The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006)

Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Piper Perabo, David Bowie, Andy Serkis, Samantha Mahurin, Roger Rees, Ricky Jay, Daniel Davis, Jim Piddock, Christopher Neame. Screenplay: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, based on a novel by Christopher Priest. Cinematography: Wally Pfister. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Lee Smith. Music: David Julyan.

With his low-budget feature Following (1998), Christopher Nolan showed a genius for making the preposterous plausible, and he followed it up well with Memento (2000). But although he managed to get his footing again with Inception (2010), after his excursion into the comic book world of Batman, in The Prestige he lost control. It's a dark thriller about dueling illusionists with a sci-fi twist that seems to take to heart Arthur C. Clarke's assertion, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As Nolan is careful to show from the outset, stage magic is technology-based, a careful use of low-tech apparatus like trap doors and collapsible cages that can prove accidentally deadly -- or intentionally so, as the sacrifice of several pigeons demonstrates, and the film's plot will exploit. But as the rivalry between illusionists Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) heats up, The Prestige wanders into the fancifully futuristic, a sort of molecular cloning technology devised by no less than Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). The problem for me -- if not for the fans who give The Prestige an astonishingly high 8.5 ranking on IMDb -- is that this insertion into the story of a real historical figure, who never crafted anything of the sort, is about as cheesy as turning Abraham Lincoln into a vampire hunter. It undermines the suspension of disbelief we need to appreciate the film's intricate plotting (complicated by Nolan's non-linear narrative technique) and enjoyable performances. I didn't get the exhilaration I expect from a thriller's twists and turns, but instead a kind of numb depression set in.

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine. Cinematography: Wally Pfister. Production design: Guy Hendrix Dyas. Film editing: Lee Smith. Music: Hans Zimmer.

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

Tommy: Fionn Whitehead
Gibson: Aneurin Barnard
George: Barry Keoghan
Mr. Dawson: Mark Rylance
Peter: Tom Glynn-Carney
Farrier: Tom Hardy
Collins: Jack Lowden
Commander Bolton: Kenneth Branagh
Col. Winant: James D'Arcy
Shivering Soldier: Cillian Murphy
Alex: Harry Styles
Dutch Seaman: Jochum ten Haaf

Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay: Christopher Nolan
Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Production design: Nathan Crowley
Film editing: Lee Smith
Music: Hans Zimmer

I've said it before: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? I'm sure Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk was something to see in an IMAX theater, but truth to tell, I'm just as happy to have watched it in HD on my 32-inch Samsung. I don't mind losing the giddy spectacle of riding the waves or flying in pursuit of German fighter planes, so long as there's real artistry in the storytelling, the acting, and the production. I've liked Nolan's work with some reservations since I first encountered it in Memento (2000). I admired his ability to revivify the Batman story, but found the films in his trilogy a little wearying. I was kind of bowled over by the audacity of the concepts and their execution in Inception (2010), but Interstellar (2014) made me fear the worst: that he was so infatuated with cutting-edge film technology and with far-out science fiction speculations that he might never come back down to Earth. So Dunkirk was a relief to me: This is traditional war-movie filmmaking with a splendid contemporary spin, mostly in the way the story is told through cuts back and forth in time. This so-called "non-linear" narrative technique bothered some traditionalists, but I found it both illuminated the characters and suggested some of the tension and chaos of the actual Dunkirk evacuation. Best of all, Nolan forgoes CGI for the most part, using actual ships and planes or convincing models of them, giving the action a much-needed solidity. He also doesn't yield to the temptation to lard his film with star cameos, letting mostly unknown young actors carry the burden of the story. The stars who do appear -- Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy -- behave themselves, blending into the cast nicely. Hardy, for example, is capable of scene-stealing physicality, but he spends most of the film acting with only his eyes, the rest of his face covered by his pilot's breathing apparatus. (When he's liberated from that restriction at the end, I almost feared for the Germans who captured him.) Every genre movie has its clichés, of course, but a good writer and director -- Nolan is both -- knows how to work them, how to avoid stumbling over them and instead give them just enough weight to satisfy our expectations, as he does in the scene in which the returning soldiers, fearful that they'll be cursed and spat upon for losing the battle, are greeted at the train station with people cheering and handing them bottles of beer. He also handles the celebrated speech by Winston Churchill with finesse, never introducing Churchill as an on-screen character and having the speech itself read by the rescued men, as it should be. It's as stirring a moment as one could wish.

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight

Bruce Wayne: Christian Bale
Joker: Heath Ledger
Harvey Dent: Aaron Eckhart
Alfred: Michael Caine
Rachel: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Lucius Fox: Morgan Freeman

Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer
Cinematography: Wally Pfister
Production design: Nathan Crowley
Film editing: Lee Smith
Music: James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer

I have never really understood the appeal of Batman, or really of Bruce Wayne: a superwealthy technocrat whose compulsive dressing up to hide his identity seems like silly bit of role-playing rather than an essential element of his superheroism. Moreover, he always seems to be outshone by his villainous adversaries, whose own dressing up is a manifestation of psychosis that eerily mirrors his own. So I'm not as enthusiastic as some are about the rebooting of the comic book hero as a dark knight, rather than the old TV series' campy avatar of the character. The best thing about The Dark Knight is clearly the re-imagining of the Joker and the superb performance by Heath Ledger. Otherwise, I found the usual slam-bang action rather tiresome.