Run time: 180 mins

Christopher Nolan’s earth-shattering take on the man behind mankind’s most devastating creation.

After tackling superheroes and spies, time travel, dreams within dreams and the furthest reaches of space, the five-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker is venturing into a new genre: the biopic. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus, Nolan’s film charts theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s role in the Manhattan Project.

With the Nazis stepping up the pace in their bid to win the nuclear race, Oppenheimer is brought into a classified military program by director Leslie Groves. Heading up a top secret weapons laboratory in remote New Mexico, he and his team of physicists get to work designing and constructing an atomic bomb. Grappling with the ramifications of creating such a weapon, Oppenheimer is caught up in a pulse-pounding paradox of whether to risk destroying the world in order to save it.

Relentlessly paced and meticulously detailed, this is a character study on the grandest, most devastating scale. A sublime central performance from Cillian Murphy is supported by a staggering wealth of acting talent, with particular supporting praise for Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh and Matt Damon.

This is arguably Nolan’s most impressive work in the way it combines his acknowledged visual mastery with one of the deepest character dives in recent American cinema. An unmissable, utterly absorbing achievement.