme makes “Oppenheimer” less complex rather than more. The insistence on correlation means that events get reduced to their function within a larger morality tale. Nolan cuts his scenes to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and details that don’t fit—contradictions, subtleties, even little random peculiarities—get left out, and, with them, the feeling of experience, whether the protagonist’s or the viewer’s. What remains is a movie to be solved rather than lived.

The crux of “Oppenheimer” is, of course, the tension between the abstractions of physics and the brutal exigencies of war, between the freewheeling researcher and the project manager pursuing worldly goals, between the man of principle and the man whose work is directly responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. Oppenheimer, who is Jewish as well as a leftist, fervently devotes himself to the creation of an atomic bomb because he knows that Nazi Germany is far ahead in developing one and he assumes that Hitler won’t hesitate to use it. Once Germany surrenders—in May, 1945—he gets a shock: work on the bomb not only continues but accelerates. This mission drift poses a moral crisis for Oppenheimer that determines the course of the rest of the film, and of his life. It becomes clear that joining the Manhattan Project has left him tragically compromised, committed to creating a weapon of unparalleled destructiveness while having no say in how it will be used.

Then again, the film is so intent on making Oppenheimer an icon of conflicted conscience that it pays little attention to his character over all. He was a renowned aesthete with a bearing so charismatic that his students would try to emulate it, but we get little more than a couple of artsy name-drops to suggest that he has any cultural life at all. The “overweening ambition” that Groves saw in Oppenheimer is never in evidence, nor is there any mention of his chilling readiness to go along with a plan (one that was never put into action) to poison German food supplies with radioactive strontium. There’s no glimpse of the ailing Oppenheimer, who was suffering from tuberculosis and joint pain even while running Los Alamos. It doesn’t help that Murphy portrays Oppenheimer as wraithlike and haunted, a cipher, a black hole of experience who bears his burdens blankly as he’s buffeted by his circumstances but gives off no energy of his own. The performance, no less than the script, reduces the protagonist to an abstraction created to be analyzed. “Oppenheimer” reveals itself to be, in essence, a History Channel movie. Detached from the rich particulars of personality and thought, the moral dilemmas and historical stakes that Oppenheimer faces are reduced to an interconnected set of trolley problems—with the historical context flattened to green-screen backgrounds.

This moral reckoning is oddly underplayed in the dramatic action of the film, largely because of one specific aesthetic conceit of Nolan’s. After the bombing of Hiroshima , Oppenheimer is brought to speak to a raucously triumphal assembly of Los Alamos employees. His speech betrays no misgivings, but, while he’s at the podium, Nolan shows what Oppenheimer imagines: overwhelming flashes of destruction, conflagrations that burn his audience to cinders. Representing conscience in this way, wordlessly, enables Nolan to fill the screen with visual fizz, but it doesn’t convey the presence, the inner experience, of a true moral reckoning. That’s because images alone—at least, those which Nolan offers here—can’t suggest the interior debates that must be pulsing through such a conflicted mind at this ghastly moment. Perhaps, in a movie that told its story while ranging further into the realm of visual imagination, the decision would come off as an aesthetic commitment. But, given the plethora of dialogue in “Oppenheimer,” Nolan’s choice to convey Oppenheimer’s inner life solely in images comes off as merely a cinematic prejudice. In “Memento,” Nolan was sufficiently interested in his protagonist’s thoughts to let us hear them, as voice-over; all the more puzzling, then, that we are granted no such access to the inner monologue of someone as literate, reflective, and fascinating as Oppenheimer. Although the movie is unusually and even gratifyingly talky, moving most of its action ahead by way of dialogue, we almost never hear Oppenheimer speak about his guilt—not even in intimate discussions with his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt). The key moment in which he does verbalize misgivings is an encounter with Harry S. Truman, after the end of the war: Oppenheimer admits to feeling as if he has blood on his hands; Truman derisively offers him a handkerchief and then dismisses him as a “crybaby.” The scene is powerful, but its power is limited by Nolan’s failure to convey Oppenheimer’s opinion of the Commander-in-Chief who’d ordered the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The extended scenes of the closed-door security-committee hearing in which Oppenheimer’s political record and personal life are subjected to cruelly intrusive scrutiny come off as a scourging that he endures with a sense of self-punishment. Other scenes, of his persecutor Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), a Cabinet nominee, facing his own intrusive inquiries at a Senate committee hearing, evoke the Machiavellian realm of power into which Oppenheimer, naïvely confident in the wisdom of his mission, has ventured. Yet these notions, too, are unexplored from Oppenheimer’s own perspective. Rather than illuminating him or his times, the scenes seem pitched to spark post-screening debate, to seek an importance beyond the experiences and ideas of the characters.

A hallmark of Nolan’s method—as in such auteur-defining big-budget works as “Inception” and “ Interstellar ”—is to take the complexities of science, turn them into sensationalist science fiction, and then reinfuse the result with brow-furrowing seriousness. The last step is often achieved by means of chronological or visual intricacies that render objectivity as deep subjective strangeness; strip away such effects, however, and one sees characters conceived in simplistically sentimental terms that are pure melodrama. In “Oppenheimer,” sentimentality and melodrama are in plentiful supply, but visuals less so, with the exception of Oppenheimer’s visions of conflagration. Even these are strangely subdued, generic images of churning fire standing in for the destructive power of atomic weapons—and it is tempting to imagine that Nolan is, in spite of himself, admitting to the incommensurability of cinematic representation for the historic catastrophe of nuclear devastation. For long stretches of the film, Nolan’s direction is a merely literal depiction of actors dispensing dialogue with efficiency but without flair; if his name weren’t attached, the direction might well be ascribed to a serial-television journeyman.

What’s missing, above all, from Nolan’s connect-the-dots version of Oppenheimer’s life is the kind of utterly outlandish detail in which that life abounded. For instance, Nolan shows Oppenheimer, as a student at Cambridge, injecting potassium cyanide into an apple belonging to a professor who humiliates and punishes him for poor laboratory technique—apparently to no consequence. Later, Oppenheimer lets on, in a quick aside, that he was forced into psychoanalysis as a result. In fact, he was threatened with criminal charges and with expulsion, and only the pleas of his father, a prosperous businessman, spared him. In the movie, this reckless, potentially deadly whim comes out of nowhere, but there are plenty of other episodes in Oppenheimer’s life to suggest that a truly violent personality lurked within, as when he physically attacked a friend who announced plans to marry. Nolan shows Oppenheimer to be an eager class participant in his physics tour of Europe; in fact, he was an obnoxiously aggressive one, whose fellow-students signed a petition demanding that the professor silence him. Throughout his life, he was highly mercurial—expansive and sociable and whimsical when the occasion demanded it, as at Los Alamos, where he took a comic role in a play and was an enthusiastic party host.

It wouldn’t have taken a six-hour miniseries to show Oppenheimer from more angles and do justice to his range of character: the movie is as sluggish as if Nolan were underlining the script’s most salient passages onscreen, and, with a more vigorous pace, it could have amplified the script without adding a minute of screen time. As it is, the paucity of teeming, loose-ended details is rendered all the more dismaying by contrast with the movie’s finest touches—particularly one involving Oppenheimer’s brief meeting with the elderly Albert Einstein (Tom Conti). Oppenheimer has come to head up the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein has been seemingly put out to pasture, and the pair discuss guilt and fame, faded glory and the passing of time. In terms of the film’s plot, the scene is insignificant, but the lightning flash of worldly wisdom it offers is exactly what most of the movie fails to give us. Unfortunately, Nolan parsimoniously withholds it to the end—like a banknote that, thanks to the inflation of the rest of the movie, has lost most of its value by the time it’s used. “Oppenheimer” sacrifices much of its dramatic force to the importance of its subject, and to Nolan’s pride at having tackled it—which is to say, to his own self-importance. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the affiliation of the Institute for Advanced Study.

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'Oppenheimer' Cast: Meet the A-List Actors Starring in the Christopher Nolan Film

Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Robert Downey Jr. are just a few of the famous faces in historical drama

Adam England is a contributing writer at PEOPLE. He has been working at PEOPLE since 2022. His work has previously appeared in The Guardian, Euronews, Vice UK and Dazed.

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As one of the year's most highly-anticipated films, Christopher Nolan ’s Oppenheimer almost needs no introduction.

Based on the biography American Prometheus about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who developed the first nuclear weapons during World War II, the epic drama explores his life and his work.

Peaky Blinders ’ Cillian Murphy plays the titular character, but he’s just one name in the star-studded cast. Alongside young actors like Florence Pugh , Dylan Arnold and Jack Quaid are icons like Robert Downey Jr. , Emily Blunt and Matt Damon .

In fact, Downey Jr. described Oppenheimer as the “best film I’ve ever been in” at the London premiere on July 13, adding, “I cannot wait for you all to experience it."

“This is what a summer blockbuster, when I was growing up, used to be," he continued. "It just kind of, like, changed your life. But again, you know, it’s why Chris Nolan is who he is.”

From their past roles to personal lives, here's everything to know about the cast of Oppenheimer .

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Universal Pictures ; Samir Hussein/WireImage

Murphy, 47, plays the titular character, Robert J. Oppenheimer. The Irish actor is best known for his starring role as Tommy Shelby in the BBC drama Peaky Blinders . In 2020, he also had a role in the horror sequel A Quiet Place Part II .

He married visual artist Yvonne McGuinness in 2004 after they met in the '90s, and they lived in London for 14 years before moving to Dublin in 2015. They have two sons, Malachy (born in 2005) and Aran (born in 2007).

Emily Blunt as Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer

Universal Pictures ; Karwai Tang/WireImage

Blunt, 40, plays Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, the wife of Murphy’s character. Like her on-screen husband, she had a main role in the A Quiet Place series. Blunt is also known for movies like The Devil Wears Prada , Salmon Fishing in the Yemen , Mary Poppins Returns and The Girl on the Train .

The London-born actress has been married to The Office star John Krasinski since 2010. The couple have two daughters , Hazel (born in 2014) and Violet (born in 2016).

Matt Damon as Lieutenant General Leslie Groves

Damon, 52, plays U.S. military officer Leslie Groves. Damon has starred in Good Will Hunting , The Talented Mr. Ripley , Saving Private Ryan and Mars , and he also played the titular character in the Bourne franchise.

He married Luciana Barroso in 2005 after they met while he was filming Stuck on You in 2003. Together, they have four daughters: Isabella, Gia, Stella and Alexia, who is Barroso's daughter from a previous relationship.

Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss

Pierre Suu/WireImage

Robert Downey Jr., 58, plays Lewis Strauss, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and adversary of Oppenheimer. As Hollywood’s highest-paid actor from 2013 to 2015, per Variety , he might be best known for playing Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). He also portrayed Sherlock Holmes in the Guy Ritchie movie of the same name.

Downey married Susan Downey (née Levin) in 2005, and they have two kids : a son, Exton, born in 2012, and a daughter, Avri, born in 2014. Downey Jr. was previously married to actress and singer Deborah Falconer from 1992 to 2004 — they have a son, Indio, born in 1993.

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock

Pugh, 27, plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, who had a relationship with the movie’s titular character. She rose to fame in 2019 after playing Dani in Midsommar and Amy March in Little Women . She also had roles in Don’t Worry Darling (alongside Harry Styles ) and The Wonder and starred as Yelena Belova in the MCU movie Black Widow .

Born in the British city of Oxford, one of her siblings is Game of Thrones actor Toby Sebastian. She lived in Spain for three years as a child, as her family hoped the warmer weather there would be good for her health — she had tracheomalacia as a child. From 2019 to 2022, Pugh was in a relationship with fellow actor Zach Braff after meeting while working on a short film.

Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence

Universal Pictures ; Neil Mockford/FilmMagic

Hartnett , 44, plays nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence. He’s known for his starring roles in war films Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down , as well as the rom-com 40 Days and 40 Nights and the drama O . From 2014 to 2016, he played Ethan Chandler in the Showtime horror series Penny Dreadful .

He’s been in a relationship with English actress Tamsin Egerton since 2012, and the couple have three children . He married Egerton in 2021.

Casey Affleck as Boris Pash

Alberto Rodriguez/Variety/Getty

Affleck , 47, plays military intelligence officer Boris Pash. The younger brother of Ben Affleck began his career as a child actor in the 1980s and rose to prominence in 2007 after he played outlaw Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and appeared in Gone Baby Gone , his brother’s directorial debut.

He married Summer Phoenix in 2006 after they dated for six years; her brother, Joaquin , introduced them. Affleck and Phoenix had two sons together, born in 2004 and 2007. However, Phoenix filed for divorce in August 2017, and their divorce was finalized later that year. Since 2021, Affleck has been in a relationship with Caylee Cowan .

Rami Malek as David Hill

Samir Hussein/WireImage

Rami Malek , 42, plays experimental physicist David Hill. Malek was born in California to Egyptian parents and is best known for his Emmy-winning role as computer hacker Elliot Alderson in USA Network’s Mr. Robot (2015 to 2019). In 2018, he notably portrayed Freddie Mercury in the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody , for which he won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a SAG award.

Malek lives a private life but has been in a relationship with his Bohemian Rhapsody costar Lucy Boynton since 2018.

Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr

Kenneth Branagh , 62, plays Danish physicist Niels Bohr. The Northern Irish Branagh has directed and starred in many Shakespeare adaptations over the years and was knighted in 2012 for his work in film, according to BBC . In 2002, he won an Emmy for his role as Reinhard Heydrich in the HBO movie Conspiracy .

In 2003, Branagh married film art director Lindsay Brunnock, whom he met while shooting Shackleton the year prior. He was previously married to Emma Thompson , though they split in 1995 following his affair with Helena Bonham Carter .

Benny Safdie as Edward Teller

Universal Pictures ; Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty

Safdie, 37, plays theoretical physicist and “father of the hydrogen bomb” Edward Teller. He’s perhaps best known for working with his brother Josh on movies like 2017’s Good Time and 2019’s Uncut Gems. Safdie has also starred in Licorice Pizza , Person to Person and Pieces of a Woman .

Benny is married to Ava Safdie, and they have two children together.

Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer

Gregg DeGuire/FilmMagic

Arnold, 29, plays Frank Oppenheimer, the titular character’s younger brother. He’s known for playing Noah in the 2019 romantic drama After and its sequel and Cameron Elam in the 2018 slasher Halloween and its sequel. However, he might be best known for the role of Theo Engler in the third season of Netflix’s You .

In 2021, Arnold and his You costar Victoria Pedretti sparked dating rumors when they were spotted running errands together in Los Angeles.

Gustaf Skarsgård as Hans Bethe

Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic

Gustaf Skarsgård , 42, plays theoretical physicist Hans Bethe. The Swedish actor, brother to fellow stars Alexander , Bill and Valter, is known for roles in movies like The Way Back and Kon-Tiki , and for playing Floki in the History Channel’s Vikings from 2013 to 2020. He’s also had roles in HBO TV’s Westworld and Netflix’s Cursed .

Skarsgård is in a relationship with Caroline Sjöström. Their daughter was born in November 2020.

David Krumholtz as Isidor Rabi

Michael Loccisano/Getty

David Krumholtz , 45, plays physicist and Nobel Prize winner Isidor Rabi. The actor has had a number of TV and film roles over the years, appearing in Joss Whedon ’s 2005 space western Serenity , the CBS crime drama Numb3rs and The Santa Clause franchise.

In 2010, he married actress Vanessa Britting after a two-year engagement. They have a daughter and a son born in 2014 and 2016, respectively. In 2011, Krumholtz was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. In May 2021, he celebrated 10 years cancer-free .

Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush

Jason Davis/Getty

Matthew Modine , 64, plays Vannevar Bush, the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. His breakout role was as J.T. “Joker” Davis in the 1987 war drama Full Metal Jacket . In recent years, he’s perhaps more noted for playing Dr. Martin Brenner in Netflix’s Stranger Things .

In 1980, Modine married Caridad Rivera. Their son, assistant film director Boman, was born in 1985, and their daughter, actress, dancer and singer Ruby, was born in 1990. She’s perhaps best known for playing Sierra Morton in Shameless .

Emma Dumont as Jackie Oppenheimer

Jemal Countess/FilmMagic

Emma Dumont, 28, plays Jackie Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer's sister-in-law. The Seattle-born Dumont is best known for her roles in the ABC Family comedy-drama Bunheads , NBC’s period crime drama Aquarius and FOX’s superhero series The Gifted.

She’s relatively private, but as a teenager, Dumont was a big roller derby skater and used to take part in robotics challenges. She began doing ballet at age 3 and performing in community theater at age 6.

Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman

Universal Pictures ; ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty

Jack Quaid , 31, plays theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. He began his acting career in his late teens playing Marvel in The Hunger Games , before his main role in the HBO period drama series Vinyl and then the starring role of Hughie Campbell in the Amazon Prime superhero series The Boys . He’s also appeared in 2022's Scream and Scream VI .

Born to Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid , Quaid comes from a family of actors. From 2016 to 2021, he was linked to actress Lizzy McGroder. He has been most recently linked to his The Boys costar Claudia Doumit.

Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman

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Gary Oldman , 65, plays President Harry S. The London-born actor has been one of the biggest names in Hollywood for over three decades. In recent years, he’s become known for playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour , George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , and Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise.

He’s been married five times: to Lesley Manville, Uma Thurman , Donya Fiorentino, Alexandra Edenborough and Gisele Schmidt — whom he married in 2017. He has a son with Manville, born in 1988, and two sons with Fiorentino, born in 1997 and 1999.

Olivia Thirlby as Lilli Hornig

Amy Sussman/Getty

Olivia Thirlby , 36, plays scientist Lilli Hornig. She began her career in 2006 with roles in NBC’s crime drama Kidnapped and the thriller United 93 and rose to prominence a year later with a role in Juno . She’s also featured in sci-fi action movies The Darkest Hour and Dredd .

While filming Juno, she was in a relationship with costar Elliot Page , and in 2014, she married Dredd costar Jacques Pienaar.

Tom Conti as Albert Einstein

Karwai Tang/WireImage

Tom Conti, 81, plays legendary scientist Albert Einstein. The Scottish actor has taken on a wide range of roles throughout his career, winning a Tony Award in 1979 for his role in Whose Life Is It Anyway? and starring in the likes of Reuben, Reuben (for which he was nominated for an Oscar) and The Dark Knight Rises.

He has been married to actress Kara Wilson since 1967, and they have a daughter, Nina Conti, a comedian and ventriloquist.

Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols

Cindy Ord/Getty

Dane DeHaan , 37, plays army officer Kenneth Nichols. He began his acting career in 2008 as an understudy to Haley Joel Osment in Broadway’s American Buffalo before landing a role in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit . Since then, he’s appeared in the 2012 superhero thriller Chronicle , the 2013 drama Kill Your Darlings and the 2014 MCU film The Amazing Spider-Man 2 .

He married actress Anna Wood in 2012. The pair first met in high school in North Carolina, where he transferred for his senior year, and they also appeared in Chronicle together. They have two children together.

Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge

Gilbert Flores/Variety/Getty 

Josh Peck , 36, plays physicist Kenneth Bainbridge. The N.Y.C.-born actor rose to prominence as a child actor on Nickelodeon, first on The Amanda Show and then as Josh Nichols alongside Drake Bell in Drake & Josh . In recent years, he’s appeared alongside John Stamos in the FOX sitcom Grandfathered and has starred in Hulu’s How I Met Your Father.

Peck married Paige O’Brien in June 2017, and the couple have two children together. Their elder son, Max, was born in December 2018 , and their younger son, Shai, arrived in October 2022 .

Alex Wolff as Luis Walter Alvarez

Alex Wolff , 25, plays experimental physicist Luis Walter Alvarez. Like Peck, he rose to fame on Nickelodeon, appearing alongside his brother Nat in The Naked Brothers Band , which his mother Polly Draper created. The brothers then formed a band, Nat & Alex Wolff, and starred in their mom’s 2018 comedy-drama Stella’s Last Weekend .

Wolff's mom, Polly, is an actress and writer, while his father is jazz pianist Michael Wolff.

Tony Goldwyn as Gordon Gray

Jason Mendez/Getty

Tony Goldwyn , 63, plays the attorney and government official Gordon Gray. From 2012 to 2018, he played President Fitzgerald Grant III in the ABC drama Scandal and won a Peabody Award.

He’s been married to Jane Musky since 1987, and the couple have two daughters, Anna and Tess.

Related Articles

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is often called the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the Manhattan Project, the program that developed the first nuclear weapon during World War II.

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Latest News: Oppenheimer Movie Wins 2024 Golden Globe for Best Drama Motion Picture

On January 7, producer Emma Thomas accepted the 2024 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Drama for Oppenheimer , the 2023 biopic which explores the life of famed physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb through the Manhattan Project.

The summer blockbuster put the little-known yet highly influential scientist on the map as it grossed more than $950 million at the global box office. You can rent or purchase Oppenheimer on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV+ , the Google Play store , Vudu , or YouTube . It’s expected to eventually stream on Peacock , though no plans have been announced.

Watch Oppenheimer on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV+ , or Vudu .

Quick Facts

Early life, education, and professorships, the manhattan project, life after the atomic bomb, relationship with jean tatlock, wife and children, oppenheimer in movies and tv, who was j. robert oppenheimer.

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer served as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the development of the atomic bomb. After the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Oppenheimer was selected to administer a laboratory to carry out the Manhattan Project, the program that developed the first nuclear weapon during World War II. After resigning from his post in 1945, he became the chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. Prior to John F. Kennedy ’s assassination in 1963, the president announced Oppenheimer would receive the Enrico Fermi Award for his achievements in physics. President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him the award that December. The “Father of the Atomic Bomb” died from cancer at the age of 62 in 1967.

FULL NAME: Julius Robert Oppenheimer BORN: April 22, 1904 DIED: February 18, 1967 BIRTHPLACE: New York, New York SPOUSE: Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer (1940-1967) CHILDREN: Peter and Katherine ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904, in New York City. His German Jewish parents were Julius Oppenheimer, a rich textile importer, and Ella (née Friedman), a painter. Both were immigrants.

After graduating from Harvard University, Oppenheimer sailed to England and enrolled at the University of Cambridge, where he began his atomic research at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1925. Oppenheimer experienced bouts of depression throughout his life, telling his brother Frank: “It is occasionally true that I need physics more than friends.”

Oppenheimer was miserable at Cambridge and found laboratory work uninteresting, preferring theoretical physics rather than experimental, according to American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Oppenheimer had such a poor relationship with his Cambridge tutor, Patrick Blackett, that at one point Oppenheimer left an apple doused with noxious chemicals on Blackett’s desk, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life by Abraham Pais and ‎Robert P. Crease. Blackett wasn’t harmed, and Oppenheimer avoided discipline only with the intervention of his parents.

In 1926, he teamed with Max Born at Göttingen University, where he met a host of prominent physicists, including Niels Bohr . He received his doctorate at Göttingen while also developing what became known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, an important contribution to quantum molecular theory.

Oppenheimer held teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology, and did important research in such fields at theoretical astronomy, nuclear physics, quantum electrodynamics, and more, according to A Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists and Inventors in American Film and TV Since 1930 by A. Bowdoin Van Riper.

Oppenheimer became politically active in the 1930s and agreed with Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard that the Nazis could develop a nuclear weapon. Following the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Oppenheimer was selected to administer a laboratory to carry out the Manhattan Project, a U.S. Army experiment aimed at harnessing atomic energy for military purposes.

The choice of Oppenheimer surprised some due to his left-wing politics, lack of leadership experience, and the fact he had never won a Nobel Prize. However, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project, felt Oppenheimer had an “overweening ambition” that would serve him well in the position, according to Life and Times of the Atomic Bomb by Albert Berger.

Oppenheimer led the scientific end of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, beginning in 1942. The project, which grew from a few hundred people to more than 6,000 by 1945, was populated by many scientists who had escaped fascist regimes in Europe, according to American Prometheus . Their mission was to explore a newly documented fission process involving uranium-235, with which they hoped to make a nuclear bomb before Adolf Hitler could develop one. The project was initially allotted $6,000 by the U.S. government, but by the time the work culminated in 1945, the budget had grown to $2 billion.

The work of Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists led to the world’s first nuclear explosion in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The detonation was given the code name “Trinity,” inspired by a poem by John Donne . While witnessing the explosion, Oppenheimer recalled a verse from the Bhagavad Gita that read, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one,” according to the book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists by Robert Jungk. More famously, he later said he also reflected upon another Bhagavad Gita verse: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer was initially pleased with the atomic bomb, with physicist Isidor Rabi saying of him: “I’ll never forget his walk; I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car. His walk was like High Noon… This kind of strut. He had done it,” according to Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center by Ray Monk.

But Oppenheimer’s feelings of elation following Trinity and the bombing of Hiroshima three weeks later changed after the bombing of Nagasaki, which he found unnecessary from a military perspective. During a White House meeting with Harry S. Truman , Oppenheimer famously claimed to have “blood on his hands,” a comment that infuriated the president . Although the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings effectively ended World War II, the weapons’s devastation prompted Oppenheimer to argue against its further development, and he resigned from his post that same year. Ultimately, his work for the Manhattan Project earned him the enduring nickname “father of the atomic bomb.”

The Manhattan Project was top secret until after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Oppenheimer became a household name. He returned to the California Institute of Technology but found he had little desire to each anymore. He went on to become chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb test in 1949 came earlier than Americans had expected, increasing pressure for the United States to develop the more powerful hydrogen bomb, but Oppenheimer opposed this for practical and ethnical reasons, according to American Prometheus . Truman, however, decided to press forward with the weapon’s development anyway.

Oppenheimer’s shocking opposition to the bomb led to accusations that he was a Communist supporter. In 1954, the AEC held a security hearing regarding Oppenheimer, during which he was suspended from secret nuclear research and stripped of his security clearance. This served as a personal and professional humiliation for Oppenheimer, effectively ending his role in government and policy.

However, his reputation was partially rehabilitated in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy announced Oppenheimer would receive the Enrico Fermi Award, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century by David Cassidy. After Kennedy’s assassination , President Lyndon B. Johnson presented the award to Oppenheimer that December.

Oppenheimer continued to support international control of atomic energy in his later years.

Oppenheimer was known for his romantic relationship with Jean Tatlock , a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, while Oppenheimer was a young physics professor there. Tatlock is credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical communist politics, something that haunted him later in his career. Although Oppenheimer felt passionately toward Tatlock and reportedly proposed to her twice, they broke up before Oppenheimer joined the Manhattan Project, and Tatlock died by suicide in January 1944.

In 1939, Oppenheimer met Katherine “Kitty” Puening, a Berkeley student who also had communist ties. The two married in 1940, and they had two children: Peter, who was born in 1941, and Katherine “Toni,” who was born in 1944.

Working as a biologist and botanist, Kitty became an alcoholic after her husband became a celebrity for his role in the Manhattan Project, according to American Prometheus . Kitty died of an embolism in 1972 years after Oppenheimer’s own death.

A chain smoker, Oppenheimer died of throat cancer on February 18, 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey.

In December 2022, 55 years after Oppenheimer’s death, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm nullified the 1954 decision to revoke his national security clearance.

Oppenheimer has been portrayed in several films, plays, and other works of media. A BBC television serial Oppenheimer was released in 1980, starring Sam Waterston as the famed physicist. It won three BAFTA Television Awards. That year also saw the release of The Day After Trinity , a documentary about Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won a Peabody Award.

Dwight Schultz portrayed Oppenheimer in the film Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), and David Strathairn played him in the television movie Day One , also released in 1989. Filmmaker Christopher Nolan directs 2023’s Oppenheimer movie, in which Cillian Murphy plays the famed physicist.

• I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
• If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.
• Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Colin McEvoy joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had spent 16 years as a journalist, writer, and communications professional. He is the author of two true crime books: Love Me or Else and Fatal Jealousy . He is also an avid film buff, reader, and lover of great stories.

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‘oppenheimer’ among movies coming to streaming on prime video in june.

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Cillian Murphy in "Oppenheimer."

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and eight Godzilla movies are among the June streaming titles coming to Prime Video.

Oppenheimer —Nolan’s epic film about J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and the creation of the atomic bomb— won seven Oscars in March including Best Picture, Best Director for Nolan , Best Actor for Cillian Murphy and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr.

Not surprisingly, Oppenheimer made its streaming debut on NBC Universal’s Peacock app because the film was produced by Universal Pictures. According to streaming tracker When to Stream , Oppenheimer is set to debut on Prime Video on June 18.

Ironically, eight Godzilla films from Toho Studios will also begin streaming on Prime Video in June. The Godzilla film saga, of course, is rooted in the fears Japanese residents felt after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The bombings are not shown—and only spoken of—in Oppenheimer .

When to Stream reported that the eight Godzilla films coming to Prime Video on June 1 include Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993), Godzilla Vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994), Godzilla Vs. Destoroyah (1995), Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla (2002), Godzilla vs. Megaguirus: The G Annihilation Strategy (2000), Godzilla, Mothra And King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003) and Godzilla: Final Wars (2004).

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In total, 150 films are being added to Prime Video in June, according to When to Stream .

‘Oppenheimer’ Isn’t The Only Oscar Winner Coming To Prime Video In June

In addition to Oppenheimer , Oliver Stone’s 1987 Best Picture Oscar winner Platoon begins streaming on Prime Video on June 1, per What to Stream .

The Vietnam War drama won four Oscars total, including Best Director for Stone. Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger were both nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Platoon , but the Oscar went to Michael Caine for Hannah and Her Sisters .

Several other Oscar-winning films also begin streaming on Prime Video on June 1. Among them is Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2007 Best Picture Oscar winner No Country for Old Men , which also earned the filmmaking brothers an Oscar for Best Director. Javier Bardem also won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the film.

Films with major Oscar winners attached coming to Prime Video include the 1951 Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn adventure classic The African Queen , which earned Bogart a Best Actor Oscar. Director John Ford’s 1952 classic romantic drama The Quiet Man is also debuting on Prime Video on June 1. The film—which stars John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara—earned two Oscars, including Best Director for Ford.

Also coming to the streamer to kick off June is the legendary 1952 Western High Noon , which earned a Best Actor Oscar for Gary Cooper.

Among the more recent films featuring Academy Award winners that are coming to Prime Video on June 1 is the acclaimed drama Precious , the 2009 drama that earned Mo’Nique a Best Supporting Actress Oscar; and 2016’s The Danish Girl , which won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Alicia Vikander.

Also, 2018’s acclaimed drama If Beale Street Could Talk —which earned Regina King an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress—will be available to stream for free with ads through Prime Video’s Freevee app.

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The Manhattan Project and the Birth of the Atomic Bomb: From Albert Einstein's Theories to J. Robert Oppenheimer's Test. A 2023 Biography and Documentary ... The J. Robert Oppenheimer Legacy Series 2) Kindle Edition

Did the recent cinematic masterpiece, the Oppenheimer movie directed by the brilliant Christopher Nolan with Cillian Murphy in the lead role, captivate your imagination? Drawing inspiration from the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography "American Prometheus Oppenheimer" by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the film offers a mesmerizing glimpse into the enigmatic life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But if it ignited a spark of curiosity within you, urging you to delve deeper into the intricate tapestry of events and personalities that birthed the atomic age, then you're on the precipice of an enlightening journey.

Venture into a world before the atomic era, where the interplay of global geopolitics, groundbreaking scientific discoveries, and societal shifts set the stage for monumental transformations. Discover the genius of Einstein, whose revolutionary theories in physics paved the way for the atomic age, and immerse yourself in the contributions of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the team of scientists who were instrumental in the Manhattan Project.

In this meticulously researched narrative, available in various formats including hardback, hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and soon as an audiobook, you'll traverse:

Einstein's Vision: Delving into the theories that reshaped our cosmic understanding and the atomic research challenges they presented.

The Manhattan Project's Pioneers: An exploration of Oppenheimer's role and the collaborative efforts of the brilliant minds that brought the project to fruition.

The Atomic Age Revealed: From the inaugural test in New Mexico's deserts, known as the Trinity test, to the cataclysmic events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Moral Crossroads: A reflection on the global response, Cold War espionage, and philosophical discourse surrounding the atomic bomb's deployment.

The Bomb's Legacy : An exploration of the atomic age's enduring influence on our contemporary world, including the controversies and ethical debates it sparked among 20th-century scientists, leaders, and influencers.

As you navigate this narrative, you'll be transported to an era marked by scientific brilliance, ethical quandaries, and decisions that altered the course of history. This book not only chronicles the events leading to the atomic bomb but also delves into the psyche of the visionaries who made it a reality.

Are you prepared to embark on a journey spanning from the early 20th-century scientific labs to the pivotal test sites of "The Manhattan Project and the Birth of the Atomic Bomb: From Einstein's Theories to Oppenheimer's Test"? Eager to grasp the intricate dance of science, ethics, and geopolitics that heralded the atomic age? This book promises a comprehensive, enlightening, and challenging voyage.

Embark on this enlightening odyssey, grasp the genesis of the atomic age, and unravel the stories of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and the atomic bomb's history.

From the making of the Hiroshima documentary to the "Day After" reflections, from the nuclear movies of 1986 to the weapons of power trailers, and from the historical nonfiction best sellers of 2023 to the DVD projects that encapsulate the era, this book encompasses it all. Dive into the heart of the Manhattan Project and the influence it had on the world.

Don't let this opportunity slip by. Dive in now and uncover the enigmas of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb's inception.

• Reading age 10 - 18 years
• Book 2 of 3 Pioneering Minds: The J. Robert Oppenheimer Legacy Series
• Print length 249 pages
• Language English
• Publication date August 23, 2023
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• See all details
• Next 2 for you in this series $16.76
• All 3 for you in this series $25.15

• In This Series
• By Julian R. Stonebridge
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From the Publisher

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CGHLBCPR
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 23, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1053 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 249 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ B0CGL335Z4
• #54 in Biographies of the Cold War
• #865 in Biographies of World War II
• #3,063 in WWII Biographies

About the author

Julian r. stonebridge.

Julian R. Stonebridge stands as a beacon in the literary world, celebrated for his unparalleled ability to intertwine the realms of science, history, and ethics into riveting narratives. His profound passion for the history of science, coupled with an insatiable curiosity about the intricacies of physics, has led to works that resonate deeply with scholars, students, and casual readers alike.

Born and raised amidst the historic charm and urban vibrancy of London, Stonebridge's formative years were a tapestry of exploration and discovery. The city's myriad museums, libraries, and cultural hubs served as his playground, fueling a voracious appetite for knowledge. This early immersion in a world of learning laid the foundation for an interdisciplinary approach that would later become the hallmark of his writing.

Beyond his literary pursuits, Stonebridge is a recognized figure in the global academic community. He has graced the stages of numerous science history symposiums, conferences, and workshops, captivating audiences with his thought-provoking lectures. His discussions often delve into the ethical quandaries posed by scientific advancements, the transformative role of science in human history, and the ever-evolving relationship between past discoveries and future innovations.

Stonebridge's commitment to knowledge extends beyond the written word and lecture halls. He has been instrumental in curating exhibitions that bring the wonders of science and history to the public. Collaborating with renowned institutions, he has helped design interactive experiences that bridge the gap between academia and the general populace.

In moments of respite, Stonebridge is often found wandering the English countryside, drawing inspiration from its serene landscapes. He's also an avid collector of antique books and scientific instruments, treasures that he believes hold stories waiting to be told. Engaging in spirited debates, attending book readings, and mentoring young writers are among his other cherished pastimes.

He often quips, "The universe is a vast tapestry of stories, and every day offers a new thread to weave." This philosophy is evident in his dedication to continuous learning and his drive to share the wonders of the world with his readers.

For a deeper dive into his research, upcoming projects, or to engage in enlightening discussions, follow Julian R. Stonebridge on Amazon and become part of his ever-expanding circle of inquisitive minds.

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All the Movies and Shows Coming to Prime Video in June 2024

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June is looking to be a diabolical month for Prime Video as one of the streaming service's most popular series is making its much-anticipated return. You can check out the list below to see all the movies and shows heading to Prime Video this June.

Available June 1, 2024:

• Las Vegas S1-S5
• All Saints (2017)
• Animal Crackers (2020)
• Annie (2014)
• A Raisin In The Sun (1961)
• At Close Range (1986)
• Basic (2003)
• Battlefield Earth (2000)
• Bite The Bullet (1975)
• Black Dynamite (2010)
• Bloodsport (1988)
• Blow Out (1981)
• Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
• Brewster's Millions (1985)
• Brick (2006)
• Bruno (2009)
• Buck And The Preacher (1972)
• Class (1983)
• Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)
• Cry Freedom (1987)
• Dark Angel (1990)
• Dark Blue (2003)
• Dawn Of The Dead (2004)
• Death At A Funeral (2007)
• Death At A Funeral (2010)
• Diablo (2016)
• Duck Soup (1933)
• Edge Of Darkness (2010)
• Eye Of The Needle (1981)
• Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982)
• Finding Forrester (2001)
• Fireproof (2008)
• Gigli (2003)
• Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2004)
• Godzilla Vs. Destoroyah (1999)
• Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla II (1999)
• Godzilla Vs. Megaguirus: The G Annihilation Strategy (2003)
• Godzilla Vs. Spacegodzilla (1999)
• Godzilla, Mothra, And King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2003)
• Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)
• Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2004)
• Gridiron Gang (2006)
• Guarding Tess (1994)
• Hackers (1995)
• Hellfighters (1968)
• High Noon (1952)
• I Am Ali (2014)
• I Am Bolt (2016)
• Igby Goes Down (2002)
• Incendies (2010)
• It Came From Outer Space (1953)
• Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
• Juan Of The Dead (2011)
• Just Mercy (2020)
• Kindergarten Cop (1990)
• Kindergarten Cop 2 (2016)
• Last Tango In Paris (1973)
• Layer Cake (2005)
• Little Man (2006)
• Macarthur (1977)
• Man's Favorite Sport? (1964)
• Midnight Run (1988)
• Milk (2009)
• Money Train (1995)
• No Country For Old Men (2007)
• No Good Deed (2014)
• No Stranger Than Love (2016)
• Noah (2014)
• Not Without My Daughter (1991)
• Ong Bak - The Thai Warrior (2005)
• Open Season (2006)
• Outlaws And Angels (2016)
• Overboard (1987)
• Pariah (2011)
• Paths Of Glory (1957)
• Platoon (1987)
• Precious (2009)
• Predestination (2015)
• Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
• Quantum Of Solace (2008)
• Revenge (1990)
• Saved! (2004)
• Six Degrees Of Separation (1993)
• Skyfall (2012)
• Sleepover (2004)
• Soapdish (1958)
• Some Kind Of Wonderful (1987)
• St. Elmo's Fire (1985)
• Stomp The Yard (2007)
• Superbad Unrated (2007)
• Takers (2010)
• Tangerine (2015)
• Teen Wolf (1985)
• The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert (1994)
• The African Queen (1952) The Animal (2001)
• The Battle Of Britain (1969)
• The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1977)
• The Brady Bunch Movie (1995)
• The Danish Girl (2016)
• The Haunting (1999)
• The Hurricane (2000)
• The Kids Are All Right (2010)
• The Last Castle (2001)
• The Man in the Moon (1991)
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
• The Mechanic (2011)
• The Missouri Breaks (1976)
• The Quiet Man (1952)
• The Russia House (1990)
• The War Wagon (1967)
• To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)
• Tomahawk (1951)
• Vertical Limit (2000)
• Written On The Wind (1956)
• You Got Served (2004)

Available on Freevee with ads:

• Brick Mansions (2014)
• Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
• Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014)
• If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
• Legion (2010)
• Rise of the Guardians (2012)
• Running with the Devil (2019)
• The Fate of the Furious (2017)
• The Lost Husband (2020)
• Traffik (2018)
• Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Available June 3, 2024:

• Melting Me Softly S1

Available June 4, 2024:

'mean girls' (2024).

The plastics are back and this time they sing. The Broadway hit based on the classic 2004 comedy gets readapted for the screen in Mean Girls . The film follows Cady Heron, who has recently moved back to the US after spending most of her childhood in Africa with her mother. Excited to start attending high school like a regular teenager, Cady quickly befriends outcasts Janis and Damian, who warn her of the toxic clique known as the Plastics, led by the fierce Regina George. When the Plastics decide to let Cady join their group, Janis asks Cady to attempt to take down the mean girls from within. This musical reimagining stars Angourie Rice ( Spider-Man: Far From Home ), Reneé Rapp ( The Sex Lives of College Girls ), Auli'i Cravalho ( Moana ), Tony nominee Jaquel Spivey ( A Strange Loop ), Avantika ( Senior Year ), Bebe Wood ( Love, Victor ), Christopher Briney ( The Summer I Turned Pretty ), Jenna Fischer ( The Office ), Jon Hamm ( Mad Men ), Ashley Park ( Joy Ride ), and Busy Philipps ( Cougar Town ). Tina Fey and Tim Meadows reprise their roles as Ms. Norbury and Mr. Duvall from the original movie.

Cady Heron is a hit with the Plastics, an A-list girl clique at her new school when she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George.

Also available June 4:

• Marlon Wayans: Good Grief (2024)

Available June 6, 2024:

• Counsel Culture (2024)

Available June 9, 2024:

• Daddy’s Home (2015)

Available June 12, 2024:

• Black Mass (2015)

Available June 13, 2024:

'the boys' season 4.

Prime Video's ultra-violent, ultra-horny, and ultra-bonkers superhero satire The Boys returns for its much anticipated fourth season. After Homelander's murderous tendencies were made public in the final moments of Season 3 , the world has become more divided than ever. While thousands support Homelander's ex-teammate Starlight, there are just as many who support Homelander's insanity and fascism. Meanwhile, Billy Butcher has now discovered a new secret weapon, a virus with the potential to kill Supes, something that Gen V fans already know plenty about . Karl Urban , Antony Starr , Jack Quaid , Erin Moriarty , Jessie T. Usher , Laz Alonso , Chace Crawford , Tomer Capone , Karen Fukuhara , Colby Minifie , Claudia Doumit , and Cameron Crovetti all return for Season 4. New cast members this season include Susan Heyward ( Orange Is the New Black ) as Sister Sage, Valorie Curry ( The Tick ) as Firecracker, and Jeffery Dean Morgan ( The Walking Dead ) in a mystery role. Gen V cast members Maddie Phillips and Asa Germann will also be appearing this season as Cate Dunlap and Sam Riordan.

A group of vigilantes set out to take down corrupt superheroes who abuse their superpowers.

Available June 15, 2024:

• Premier Boxing Champions (2024)

Available June 16, 2024:

• Anomalisa (2015)
• I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007)
• The Grey (2012)

Available June 18, 2024:

'oppenheimer' (2024).

Winner of seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor; Christopher Nolan 's Oppenheimer is finally heading to Prime Video, 11 months after its theatrical release. The epic biopic tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb" who is tasked with leading the Manhattan Project towards the end of World War II. The movie also covers Oppenheimer's infidelity and his 1954 security hearing. The movie stars Academy Award winner Cillian Murphy ( Peaky Blinders ) in the title role alongside a vast ensemble cast that includes Academy Award winner Robert Downey Jr. ( Iron Man ), Academy Award nominee Emily Blunt ( The Fall Guy) , Academy Award winner Matt Damon ( The Martian ), Academy Award nominee Florence Pugh ( Dune: Part Two ), Josh Hartnett ( 30 Days of Night ), Academy Award winner Casey Affleck ( Manchester by the Sea ), Academy Award winner Rami Malek ( Bohemian Rhapsody ), Academy Award winner Kenneth Branagh ( Tenet ), Benny Safdie ( Good Time ), Jason Clarke ( Dawn of the Planet of the Apes ), David Krumholtz ( The Deuce ), and Alden Ehrenreich ( Fair Play ).

Oppenheimer

The story of American scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

Also available June 18:

• Power of the Dream (2024)

Available June 20, 2024:

• Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024)

Available June 25, 2024:

'i am: celine dion' (2024).

Grammy winner Celine Dion is opening up about her personal life beyond the stage in the documentary film I Am: Celine Dion . Directed by Academy Award nominee Irene Taylor (Leave No Trace), the documentary will not only cover Dion's struggle battling a life-altering neurological disorder, but it will also capture what her music has brought to the world and her perseverance to still live her life to the fullest.

Also available June 25:

• Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016)

Available June 26, 2024:

• Dirty Grandpa (Unrated) (2016)
• Judy (2019)

Available June 27, 2024:

• My Lady Jane (2024)

Available June 30, 2024:

• 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)
• Zoolander No. 2: The Magnum Edition (2016)
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• June 4, 2024   •   29:17 A Conversation With President Zelensky
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• May 28, 2024   •   25:56 The Alitos and Their Flags
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• May 23, 2024   •   34:24 I.C.C. Prosecutor Requests Warrants for Israeli and Hamas Leaders
• May 22, 2024   •   23:20 Biden’s Open War on Hidden Fees
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A Conversation With President Zelensky

In a wide-ranging interview, president volodymyr zelensky of ukraine challenged the west’s hesitations..

Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Featuring Andrew E. Kramer

Produced by Nina Feldman ,  Clare Toeniskoetter ,  Rob Szypko and Diana Nguyen

With Michael Simon Johnson

Edited by Lisa Chow

Original music by Marion Lozano ,  Elisheba Ittoop and Sophia Lanman

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

Five years ago, a TV personality and comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, won the presidency in Ukraine in a landslide victory. When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country three years later, he faced the biggest challenge of his presidency and of his life. Despite initial success beating back one of the world’s largest armies, the tide has turned against him.

Andrew E. Kramer, the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, sat down with Mr. Zelensky to discuss the war, and how it might end.

On today’s episode

Andrew E. Kramer , the Kyiv bureau chief for The New York Times.

Background reading

Read The New York Times’s interview with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine .

Explaining the debate over Ukraine’s use of Western weapons .

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Special thanks to Oleksandr Chubko .

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson, Nina Lassam and Nick Pitman.

Andrew E. Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014. More about Andrew E. Kramer

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