Winner of 7 Academy Awards!

Oppenheimer condenses hundreds of pages from American Prometheus into a single film. Even at three hours the drama doesn’t waste a moment, keeping the audience rapt for its entirety. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation largely focuses on two periods in the wildly interesting life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” The centerpiece is the atomic bomb testing by the Oppenheimer-led Manhattan Project in 1945, but Nolan places equal weight on the 1954 hearing that found the physicist’s loyalty to the United States in question during the Red Scare. Murphy is surrounded by literally dozens of recognizable actors; most significant are Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon and Florence Pugh. Nolan rarely misses, and Oppenheimer is the director working at his best in a film with big explosions and even bigger ideas. This is a complex look at a complicated man, but Oppenheimer unequivocally establishes that this is a story worth telling—and that Nolan was the perfect filmmaker to do it. –Crooked Marquee