Oppenheimer - Review Thread

Movie Information

Oppenheimer:

Release Date:

• Theatres: July 21st 2023

PLOT

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

DIRECTOR

Christopher Nolan

WRITERS

Christopher Nolan

Kai Bird

Martin Sherwin

RUNTIME

180 Minutes

BUDGET

100 Million

Review Aggregator:

Rotten Tomatoes: 93% CERTIFIED FRESH (165 Reviews)

Critic Consensus:

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

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Critic Reviews

Pete Hammond, Deadline -

Christopher Nolan’s Epic Thriller Of The Father Of The Atomic Bomb Is As Frightening As It Is Brilliant

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David Ehrlich, Indiewire - B

A divided epic of awe and horror, fission and fusion. It’s simultaneously a unified portrait of a conflicted man and a singular achievement for Hollywood’s reigning blockbuster auteur.

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Clarisse Loughrey, Independent (UK) - 4/5

Large swathes of the film play out as political thriller, the fuel in its engine being Downey Jr’s titanic colouring of Strauss, all boorishness and manipulative charm.

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Jake Cole, Slant Magazine - 3.5/4

Oppenheimer joins the ranks of Christopher Nolan’s best work not for preserving some essential inexplicability of nuclear physics but by undermining the idea of science’s objectivity.

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Dan Jolin, Empire Magazine - 5/5

A masterfully constructed character study from a great director operating on a whole new level. A film that you don’t merely watch, but must reckon with.

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Brian Truitt, USA Today - 3.5/4

Cillian Murphy turns in a haunting career-best performance as theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Robert Downey Jr. astounds in a way we haven’t seen in quite some time.

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Jake Coyle, Associated Press - 4/4

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.

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Alonso Duralde, The Film Verdict

Like its protagonist, Oppenheimer is a work in constant conflict with itself, with most of its problems rooted in Nolan’s screenplay.

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Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post - 4/4

Oppenheimer is a movie that makes you say “Oh my God” over and over again -- in awe and in terror.

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Jake Kleinman, Inverse

Oppenheimer is a tour de force. An unmatched director at the top of his game throwing off the shackles of science fiction and superheroes to tell the raw story of one man’s transformation into something both more and less than a human being.

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Owen Gleiberman, Variety -

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.

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Alison Willmore, New York Magazine/Vulture -

Its scope comes from Murphy’s haunted performance, and the way that the movie (with help from Ludwig Göransson’s panic attack of a score) submerges you in the mindset of its protagonist as though it can create a psychic connection to the past.

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Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Oppenheimer is a mainstream offering of uncommon resonance, sending the viewer out of the theater head-spun and itchy-eyed, ears ringing from all its sophisticated, voluble explosion.

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Matt Singer, ScreenCrush - 8/10

Intelligent non-IP-driven filmmaking on a scale we simply don’t see in movie theaters anymore.

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Peter Bradshaw, Guardian - 4/5

This is the big bang, and no one could have made it bigger or more overwhelming than Nolan.

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David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios. It fully embraces the contradictions of an intellectual giant who was also a deeply flawed ma

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Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger - 9.2/10

The most breathtaking film of the year.

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Nick Schager, The Daily Beast -

A divided epic of awe and horror, fission and fusion. It’s simultaneously a unified portrait of a conflicted man and a singular achievement for Hollywood’s reigning blockbuster auteur.

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Danny Leigh, Financial Times - 4/5

Nolan taps the full sensory potential of moviemaking, pushing picture and sound to meet the scale of the story: clever lines dot the script; the whole project is admirably willing to wrestle with matters of great weight through cinema.

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Manohla Dargis, New York Times

“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.

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Ann Hornaday, Washington Post - 4/4

[Nolan] has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end. Oppenheimer boldly posits that those arguments are still worth having, in a film of magnitude, profundity and dazzling artistry.

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Tim Grierson, Screen International

Nolan demonstrates his usual prowess for impeccable visuals and stunning craftsmanship within a deeply despairing portrait of an arrogant genius who, too late, realised the impact of his monstrous creation.

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Chris Hewitt, Minneapolis Star Tribune - 3.5/4

Oppenheimer is a movie with power, texture and grace. By the end, we begin to understand its subject, even if we remain baffled by a genius who somehow divorced himself from the damage his theoretical project would do.

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Ed Potton, Times (UK) - 4/5

The movie around Murphy is simultaneously breathtaking and mind-melding.

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Dylan Roth, Observer - 4/4

Simultaneously a biography, a mystery, a polemic, and a dense character study, Oppenheimer feels like the film Christopher Nolan has been preparing to make his entire career, and it may very well be his best work.

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Cary Darling, Houston Chronicle - 4.5/5

That rare summer movie with ideas as big as its ambition and budget...But "Oppenheimer" isn't a movie that is dependent on special effects for its power. In a film aimed squarely at adults, Nolan keeps the focus as much on the man as the magic.

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Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

One of the many satisfactions of Oppenheimer, Nolan’s intellectually thrilling and morally despairing new film, is that it succeeds in locating some of those conventions within another of his ingeniously constructed narrative labyrinths.

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Philip De Semlyen, Time Out - 5/5

Only Nolan could make this potentially forbidding subject matter so thrilling.

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David Fear, Rolling Stone

Any filmmaker can create a cinematic universe. (Many have. Too many, some might say.) Very few can show you how a genius perceives the building blocks of our universe, right before that same person imagines something that threatens our existence in it.

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Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic - 5/5

The acting is uniformly brilliant, with Murphy, Downey and Blunt simply astounding.

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Tara Brady, Irish Times - 4/5

The filmmaker’s technique generally counterpoints any caveats and script imperfections. The ensemble cast is starry and strong. ... “Brilliance makes up for a lot,” Murphy’s Oppenheimer tells us. It sure does.

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Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times - 4/4

Magnificent. Christopher Nolan’s three-hour historical biopic Oppenheimer is a gorgeously photographed, brilliantly acted, masterfully edited and thoroughly engrossing epic that instantly takes its place among the finest films of this decade.

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David Jenkins, Little White Lies - 5/5

A juggernaut historical biopic that you'll want to see again asap, even if it doesn’t all work on the first sweep.

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Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph (UK) - 5/5

It’s at once a speeding roller-coaster and a skin-tingling spiritual portrait; an often classically minded period piece that only Nolan could have made, and only now, after a quarter-century’s run-up.

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Matthew Jackson, AV Club - A

It’s Christopher Nolan’s best film so far, a step up to a new level for one of our finest filmmakers, and a movie that burns itself into your brain.

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David Sims, The Atlantic

It’s more impressive for how the director has made such a personal narrative feel epic, not just in visual breadth but in dramatic sweep, presenting a story from the past that feels knotted to so many present anxieties about nuclear annihilation.

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Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com - 4/4

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.

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Kristy Puchko, Mashable

My patience wore thin as the director gave into one of his favorite indulgences: a bleeding soundscape.

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Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle - 5/5

Nolan's best film to date and a spectacular achievement for cinema.

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Richard Whittaker, Austin Chronicle - 4.5/5

Rarely have the highs and lows of politics been so astoundingly charted.

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Stephen Romei. The Australian - 4/5

Christopher Nolan has done it again. He’s taken a historical story we know a bit about and turned it into an edge-of-the-seat, heart-in-the-mouth drama.

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Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune - 3.5/5

This is a film about terrible risks and a planet likely destined to destroy itself someday. And we see it, and feel it.

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Charlotte O'Sullivan, London Evening Standard - 5/5

The simultaneously old-school and new-school gorgeousness of Oppenheimer can’t be overstressed.

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Jake Wilson, The Age (Australia) - 3.5/5

[An] often laborious yet genuinely strange and gripping movie -- a grand spectacle inspired by some of the grimmest events in human history, and itself an invention meant to blow us all aw

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Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence - B

Its best moments stand out as some of the most original and exciting filmmaking of the year, highs that do a lot to counterbalance the sequences which dive back into bureaucracy and comparatively petty rivalries.

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Caryn James, BBC.com - 5/5

Downey is the crucial supporting player, and he gives a shrewd, dynamic performance as the wily, insecure, powerful Strauss

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Moria MacDonald, Seattle Times - 3.5/4

Murphy’s eerily handsome face, made up of angles and shadows and eyes that always seem to be telling a story that’s different from the one he’s speaking, is the film’s foundation, and his layered performance is its anchor.

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Esther Zuckerman, Bloomberg News

This is dense material that’s thoroughly engrossing and by its end, shattering

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Tomris Laffly, TheWrap

Elevated by Cillian Murphy’s exacting performance, Nolan’s biopic on the father of the atomic bomb is majestic and morally complex.

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Leonard Maltin, leonardmaltin.com

For all we learn about the creation and execution of the atomic bomb and its aftermath, the story could and should be told in a more digestible form. Instead, we have an overlong narrative that isn’t revelatory or surprising.

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Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine

Either despite its intense craft or because of it, Oppenheimer works.

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Christian Holub, Entertainment Weekly - A

Though they may seem disparate, the many elements of Oppenheimer refract and reflect each other, like a bunch of atoms creating a chain reaction or a group of scientists building off each other's ideas to forge something new.

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Odie Henderson, Boston Globe - 2.5/4

What I can say for sure is that “Oppenheimer” far too often feels like a three-hour Wikipedia entry than a compelling movie.

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Rafer Guzman, Newsday - 3/4

However you choose to view “Oppenheimer,” it’s the picture of a man who reaped everything he sowed

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Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle - 4/4

The movie is so vigorously directed, not only in terms of sight but also sound, that probably the best a critic can do is point you toward the experience and say, “It’s that.”

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James Berardinelli, ReelViews - 3/4

Despite being overlong and unevenly paced, Oppenheimer contains moments of greatness and features one of the most compelling lead performances (by Cillian Murphy) in recent memory.

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Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

If Hollywood is ending as we know it – and all signs on that question point to a strong “maybe” – then Oppenheimer is the ideal movie to finish us all.

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