Though he first got some attention with Following, and then quite a bit more with Memento, Christopher Nolan is best known nowadays for making films on a massive scale. Those two early films of his weren’t really epics, by any means, and neither were Insomnia nor The Prestige, even if they got a bit bigger in scale, and had larger budgets. It wasn’t until Nolan started making some superhero films that he began leaning more towards crafting epics, and it’s that zone he’s generally stayed in for almost two decades now.

It takes a special kind of canonical classic to feature a line of dialogue so memorable that anyone could identify what movie it comes from without any context. "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain," uttered by Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in The Dark Knight, fits the bill. In what is likely to remain his culturally definitive and most popular movie, Christopher Nolan, for better or worse, changed the film landscape forever by making a superhero movie feel like an American epic about crime, justice, and society's belief in costumed vigilantes as religious dogmas.

Let's be honest, a movie called The Odyssey with Christopher Nolan as its director was never going to be a 90-minute jaunt with some laughs, a frothy plot and a happy ending. This is the biggest director in the world adapting the biggest story ever written, in IMAX, with gods and monsters (not those kind, James Gunn) and the longest road home ever taken. So when Nolan said that the movie would be shorter than Oppenheimer, that still left quite a bit of wiggle room. Now, we finally know exactly how long this thing is going to be.

2026 is set to be a huge year for Christopher Nolan, who will return to the director’s chair for what may be the most ambitious movie of his career. Nolan spent most of 2025 working on The Odyssey, the new historical epic based on Homer’s work featuring one of the most star-studded casts ever assembled. Starring in the lead roles of Odysseus and his son Telemachus in The Odyssey are Matt Damon and Tom Holland, who are already being eyed as potential Oscar contenders at the 2027 Academy Awards. Over the last 15 years, Christopher Nolan has become one of the most important and established filmmakers in Hollywood history, but not every one of his films has been a certified hit. His last film, Oppenheimer, was viewed as his magnum opus, but before that came the most polarizing release of his career.

What is Christopher Nolan's best movie? The answer might vary among cinephiles, thanks to Nolan's filmography, which spans a wide variety of genres. Some would point to Memento, as its non-linear structure makes for a compelling mystery. Others would throw The Dark Knight trilogy into the ring, as it helped put Nolan on the map and showcased that superheroes can be taken seriously when in the right hands. The best answer is a movie that Nolan made 12 years ago, a science fiction odyssey that still holds up today. It also contains two key elements that helped cement Nolan as a top-tier filmmaker.