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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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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.

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‘Oppenheimer’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director christopher nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film, starring cillian murphy..

Hi, I’m Christopher Nolan director, writer, and co-producer of “Oppenheimer.” Opening with the raindrops on the water came late to myself and Jen Lane in the edit suite. But ultimately, it became a motif that runs the whole way through the film. Became very important. These opening images of the detonation at Trinity are based on the real footage. Andrew Jackson, our visual effects supervisor, put them together using analog methods to try and reproduce the incredible frame rates that their technology allowed at the time, superior to what we have today. Adapting Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus,” I fully embraced the Prometheun theme, but ultimately chose to change the title to “Oppenheimer” to give a more direct idea of what the film was going to be about and whose point of view we’re seeing. And here we have Cillian Murphy with an IMAX camera inches from his nose. Hoyte van Hoytema was incredible. IMAX camera revealing everything. And I think, to some degree, applying the pressure to Cillian as Oppenheimer that this hearing was applying. “Yes, your honor.” “We’re not judges, Doctor.” “Oh.” And behind him, out of focus, the great Emily Blunt who’s going to become so important to the film as Kitty Oppenheimer, who gradually comes more into focus over the course of the first reel. We divided the two timelines into fission and fusion, the two different approaches to releasing nuclear energy in this devastating form to try and suggest to the audience the two different timelines. And then embraced black-and-white shooting here. Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss being shot on IMAX black-and-white film. The first time anyone’s ever shot that film. Made especially for us. And he’s here talking to Alden Ehrenreich who is absolutely indicative of the incredible ensemble that our casting director John Papsidera put together. Robert Downey Jr. utterly transformed, I think, not just in terms of appearance, but also in terms of approach to character, stripping away years of very well-developed charisma to just try and inhabit the skin of a somewhat awkward, sometimes venal, but also charismatic individual, and losing himself in this utterly. And then as we come up to this door, we go into the Senate hearing rooms. And we try to give that as much visibility, grandeur, and glamour to contrast with the security hearing that’s so claustrophobic. And takes Oppenheimer completely out of the limelight. [CROWD SHOUTING]

By Manohla Dargis

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.

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The movie is based on “ American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.

The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.

The story tracks Oppenheimer — played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy — across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child.

It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot.

It also isn’t a story that builds gradually; rather, Nolan abruptly tosses you into the whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods. In rapid succession the watchful older Oppie (as his intimates call him) and his younger counterpart flicker onscreen before the story briefly lands in the 1920s, where he’s an anguished student tormented by fiery, apocalyptic visions. He suffers; he also reads T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” drops a needle on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and stands before a Picasso painting, defining works of an age in which physics folded space and time into space-time .

This fast pace and narrative fragmentation continue as Nolan fills in this Cubistic portrait, crosses and recrosses continents and ushers in armies of characters, including Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), a physicist who played a role in the Manhattan Project. Nolan has loaded the movie with familiar faces — Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman — some distracting. It took me a while to accept the director Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and I still don’t know why Rami Malek shows up in a minor part other than he’s yet another known commodity.

As Oppenheimer comes into focus so does the world. In 1920s Germany, he learns quantum physics; the next decade he’s at Berkeley teaching, bouncing off other young geniuses and building a center for the study of quantum physics. Nolan makes the era’s intellectual excitement palpable — Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 — and, as you would expect, there’s a great deal of scientific debate and chalkboards filled with mystifying calculations, most of which Nolan translates fairly comprehensibly. One of the film’s pleasures is experiencing by proxy the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse.

It’s at Berkeley that the trajectory of Oppenheimer’s life dramatically shifts, after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland. By that point, he has become friends with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist who invented a particle accelerator, the cyclotron , and who plays an instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. It’s also at Berkeley that Oppenheimer meets the project’s military head, Leslie Groves (a predictably good Damon), who makes him Los Alamos’s director, despite the leftist causes he supported — among them, the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War — and some of his associations, including with Communist Party members like his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold).

Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically. Working with his superb cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan has shot in 65-millimeter film (which is projected in 70-millimeter), a format that he’s used before to create a sense of cinematic monumentality. The results can be immersive, though at times clobbering, particularly when the wow of his spectacle has proved more substantial and coherent than his storytelling. In “Oppenheimer,” though, as in “ Dunkirk ” (2017), he uses the format to convey the magnitude of a world-defining event; here, it also closes the distance between you and Oppenheimer, whose face becomes both vista and mirror.

The film’s virtuosity is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandizement. Big subjects can turn even well-intended filmmakers into show-offs, to the point that they upstage the history they seek to do justice to. Nolan avoids that trap by insistently putting Oppenheimer into a larger context, notably with the black-and-white portions. One section turns on a politically motivated security clearance hearing in 1954, a witch hunt that damaged his reputation; the second follows the 1959 confirmation for Lewis Strauss (a mesmerizing, near-unrecognizable Downey), a former chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission who was nominated for a cabinet position.

Nolan integrates these black-and-white sections with the color ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation — Strauss’s role in the hearing and his relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation’s outcome — to create a dialectical synthesis. One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark, existential terms. Yet Oppenheimer’s genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the naked antisemitism of the Red scare.

These black-and-white sequences define the last third of “Oppenheimer.” They can seem overlong, and at times in this part of the film it feels as if Nolan is becoming too swept up in the trials that America’s most famous physicist experienced. Instead, it is here that the film’s complexities and all its many fragments finally converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery, who personified the intersection of science and politics, including in his role as a Communist boogeyman, who was transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.

François Truffaut once wrote that “war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive.” This, I think, gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls. You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.

Oppenheimer Rated R for disturbing images, and adult language and behavior. Running time: 3 hours. In theaters.

Audio produced by Kate Winslett .

An earlier version of this article misidentified J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Manhattan Project. He was director of its clandestine weapons laboratory, Los Alamos.

How we handle corrections

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Oppenheimer

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What to Know

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.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Christopher Nolan

Cillian Murphy

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt

Kitty Oppenheimer

Robert Downey Jr.

Lewis Strauss

Leslie Groves Jr.

Movie Clips

Movies in theaters, movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.

• Movie Review

Oppenheimer is an unrelenting stream of bombastic vignettes in need of a narrative chain reaction

Christopher nolan’s oppenheimer epic offers a series of visceral glimpses into the life of the father of the atomic bomb but gets too busy to reach its full potential..

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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Out of all this summer’s blockbusters that have had film buffs chomping at the bit, few (really just one, actually ) have elicited hype as visceral and sustained as Universal’s Oppenheimer biopic from director Christopher Nolan . With its sizable fleet of A-listers doing mid-20th-century accent work, a complicated historical figure at its center, and a respected auteur steering the ship, Oppenheimer has all the making of a summer blockbuster destined to continue dominating this year’s film discourse for months to come.

But for all of its explosive moments of grandeur and unsurprisingly powerful individual performances, Oppenheimer, as a whole, plays like a chaotic assortment of frantic vignettes coming from a storyteller who’s far too focused on the performance of sage profundity rather than sussing out the real thing.

Inspired by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s seminal 2005 Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer , Oppenheimer is an account of the events that led to its eponymous theoretical physicist becoming one of the most lauded, hated, and infamous men in human history for his role in developing the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer commits most of its energy to chronicling the US’s race to develop nuclear weapons during World War II and the subsequent political fallout Oppenheimer weathered afterward as he began to advocate for nuclear nonproliferation. 

Like American Prometheus , though, Nolan’s new film also understands the importance of illustrating what kind of idiosyncratic, sexually frustrated, and politically engaged person Oppenheimer was in his pre-fame days — a time when he was still learning just how much of an influence he and his intellect could have over others. Long before he was being grilled by the Gray Board, gracing the covers of Time magazine, or directing the Manhattan Project laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) was an exceedingly brilliant but profoundly awkward young man looking for meaning in the arts and sciences.

Equal parts ensemble drama and stealth thriller, Oppenheimer frames its famed subject as a kind of human catalyst who — both in spite and because of his eccentric mind — innately radiates a kind of animating energy that compels most everyone around him into various kinds of action. It’s that energy that first pulls people like acerbic botanist and high-functioning alcoholic Katherine “Kitty” Puening (Emily Blunt) — Oppenheimer’s eventual wife — and depressive psychiatrist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) — his eventual longtime mistress — into his orbit. That energy’s also what makes so many of his peers gravitate toward him during his years coming up through academia and an important part of what puts him on the radar of Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) as he begins building the brain trust destined to power the Manhattan Project.

But there’s a chaos to its overall narrative structure that makes the film play like an assortment of overengineered individual scenes that only coalesce into something concrete occasionally before the movie shifts its focus and attempts to repeat the process to varying degrees of success.

At the same time the movie’s trying to illustrate how Oppenheimer’s left-wing political sensibilities and youthful experiences with labor organization informed his adult worldview, it’s also digging into his love life and the professional jealousies of Oppenheimer’s peers that made him both a threat and someone to look up to. All of that is deeply important context for the film’s quick-fire scenes set during the mid-’50s as United States Atomic Energy Commission commissioner Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) heads up hearings designed to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance and deeply discredit him in the public eye.

But Oppenheimer is so prone to bouncing around from one brief, intense, overly patter-filled scene to another that it often feels like Nolan might have simply shot far, far too much footage and then ultimately cherry-picked the moments that felt impactful to him rather than the ones necessary to set off a narrative chain reaction resulting in a cohesive movie.

This is especially unfortunate because, by and large, many of Oppenheimer ’s actors — Blunt, Damon, and Murphy, in particular — are delivering truly fantastic, studied performances that speak to the humanity and complexity of their characters. Both Rami Malek and Alden Ehrenreich are tremendous as Los Alamos physicist David Hill and an unnamed Senate aide, respectively, and Dane DeHaan is downright chilling as Army officer Kenneth Nichols. But because of Oppenheimer ’s structure, almost none of these performances really have enough time to take up the space they deserve, and just when you’ve gotten a chance to become comfortable and fully engaged with them, the movie’s already moved on.

Though composer Ludwig Göransson’s score is often beautiful, rather than flowing throughout the film consistently in time with its emotional beats, it fades in and out much like the movie’s vignettes frequently fade to black, and it tends to emphasize how disjointed they feel. But Oppenheimer ’s sound — that is to say, its sound design — is arguably the most interesting (though not always well-executed) aspect of the film and what most moviegoers are going to end up being blown away by, in multiple senses of the phrase.

For obvious reasons, there are more than a few explosions that punctuate Oppenheimer ’s three-hour runtime. But instead of fixating solely on the visual spectacle of towering infernos designed to mutilate and massacre, Nolan instead tries to use sound to make you feel a fraction of the devastation Oppenheimer became famous for. Though this approach works well when the movie’s depicting explosions, it truly begins to shine later on in the film after the atomic bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer — surrounded by fellow Americans drunk on the idea of American exceptionalism — can’t help but marvel in horror at the idea of what his life’s work has culminated in.

It’s in moments like those — when Oppenheimer ’s directly addressing the reality of the US’s decisions made as WWII was coming to an end rather than mythologizing the men behind those decisions — that the movie’s at its absolute best. But ultimately, those moments are so few and far between that Oppenheimer always feels like an assortment of great filmmaking ideas being hamstrung by their haphazard execution.

Oppenheimer also stars Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Dylan Arnold, Gustaf Skarsgård, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Tom Conti, Michael Angarano, Jack Quaid, Olivia Thirlby, Tony Goldwyn, Emma Dumont, and Gary Oldman. The movie hits theaters on July 21st.

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Oppenheimer review – Christopher Nolan’s volatile biopic is a towering achievement

As the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, Cillian Murphy is a 20th-century Frankenstein whose catastrophic creation unravels across a tangle of timelines in Nolan’s expansive drama

I t’s billed as a biopic of theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, dubbed the “father of the atomic bomb”. But “biopic” seems too small a word to contain the ambition and scope of Christopher Nolan ’s formidable if occasionally unwieldy latest. Oppenheimer is a dense and intricate period piece, playing out in a tangle of timelines. It weaves together courtroom drama, romantic liaisons, laboratory epiphanies and lecture hall personality cults. But perhaps more than all of this, Oppenheimer is the ultimate monster movie. Cillian Murphy ’s Oppenheimer is an atomic-age Frankenstein, a man captivated by the boundless possibilities of science, realising too late that his creation has a limitless capacity for destruction. Ultimately, however, the monster in this story is not Oppenheimer’s invention but the appetite for annihilation that it unleashes in mankind. It’s a realisation that plays out, inexorably, in Oppenheimer’s hollow, haunted face as the film unfolds. Murphy’s far-seeing ice-chip eyes have never been put to better use.

In fact, Murphy’s physicality as a whole is one of the most potent weapons at the film’s disposal. He seems impossibly slight, a theoretical idea of a man in contrast to the robust certainties of the military figures he works alongside ( Matt Damon ’s Lt Gen Leslie Groves, for example, is bullish and solid, a clenched fist looking for something to punch). In one shot we see Oppenheimer hauling an armful of books into a new classroom, and it looks as though he’s buckling under the weight of his accumulated knowledge. At other times he’s calm and glassily composed, somehow removed from jostling egos and the fusion of ideas that will take shape into the ultimate weapon.

The version of Oppenheimer that we see on screen at any given time is a marker, an indication of which timeline we are currently inhabiting. Insights into his stellar early academic career are punctuated by glimpses of a later humiliating security clearance hearing that picked over every aspect of his life; the development of the bomb – the so-called Manhattan Project – is cut together with another hearing, this time in the Senate, to establish whether Oppenheimer’s former colleague Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey Jr , excellent) should be appointed in a federal government role. It’s a knotty mesh of a structure. Time in Oppenheimer doesn’t feel entirely linear – there are moments, in particular a pivotal encounter with Albert Einstein, that seem unmoored from the rest of the film. Nolan’s films frequently require a couple of viewings to unravel fully, and while it lacks the baffle-factor of Tenet , Oppenheimer is no exception.

There are other problems: the cursory treatment of the female characters is one. Florence Pugh , as Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock, gets short shrift. And Emily Blunt , as J Robert’s wife Kitty Oppenheimer, spends much of the first two hours mutinously clutching a martini on the edge of the frame. She does, however, claim a couple of terrific moments later on: a skin-flaying interrogation scene; a wordless glare that conveys the full nuclear winter of her animosity towards a disloyal colleague.

But, for the most part, the film is a towering achievement. Not surprisingly, given Nolan’s preference for shooting on Imax 70mm film, the picture has a depth of detail you could drown in. There’s no shortage of scenes of furious blackboard scribbling, the accepted cinematic signifier of scientific genius. But more interesting are the abstract moments; it’s as though we are venturing into the heart of the atom itself. Equally inventive is the way the sets seem to quake at moments of tension. Oppenheimer’s world is literally rocked by the shockwaves of the reaction that has been set in motion.

Most effective, however, is the use of sound and music. Like Jonathan Glazer’s upcoming The Zone of Interest , this is a film in which the horrors of war are not shown but conveyed inescapably through what we hear. Ludwig Göransson’s score is masterful and mercurial, surely one of the finest of the year. And there’s a recurring motif in the soundscape, a crescendo of thunderously stamping feet. It’s taken from a moment of triumph and glory, the high point of Oppenheimer’s career. But it takes on a mounting sense of threat with each use, as the catastrophic potential of the physicist’s work becomes clear.

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Oppenheimer First Reviews: Breathtaking, Ballsy, and One of the Best Biopics Ever Made

Critics say this may be not only christopher nolan's most impressive film but one of the best of the year, period, anchored by an award-worthy performance from cillian murphy..

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Here’s what critics are saying about Oppenheimer :

Is this possibly the best movie of the year?

“ Oppenheimer isn’t just an epic masterpiece but one of the most important films of the year.” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

“The most breathtaking film of the year.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Unless Hollywood has a sleeper hit waiting in the wings, Oppenheimer is primed to be 2023’s best film.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

“The film stands as the best of 2023.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“2023’s best.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“The best film of 2023 and one of the greatest biopics ever.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

(Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/©Universal Pictures)

Will Christopher Nolan fans enjoy it?

“It’s hard to know how the Nolan fanboys will respond to a movie as heady, historically curious, and grounded in gravitas as Oppenheimer which has little in common with the brooding majesty of his Batman movies or the tricky mindf–kery of films like Inception or Tenet . In terms of its stirring solemnity, it’s perhaps closest to Dunkirk , while its melding of science and emotion recalls Interstellar .” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“ Oppenheimer feels like the culmination of everything the director has done so far in his already remarkable career.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“ Oppenheimer is nothing if not a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make one. Indeed, it would seem like the ideal vehicle for Nolan’s career-long exploration into the black holes of the human condition — the last riddles of a terrifyingly understandable world.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Is it one of his most impressive films?

“ Oppenheimer —a film of endless contrasts and contradictions—is the fullest expression of the writer/director’s artistry to date… surely the finest and most inspired film of Nolan’s career.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“Nolan has created not just one of his best films, but easily the most mature film of his career.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“With Oppenheimer , Nolan might just be at his most experimental… [He] is now in the conversation for the greatest director of all time.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“It may just be Nolan’s magnum opus… [his] most profound and career-defining film to date.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

How is the screenplay?

“In what could be Christopher Nolan’s best screenplay thus far, Oppenheimer weaves through a three-act structure that can be divided into these unique entities; a rich character-driven deconstruction, a tense-filled thriller, and a politically laced courtroom drama.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“It is undoubtedly his strongest script and most cohesive plot.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

“Nolan has crafted an incredibly dense script that never manages to feel too convoluted or overwhelming—a feat in itself, considering how many timelines and characters are thrown into the mix.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Is it difficult to understand?

“While the four-act structure asks a lot of the film’s audience, our patience and concentration are amply rewarded.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Considering the subject of Oppenheimer involves quantum mechanics, the film does a reasonable job explaining scientific concepts for laymen.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

How is Cillian Murphy in the title role?

“Cillian Murphy leads the ensemble for Oppenheimer with a career-defining performance… a tour de force, encapsulating the complexities of the man with a haunting intensity and continuous dead look in the eye.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“A tour de force… It’s a performance that demands his name to be called on Oscar nomination morning.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Murphy’s performance is every bit as inspired as his casting.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“Murphy’s take on Oppenheimer will go down as one of the best performances ever captured by Nolan’s camera.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Cillian Murphy, with a thousand-yard beam, the half-smile of an intellectual rake, and a way of keeping everything close to the vest, gives a phenomenal performance as Oppenheimer, making him fascinating and multi-layered.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“It’s a magnificent marquee turn from the Peaky Blinders star (and frequent Nolan collaborator), providing a micro and macro concept of the physicist’s internal and external battles.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

Do any of his co-stars particularly stand out?

“In a mighty ensemble of heavy-hitters, Downey gives the drama’s standout performance as Strauss, a founding member, and later chair, of the Atomic Energy Commission.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Downey should be a shoo-in for the awards circuit. A Best Supporting Actor nomination might just be a lock.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“Downey offers a thunderous, Oscar-worthy performance that is one of his career’s best.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Special mention goes to David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“David Krumholtz is extraordinary…[and] in one of his best roles in years, there’s Matt Damon as Leslie Groves.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“It speaks to the caliber of this cast that there’s not enough room to praise the excellent Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck and Rami Malek, all of whom make a porterhouse out of a slice of roast beef.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

How is the movie’s representation of women characters?

“Though efforts were made, one can’t deny this movie ignores the women characters.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“Despite attempts to include three significant female characters in a male-dominated story, all three women fare poorly enough to suggest it might have been less glaring to stick to the military story.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

“Nolan still has problems with substantial female roles, and that does continue in Oppenheimer .” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Emily Blunt’s role at first seems limited to the supportive wife, urging her husband to fight harder for his reputation. But she has a knockout scene in the hearing.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

How does it look and sound?

“The major draw for hardcore film geeks will be the visuals… DP Hoyte van Hoytema brings visceral intensity to the Trinity sequence and extraordinary texture and depth of field to the many dialogue-driven scenes.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Hoyte van Hoytema continues to impress as one of the best cinematographers. The film, shot with 70mm IMAX cameras, stands as one of the crowning achievements of IMAX with astonishing visuals that are set to leave with cinephiles upon the film’s conclusion.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Every frame is breathtaking, and just when you think you’ve seen all the tricks Nolan and van Hoytema have up their sleeves, they shock with another.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Shot with grandeur by regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the film is sensorially overwhelming, its titanic visuals matched by Ludwig Göransson’s bellowing score of anxious ticking, thunderous foot-stomping, discordant buzzing, and strident Psycho-esque strings.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“Ludwig Göransson wrote a good score, but the constant use of it is exhausting… Nolan may have taken criticisms about his films’ inaudible dialogue to heart and strove to keep dialogue at least as audible as the music.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

What about the pacing?

“Nolan begins with a flurry of borderline avant-garde cutting between spaces, places, and faces (courtesy of stellar editor Jennifer Lame), and he never lets his foot off the gas… I can recall no biopic ever hurtling forward at such a scorching clip” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“At no point did this film ever feel slow because it had my attention for every single minute.” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

“It’s more slow-burn than explosive.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Does it have any surprises?

“Perhaps the most surprising element of this audacious epic is that the scramble for atomic armament ends up secondary to the scathing depiction of political gamesmanship.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Many unbelievable scenes fill the entire screen.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

Do we need to see it in IMAX?

“If you’re lucky enough to be near one of the 30 screens worldwide showing the film in IMAX 70mm, you’ll experience a movie that, even at its talkiest, exerts an immersive hold, pulling you in to absorb the molecular detail of every shot.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“See it in IMAX on 70-millimeter film — you’ll be very glad you did.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

“It’s a film that must be experienced on the biggest screen possible!” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

Oppenheimer opens in theaters everywhere on July 21, 2023.

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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.

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• 90 Metascore
• 344 wins & 358 nominations total

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• Leslie Groves

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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.
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• July 21, 2023 (United States)
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• Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA (only interiors, Los Alamos facilities interiors, including Oppenheimer's house, Fuller Lodge Interior and Exterior)
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• $100,000,000 (estimated)
• $329,862,540
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• Jul 23, 2023
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• Runtime 3 hours
• Black and White
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Digital

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Movie Review: A bomb and its fallout in Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Cillian Murphy in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, left, and Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Dane Dehaan as Kenneth Nichols in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Jason Clarke is Roger Robb in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Benny Safdie as Edward Teller in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

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Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is a kinetic thing of dark, imposing beauty that quakes with the disquieting tremors of a forever rupture in the course of human history.

“Oppenheimer,” a feverish three-hour immersion in the life of Manhattan Project mastermind J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), is poised between the shock and aftershock of the terrible revelation, as one character calls it, of a divine power.

There are times in Nolan’s latest opus that flames fill the frame and visions of subatomic particles flitter across the screen — montages of Oppenheimer’s own churning visions. But for all the immensity of “Oppenheimer,” this is Nolan’s most human-scaled film — and one of his greatest achievements.

It’s told principally in close-ups, which, even in the towering detail of IMAX 70mm, can’t resolve the vast paradoxes of Oppenheimer. He was said to be a magnetic man with piercing blue eyes (Murphy has those in spades) who became the father of the atomic bomb but, in speaking against nuclear proliferation and the hydrogen bomb, emerged as America’s postwar conscience.

Nolan, writing his own adaptation of Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” layers the build-up to the Manhattan Project with two moments from years later.

In 1954, a probing inquiry into Oppenheimer’s leftist politics by a McCarthy-era Atomic Energy Commission stripped him of his security clearance. This provides the frame of “Oppenheimer,” along with a Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who chaired the Atomic Energy Commission and was a stealthy nemesis to Oppenheimer.

The grubby, political machinations of these hearings — the Strauss section is captured in black and white — act like a stark X-ray of Oppenheimer’s life. It’s an often brutal, unfair interrogation that weighs Oppenheimer’s decisions and accomplishment, inevitably, in moral terms. “Who’d want to justify their whole life?” someone wonders. For the maker of the world’s most lethal weapon, it’s an especially complicated question.

These separate timelines give “Oppenheimer” — dimly lit and shadowy even in the desert — a noirish quality (Nolan has said all his films are ultimately noirs) in reckoning with a physicist who spent the first half of his life in headlong pursuit of a new science and the second half wrestling with the consequences of his colossal, world-altering invention.

“Oppenheimer” moves too fast to come to any neat conclusions. Nolan, as if reaching to match the electron, dives into the story at a blistering pace. From start to finish, “Oppenheimer” buzzes with a heady frequency, tracking Oppenheimer as a promising student in the then-unfolding field of quantum mechanics. “Can you hear the music, Robert?” asks the elder Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). He can, absolutely, but that doesn’t mean finding harmony.

Nolan, whose last film was the time-traveling, palindrome-rich “Tenet,” may be the only filmmaker for whom delving into quantum mechanics could be considered a step down in complexity. But “Oppenheimer” is less interested in equations than the chemistry of an expanding mind. Oppenheimer reads “The Waste Land” and looks at modernist painting. He dabbles in the communist thinking of the day. (His mistress, Jean Tatlock, played arrestingly, tragically by Florence Pugh, is a party member.) But he aligns with no single cause. “I like a little wiggle room,” says Oppenheimer.

For a filmmaker synonymous with grand architectures — psychologies mapped onto subconscious worlds (“Inception”) and cosmic reaches ( “Interstellar” ) — “Oppenheimer” resides more simply in its subject’s fertile imagination and anguished psyche. (The script was written in first person.) Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema render Oppenheimer’s interiority with flashes of images that stretch across the heavens. His brilliance comes from his limitlessness of thought.

Just how much “wiggle room” Oppenheimer is permitted, though, becomes a more acute point when war breaks out and he’s tasked by Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. (Matt Damon) to lead the race to beat the Nazis to an atomic bomb. The rapid building of Los Alamos on the white-sand mesas of New Mexico — a site chosen by and with personal meaning to Oppenheimer — might not be so different than the erecting of movie sets for Nolan’s massive films, which likewise tend to culminate with a spectacular explosion.

There is something inherently queasy about a big-screen spectacle dramatizing the creation — justified or not — of a weapon of mass destruction. Oppenheimer once called the atomic bomb “a weapon for aggressors” wherein “the elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.” Surely a less imperial, leviathan filmmaker than Nolan — a British director making an American epic — might have approached the subject differently.

But the responsibility of power has long been one of Nolan’s chief subjects (think of the all-powerful surveillance machine of “The Dark Knight”). And “Oppenheimer” is consumed with not just the ethical quandary of the Manhattan Project but every ethical quandary that Oppenheimer encounters. Big or small, they could all lead to valor or damnation. What makes “Oppenheimer” so unnerving is how indistinguishable one is from the other.

“Oppenheimer” sticks almost entirely to its protagonist’s point of view yet also populates its three-hour film with an incredible array of faces, all in exquisite detail. Some of the best are Benny Safdie as the hydrogen bomb designer Edward Teller; Jason Clarke as gruff special counsel Roger Robb; Gary Oldman as President Harry Truman; Alden Ehrenreich as an aide to Strauss; Macon Blair as Oppenheimer’s attorney; and Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, the physicist’s wife.

The greatest of all of them, though, is Murphy. The actor, a Nolan regular, has always been able to communicate something more disturbing underneath his angular, angelic features. But here, his Oppenheimer is a fascinating coil of contradictions: determined and aloof, present and far-away, brilliant but blind.

Dread hangs over him, and over the film, with the inevitable. The future, post-Hiroshima, is sounded most by the wail of children who will grow up in that world; the Oppenheimers’ babies do nothing but cry.

When the Trinity test comes at Los Alamos after the toil of some 4,000 people and the expense of $2 billion, there’s a palpable, shuddering sense of history changing inexorably. How Nolan captures these sequences — the quiet before the sound of the explosion; the disquieting, thunderous, flag-waving applause that greets Oppenheimer after — are masterful, unforgettable fusions of sound and image, horror and awe.

“Oppenheimer” has much more to go. Government encroaches on science, with plenty of lessons for today’s threats of annihilation. Downey, in his best performance in years, strides toward the center of the film. You could say the film gets bogged down here, relegating a global story to a drab backroom hearing, preferring to vindicate Oppenheimer’s legacy rather than wrestle with harder questions of fallout. But “Oppenheimer” is never not balanced, uncomfortably, with wonder at what humans are capable of, and fear that we don’t know what to do with it.

“Oppenheimer,” a Universal Pictures release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some sexuality, nudity and language. Running time: 180 minutes. Four stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

Review: 'Oppenheimer' emerges as a monumental achievement on the march into screen history

"It's kind of a horror movie," understates director Christopher Nolan of "Oppenheimer,"

his brilliant, bruising take on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the dark knight of the atomic age. Murphy's pale blue eyes become a path into a tortured soul as Nolan—a true film artist in works as diverse as "Memento" and "Dunkirk," creates a new film classic.

Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman's 2005 biography, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," Nolan's three-hour-plus masterpiece fills up our senses with the details of quantum mechanics to ignite the story of an American theoretical physicist who helped invent the ultimate weapon of mass destruction and lived to regret it.

Murphy's performance, flawless in every detail, encompasses how Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project team relocated to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to accelerate development of the weapon that would help end WW2 through the cataclysmic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and usher in the threat of nuclear annihilation that's only escalated over time.

Nolan uses radio reports to detail the effects of those bombs, saving the eye-searing visuals for the 1945 Trinity test in the New Mexico desert to bring home the destruction being unleashed. The superb sound design in which silence alternates with waves of reverberation to bring the unthinkable to devastating life is unmissable, unforgettable and scary as hell.

Shot with Imax cameras by the great Hoyte van Hoytema, "Oppenheimer" deserves to be seen on the biggest screen with a state-of-the-art sound system. This despite the fact that the film is often a series of debates among scientists arguing in close-ups that find endless fascination in the geography of the human face.

The actors in "Oppenheimer could not be better. They include Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, the blustering military supervisor at Los Alamos, Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, who pushed to develop the even more dangerous hydrogen bomb, and Gary Oldman in a sensational cameo as Harry Truman, the president who ordered the use of the bomb on Japan and dismissed Oppenheimer as a "crybaby" for objecting.

Oppy, as intimates called him, had a personal life that mirrored his professional turbulence. Though he mingled with such greats as Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), and Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Oppy's sexual entanglements, notably with psychologist Jean Tatlock (a mesmerizing Florence Pugh) made the wrong kind of headlines.

His marriage to biologist Katherine "Kitty" Puening (Emily Blunt), an alcoholic suffering from postpartum depression, added to the chaos. Kudos to Blunt for building the role with a fierce independence as Kitty defended Oppy from the political gamesmanship that plagued him.

In the riveting last section of the film, Nolan shows us Oppenheimer fighting against those eager to discredit him, first in the Sen. Joseph McCarthy commie witch-hunts of 1954 and five years later during the Senate confirmation hearings for the nomination of former  Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) as secretary of commerce.

Nolan shoots both these sections in a vivid black-and-white to underscore the resentment Strauss feels for Oppenheimer for hiding his Jewish roots, communist proclivities and fears about government backed nuclear energy.

In a film of standout performances, Downey delivers a tour de force of festering animosity that blows the doors off. All his time in the Marvel universe might lead you to forget that Downey is one of the best actors on the planet. Here's a reminder. Prepare to be wowed.

"Oppenheimer," set to Ludwig Göransson's thundering orchestral score, is one of the best movies you'll see anywhere. With Nolan's extraordinary talent shining on its highest beams, the film emerges as a monumental achievement on the march into screen history.

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Oppenheimer

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Oppenheimer Movie Review : A tense & riveting portrait of human disillusionment

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Kaushik Manivezh 76 58 days ago

Best cinematography

Shockwave 46437 220 days ago

Binayak pradhan 241 days ago, sumi choudhary 752 258 days ago.

I am sure everything is commercialized including the movie reviews by so called critics. It was showing houseful in Bookmyshow and based on reviews I had made advance booking. Last night I went to watch this trash with 5 members of my family and 3 other viewers. Entire show was empty, and we spent torturous 3 hours. It can be a story about someone but certainly not worth making a movie. Do we spend so much just to watch how a scientist was treated by a government . In so many years never watched such a pathetic movie. Want my money back along with compensation.

Dilip Kumar 1871 262 days ago

One of the greatest film of Nolan

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Oppenheimer, common sense media reviewers.

Nolan's complex A-bomb biopic has sex, swearing, violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

You may have the knowledge and skill to create som

Scientists are elevated to celebrity status, and t

Most characters -- historical figures from the 193

Death by suicide. Massive fiery, loud bomb explosi

Several sex scenes with partial nudity, including

Strong language includes a few uses of "f--k," plu

Frequent drinking, including by a character who's

Parents need to know that Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan's drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the scientist responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb. But it's less an entertaining history lesson than it is a dense examination of the unholy matrimony of quantum physics and…

Positive Messages

You may have the knowledge and skill to create something dangerously powerful -- but should you?

Positive Role Models

Scientists are elevated to celebrity status, and their brain power is aspirational -- as is their perseverance and ability to work as a team to accomplish a daunting goal.

Diverse Representations

Most characters -- historical figures from the 1930s–'50s -- are White American or European men. Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists, including Albert Einstein, are Jewish (though the main Jewish characters aren't portrayed by Jewish actors). One female scientist is featured, and other women can be spotted working in the background. The victims of the atomic bomb detonations (Japanese people, interned Japanese Americans, and Native Americans) don't have a voice in the film. A sex scene that includes White characters reading from the holy Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita has drawn complaints for being insensitive/offensive.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Death by suicide. Massive fiery, loud bomb explosion, accompanied by a loud "doom" score that underlines the future impact of the detonation. Discussion of the impact of the atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a hallucination, the skin on a woman's face appears to blow off. Attempted murder through the eyes of the protagonist.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Several sex scenes with partial nudity, including long sequences with bare breasts. Recurring infidelity.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes a few uses of "f--k," plus "balls," "goddamn," "idiot," and "s--t."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Frequent drinking, including by a character who's portrayed as having an alcohol dependency. Smoking cigarettes and a pipe.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan 's drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ), the scientist responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb. But it's less an entertaining history lesson than it is a dense examination of the unholy matrimony of quantum physics and military bureaucracy, and things can get pretty confusing thanks to frequent undated time jumps and a barrage of names and characters to keep straight. The sex scenes (Nolan's first) include frequent partial nudity (particularly co-star Florence Pugh 's breasts). Characters smoke, as would be expected in the 1930s–'50s setting, and drink. A bomb trial demonstrates the enormousness of the weapon's capabilities, with fire, noise, and smoke. But viewers are told about, rather than shown, the horror that unfolded after the bomb was ultimately dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are references to mass assassination and to suicide, and a brief hallucination of a young woman's skin appearing to blow off. Language includes a few uses of "f--k," plus "goddamn," "s--t," and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (67)
• Kids say (85)

Based on 67 parent reviews

I wouldn't ever take my kids (even when they were teenagers)

What's the story.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan , OPPENHEIMER follows brilliant scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) as he studies and masters quantum physics. As the United States enters World War II, Oppenheimer is tapped to assemble and lead a group of allied scientists to create a war-ending bomb.

Is It Any Good?

Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nolan is a genius -- and, also like Oppenheimer, he may be too close to his subject matter to realize that he lost the thread. It's now abundantly clear that Nolan is fascinated with World War II, but it may be hard for many viewers (even those who love history) to follow this story with ease. If you need a reference card, captions, the ability to pause and rewind the film, and Wikipedia on standby to understand what's going on, it's an issue. And if some viewers' thoughts start drifting to wondering how Aaron Sorkin , Ron Howard , or Steven Spielberg might have made this movie better, that's a big problem.

The atomic bomb is just part of the story in Oppenheimer -- the plot is actually more about whether the leader of The Manhattan Project will get his security clearance renewed a decade after the end of World War II. Really. And given that Oppenheimer apparently wasn't the greatest guy (the film softens the fact that he apparently tried to murder his teacher), it's difficult to invest or care. Nolan is beloved for creating cinematic puzzles that challenge viewers' intellect and keep us on our toes -- we may sometimes be confused, but we know it's part of the long game. Here, he tries to play that game with viewers again, but it doesn't really work in a biopic that's directed at having audiences examine the morality of innovation. Nolan seems to intend for us to question our present race into artificial intelligence, but the film only leaves us questioning him.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the real-life moral dilemma of building a weapon of mass destruction. Given the circumstances, do you think the scientists had another choice? If you create something powerful, can you be sure it won't be misused in someone else's hands -- and should that worry impede innovation?

Nolan flips between color and black-and-white cinematography as a storytelling device in Oppenheimer . What do you think that choice means?

Discuss the fears and accusations related to Communism in the 1950s. Who were the victims? How does Oppenheimer show how McCarthyism was used to target opponents? Do you see any modern parallels?

How do you think history should judge J. Robert Oppenheimer? Do you think he's depicted accurately or fairly here?

How are drinking and smoking portrayed? Is substance use glamorized? Does the historic setting affect the impact of seeing characters smoke and drink?

Movie Details

• In theaters : July 21, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : November 21, 2023
• Cast : Cillian Murphy , Emily Blunt , Matt Damon
• Director : Christopher Nolan
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters , History , Science and Nature
• Run time : 180 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : some sexuality, nudity and language
• Awards : Academy Award , BAFTA , Golden Globe
• Last updated : March 11, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Oppenheimer Review

21 Jul 2023

Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer  is not an easy movie. To say its subject matter and theme are inherently downbeat is something of an understatement. It flings you into a very specific, crowded world and refuses to hold your hand, with a notable absence of date- or location-providing subtitles. It is three hours long, densely packed with info-rich dialogue, and mostly plays out, to paraphrase one character, in “shabby little rooms far from the limelight”. Its story unfurls along two oscillating lines – one titled “Fission”, in vivid colour; the other titled “Fusion” in high-contrast black-and-white – and cuts between their beats and revelations like an anxious channel-hopper. It is, of course, a Christopher Nolan movie.

However, despite being deeply stamped with Nolan’s hallmarks (anti-chronological, shot with IMAX cameras, avoids CGI, stars Cillian Murphy ),  Oppenheimer  feels like something new from the writer-director. While it has a logline-level similarity to Nolan’s favourite Spielberg film,  Raiders Of The Lost Ark (a man in a hat is racing the Nazis for control of an existentially powerful weapon), its release — and impact — feel more like we’ve reached Nolan’s Schindler’s List moment: a step into deadly serious, portentously resonant, adult material. With one fundamental difference: this difficult historical figure is on a very different trajectory to Oskar Schindler. One might even say the exact opposite trajectory.

Oppenheimer  is based on  American Prometheus , Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s wide-spined biography of the theoretical physicist who “fathered” the atomic bomb. But it is not a biopic. No time is spent on J. Robert’s childhood, with his disturbingly troubled early academic life tackled only briefly. Instead, the film moves briskly from his establishment of quantum theory on US curricula to his recruitment as director of the Manhattan Project (by take-no-shit Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, played with avuncular appeal by Matt Damon).

At the film’s pulsing nucleus is Murphy as Oppenheimer, and he is compelling throughout.

Interestingly, Nolan does devote some time to Oppenheimer’s romantic entanglements, allowing Florence Pugh to elegantly dominate her few scenes as communist activist Jean Tatlock, the physicist’s first lover (which also involve a Nolan first: sex scenes with prolonged nudity). Meanwhile, Emily Blunt thankfully busts out of the supportive/suffering wife archetype as the alcoholic but sharp-witted Kitty Oppenheimer, who gives us one of the film’s most rousing scenes in an intense verbal duel with bullish lawyer Roger Robb (Jason Clarke).

Given the sheer extent of the dramatis personae, it’s no exaggeration to say that  Oppenheimer  features Nolan’s most impressive cast yet. Playing admirably against type, Robert Downey Jr. leads the “Fusion” strand as haughty US Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss, whose attempt to join Eisenhower’s cabinet as Secretary of Commerce becomes intriguingly more relevant as the film progresses. Then we have a supporting cast like no other: Benny Safdie as Edward Teller (the inspiration for  Dr Strangelove ), Kenneth Branagh as Oppenheimer’s Danish mentor Niels Bohr, Josh Hartnett as his close colleague Ernest Lawrence — plus the likes of Olivia Thirlby, Rami Malek, Jack Quaid, Macon Blair, Casey Affleck, David Krumholtz and Alden Ehrenreich popping up in sometimes the smallest of roles. Not to mention Gary Oldman’s acidic cameo as President Truman, who famously dismissed Oppenheimer as “a cry-baby scientist”.

At the film’s pulsing nucleus is Murphy as Oppenheimer, and he is compelling throughout. Given the movie’s hefty import, you’d have expected him to infuse every ounce of his talent into this performance, and that is certainly evident from his every moment on screen — often with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s IMAX lens focused squarely and unsparingly on his face, as he conjures the conflicting emotions that rage beneath Oppenheimer’s surface. This is, after all, a uniquely complex man: praised as a hero for ending the war, wracked with guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and perhaps desperate to cleanse his soul through martyrdom.

Nolan complements this exquisitely tuned performance by using his subject’s memories and visions as a kind of visual punctuation, from raindrops rippling ominously in puddles like bomb blasts, to a chilling, briefly glimpsed depiction of “atmospheric ignition”: a posited world-ending outcome of the first A-bomb test. The Trinity sequence itself, in which Nolan’s SFX team somehow create a CG-free approximation of a nuclear explosion, is truly shock-and-awesome, featuring what might just be cinema’s most intense countdown scene. But the film is never visually stronger than when it is inside Oppenheimer’s head, especially during its lengthy closing act, when apparitions of his creation’s life-snuffing effects bleed into his waking life with such nightmarish potency, they’ll be hard to shake for days.

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Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a devastating biographical drama, one of his finest works.

Oppenheimer Movie Review: A tense & riveting portrait of human disillusionment

• Times of India

In-depth Analysis

Our overall critic’s rating is not an average of the sub scores below.

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Cillian Murphy

Robert Downey Jr.

Christopher Nolan

Golden globe awards.

Ludwig Goransson

Kaushik Manivezh 76 58 days ago

Best cinematography

Shockwave 46437 220 days ago

Binayak pradhan 241 days ago, sumi choudhary 752 258 days ago.

I am sure everything is commercialized including the movie reviews by so called critics. It was showing houseful in Bookmyshow and based on reviews I had made advance booking. Last night I went to watch this trash with 5 members of my family and 3 other viewers. Entire show was empty, and we spent torturous 3 hours. It can be a story about someone but certainly not worth making a movie. Do we spend so much just to watch how a scientist was treated by a government . In so many years never watched such a pathetic movie. Want my money back along with compensation.

Dilip Kumar 1871 262 days ago

One of the greatest film of Nolan

World Book Day 2024: 12 timeless Classics everyone should read

Avneet Kaur is beating the heat with these summer looks

Anindita Bose kicks off her entrepreneurial journey

Mesmerizing Tamil melodies of singer S Janaki

Hanuman Jayanti 2024: 9 foods to offer as bhog to Lord Hanuman

IPL fever in Chennai: Interesting facts about Marina Beach

Karisma Kapoor shows us how to beat the heat in comfortable cotton outfit

8 signs you have a dysfunctional family

Pandya Store fame Maira Dharti Mehra’s summer fashion

​The legend of Unicorn in 10 sentences​

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• This film marks the first collaboration of uncle-nephew duo Anil Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor. Arjun is the son of Anil’s brother Boney Kapoor.
• This is the second time Arjun Kapoor is playing a double role, the first being Aurangzeb (2013).
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‘Oppenheimer’: Christopher Nolan’s Starry Biopic Is Big, Loud, and a Must-See

• By David Fear

This is what Christopher Nolan does in Oppenheimer , a biopic on the “father of the atomic bomb,” and in terms of getting you into the mindset of its subject, these bursts of abstract imagery are a brilliant move on his part. It’s not the only ace the writer-director has up his well-tailored sleeve, mind you — there are somewhere between four to five timelines bumping against each other at any given moment, it’s shot in both saturated color and stark black & white, its sound design equally prizes dead silence and deafening booms, and the cast is comprised of seemingly every third actor with a SAG card. Not to mention a depth-charge performance by Cillian Murphy as the Man Who Would Be Destroyer of Worlds, one that allows the tiniest surface ripples to communicate the agony and the ecstasy of changing the world.

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Taking its cues from the exhaustive, Pulitzer-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer seeks to cram as much of the man’s life, his work, his elevation to national hero, his eventual persecution, and his personal demons into three hours. Just for good measure, Nolan throws in not one but two competing courtroom dramas as well. There’s a roll-the-dice sensation throughout: Scenes of people sitting in rooms talking can seem thrilling or plodding, clarify historical conflicts and complicated concepts or confuse the hell out of you. Set pieces feel sweeping one second, and like they’re sucking the oxygen out of the room the next. Then, suddenly, the movie cuts to a huge close-up of Murphy, his eyes suggesting a man wrestling for his soul, and you’re transfixed. As with so much of Nolan’s work, you can feel a truly great film peeking out in fits and spurts within a longer, slightly uneven one.

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So let us now praise movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. Oppenheimer is most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars alike. When Nolan is on, he is on , as evidenced by the early scenes of Oppenheimer and his military liaison, General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon , all mustache and bluster), assembling the eggheads. Their plan is to turn the small New Mexico burg of Los Alamos into a self-sufficient, family-friendly town for a group of scientists and a top-secret think tank for a weapon of mass destruction. The military need the end result of the Manhattan Project to win WWII, preferably before the Germans develop their own version of “the gadget.” Oppenheimer, both compelled by and wary of the opportunity, wants them to maintain the “moral advantage” after the world sees what this thing can do.

Concentrating on the mounting pressure to deliver, the miniature steps forward with each behind-the-scenes breakthrough, and the accountability factor causing friction between the project leader and his patrons, Oppenheimer becomes its own ticking time bomb. All the while, fractures are happening within the team, and the precariousness of the situation, along with Oppenheimer’s willingness to go through with opening this Pandora’s Box, brings things to a tipping point. These scenes remind you of how Nolan understands the use of sound and vision as a means of emotional engagement (helped in no small part by his regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and composer Ludwig Göransson ‘s score); how his ability to fold complex ideas into presentations of human behavior, and vice versa, comes through in his writing; how the timing of a cut and the framing of an image can transform a moment from grandiose or mundane to sublime. The gent is a genuine filmmaker. He’s a big-screen artist, the bigger the screens the better.

There’s Florence Pugh , and Emily Blunt , and Benny Safdie , Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek , Kenneth Branagh , Casey Affleck , Jason Clarke, Matthew Modine, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich … it’s actually quicker to list who’s not in Oppenheimer. Nolan has said he wanted to cast recognizable faces so that audiences could keep track of who’s who easier, but he also gives them opportunities to flex, whether it’s for a minute or the majority of the running time. And given that there are so many scenes of people conversing, reading, lecturing, interrogating, handwringing and musing over the morality of mass destruction, they have to keep things afloat as much as their ringmaster.

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As those two trials intertwine and paint a picture of Oppenheimer as both McCarthy-era martyr and, ultimately, the victor over Strauss’s smear campaign during the movie’s last act, there’s a slight sensation of listening to wind blowing through torn sails. In attempting to get a 360-degree picture of his subject’s life and times on as big a scale as possible, it feels as if Nolan occasionally loses sight of the big picture as a whole. Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens. Nolan has made what can sometimes feel like a maddeningly elusive attempt to make a grand statement about then and now, only to continually drown himself out in the technical equivalent of the Zimmer Honk . He’s also given us one of the only movies of the summer that you really have to see.

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Release Date : July 21, 2023

123telugu.com Rating : 3.75/5

Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh

Director: Christopher Nolan

Producers: Emma Thomas, Charles Roven, Christopher Nolan

Music Director: Ludwig Göransson

Cinematographer: Hoyte van Hoytema

Editor: Jennifer Lame

Related Links : Trailer

Genius director Christopher Nolan is back with his new film, Oppenheimer, which has been highly anticipated by fans worldwide. The film hit screens today. Dive into our review to find out how this movie fares.

Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), US Army Corps of Engineers Officer, approaches J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), a theoretical physicist, during World War ll to ask him to make an Atomic Bomb (A-Bomb). Oppenheimer and other physicists develop it, which the US government later uses in the war. Later, Oppenheimer is termed as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” but after a few years, a trial on Oppenheimer is conducted. Why is the trial? What does Oppenheimer do next? The movie tells the remaining story.

Plus Points:

Christopher Nolan, renowned for his grand storytelling, masterfully depicts the emotional journey of the Father of the Atomic Bomb. He takes a captivating approach, focusing not on the A-bomb’s making but on its creator’s life.

Cillian Murphy delivers an award-winning performance as Oppenheimer, skillfully portraying the complexities of the physicist’s character.

Robert Downey Jr. surprises audiences with his convincing portrayal of Lewis Strauss, a negative role that showcases his versatility as an actor.

Emily Blunt’s portrayal of Kitty, Oppenheimer’s wife, adds depth to the film, while Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, and other supporting actors enhance the overall movie experience.

The absence of CGI in showing the A-bomb detonation in Los Alamos is a remarkable achievement by the entire team, resulting in one of the movie’s most impressive sequences.

The other highlights include Oppenheimer’s post-war speech, interactions with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), and well-crafted dialogues.

Minus Points:

The lengthy 3-hour runtime may make some viewers feel bored, although those engaged in the narrative will likely be okay with it.

The use of scattered timelines, an integral part of the screenplay, throughout the film, might challenge viewers with limited knowledge of Oppenheimer’s life. Some prior understanding of the physicist’s background could enhance the viewing experience.

The first hour is less dramatic than the second, potentially affecting the overall engagement. Additionally, the shift between monochromatic and color scenes may not appeal to all viewers. The abundance of characters could confuse those unfamiliar with Oppenheimer’s story.

Technical Aspects:

Christopher Nolan’s direction perfectly narrates the ups and downs in Oppenheimer’s life, showcasing the theoretical physicist’s journey with expertise.

The movie impresses with top-notch sound design and a score by Ludwig Goransson, which emphasizes many scenes in the film. He delivers an award-winning outcome. The cinematography is top-notch, while the editor could have tightened the first half by removing some unnecessary scenes. The film’s rich production values are awe-inspiring, especially in depicting the Atomic Bomb explosion without CGI.

In Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan once again proves that he is fantastic at narrating stories in the best possible way. Cillian Murphy’s performance is commendable, and he will undoubtedly be bestowed with prestigious awards for his portrayal. However, the scattered timelines and unnecessary scenes may create confusion and boredom for some viewers. If you can overlook these aspects and remain attentive to the plot, book your tickets for the movie this weekend to experience Nolan’s magic.

123telugu.com Rating: 3.75/5

Reviewed by 123telugu Team

Click Here For Telugu Review

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Oppenheimer Review: Simply Brilliant

Oppenheimer is a very politically significant film for our time, observes Utkarsh Mishra.

When 'American Prometheus' Dr J Robert Oppenheimer decided to lead the Manhattan Project to make the world's first atomic bomb, the scientist community in most of Europe and America was perplexed by a moral dilemma.

Whether or not the 'good guys' should create an ultimate weapon that deters the 'bad guys' enough to make them fall in line?

But there's a flip side to it.

What if the 'bad guys' get the weapon first?

Or worse, what if it doesn't prove a deterrent at all and, au contraire , it starts a vicious arms race in which either side is always looking to outsmart the other.

And, most important, who can be called the 'good guys' here? Sure, when fighting against Hitler, even Stalin seems to be on the just side.

But what after the defeat of Nazism?

History is replete with examples that could decisively end this dilemma, and yet, this question keeps arising at different times.

After all, just as we all thought that the world is weaponised enough to deter a full-scale conventional war, we had Russia marching into Ukraine with tanks and troops, unleashing destruction on a scale that was not seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

Christopher Nolan's latest historical drama Oppenheimer , based on the life of the 'Father of the Atomic Bomb', deals mainly with the philosophical, social and political aspects of this dilemma.

It is based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin.

What is now largely known about Dr Oppenheimer is that he always struggled with a conflict in his head.

First, he was at conflict with his own identity.

He was born to German Jewish parents who were settled in New York and were wealthier than most of their peers.

Robert never spoke Yiddish or German at home, he never lived in a ghetto like many of his people and perhaps never felt that sense of distinction for being Jewish.

Yet, he was often seen only as a German Jew by most people of his community and outside.

Another conflict that defined his personality and which the movie mainly deals with is the idea of unleashing the forces of nature on humankind in the form of a weapon.

Nolan has represented this conflict in his characteristic style, where you actually feel the tension, the predicament and the friction that the protagonist is dealing with.

It is aided by Cillian Murphy's sublime portrayal of Dr Oppenheimer as well as an apt background score, and sometimes the lack of it, as in the scene depicting the Trinity Test.

Unlike the politicians, Dr Oppenheimer and other scientists were fully aware of the annihilating power of the weapon they were developing.

Yet, he was convinced, at least in the beginning, that it is essential for them to have this weapon before the Nazis. And though he would be giving humankind the power to destroy itself, it will end the war, not just the one they were fighting, but all future wars as well.

A few other intellectual giants of his time were less convinced of this prospect than Dr Oppenheimer.

Although it was Albert Einstein whose letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the Nazis possibly developing an atomic bomb got the latter to turn his attention towards what later became the Manhattan Project, 'the father of modern physics' was not very enthusiastic about the idea.

On the German side, Werner Heisenberg, who was asked by the Third Reich about the possibility of such a weapon, was imploring his former teacher Niels Bohr to tell him if the Allies are also working on a similar project. So that he may have a clear conscience while deciding on whether to go ahead or not.

Nolan's movie has a scene where Bohr mentions this conversation to Oppenheimer, while making his disapproval of the idea clear. (This conversation has been covered in detail in the 2002 television film Copenhagen , based on Michael Frayn's play, which has Daniel Craig playing Heisenberg and Stephen Rea playing Bohr.)

However, all these great minds of the 20th century, from Einstein to Feynman, Oppenheimer to Enrico Fermi, Heisenberg to Otto Hahn, either directly or through their discoveries, paved the way for the creation of the atomic bomb.

Are they the ones to blame for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the current stockpile of nuclear weapons that the world is sitting on?

After all, as Oppenheimer once said, 'Our work has changed the conditions in which men live but the use of those changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.'

The movie also shows that when, after the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a conscience-stricken Oppenheimer goes to President Truman and laments that he has blood on his hands, the latter rebuffs him saying it was he who decided to drop those bombs and not Oppenheimer.

Although Oppenheimer made the aforesaid remarks in 1961, before Hiroshima, he was convinced that 'they won't fear it until they saw it'. So he knew that the weapon had to be put to actual use. And once it is used, he will be the one to be blamed.

He quotes the Bhagavad Gita to declare, 'Now I am become death' (Oppenheimer found the Hindu scriptures so inspiring that he learned Sanskrit in order to read them in their original language).

He hoped to end the war with a demonstration of this death.

But the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the realisation that the people whom he trusted with this enormous weapon would not exercise the restraint that he expected them to do, forced Oppenheimer to reconsider his position. And he became a vociferous opponent of atomic weapons.

And that's when he suddenly became dangerous to the same politics to which he was hitherto essential.

His influence on atomic policy was counterproductive for the 'country's interest' during the Cold War. And, in the McCarthy era, it became increasingly simple to target him for his past association with Communism.

Nolan's film perfectly captures these moral quandaries and political skullduggery.

The latter part of the film deals with the witch-hunting of Oppenheimer for his opposition to the country's H-bomb programme.

Apart from Murphy, it has Matt Damon playing Leslie Groves, the general who directed the Manhattan Project and the man behind the decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan and not one, lest the enemy should think that it was a unique exercise; and a hard-to-recognise Robert Downey Jr playing Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who sought to settle personal as well as political scores with Oppenheimer by secretly passing on information that led to his security clearance being cancelled.

All the segments involving Robert Downey Jr are in black and white, unlike the rest of the movie. Something that reminds one of Nolan's Memento .

What makes the movie stand out is that it never actually shows the destruction caused by the two bombs.

It doesn't even show the explosion.

Yet, it's the power of Nolan's direction that the audience live that experience, without actually seeing it.

The scene showing the Trinity test has no background score.

Yet, when it played, there was a pin-drop silence in the packed theatre where I was watching the film.

Similarly, one scene where he is applauded for ending the war, shows Oppenheimer having visions of what it must have felt to experience those explosions. And that is enough to make one flinch with disgust at the thought of what would happen if a nuclear weapon is used.

Thus, it is also a very politically significant film for our time. Not only that we have some eccentric leaders who have access to these weapons, but this debate of 'good guys with big bombs as deterrent for bad guys' has never left the discourse.

The Allies must have it before the Nazis do, the US must have it before the Soviets do, India must have it before Pakistan does, Israel must have it before Iran does, it never stopped. And will never stop as new conflicts emerge.

One might argue that, so far, the armament on both sides has ensured that neither puts it to use.

But isn't it a matter of time when someone chooses to 'become death'?

Well, they have all the means to do so now.

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