Murphy keeps us with him even when the character seems a bit opaque. The story takes us from his student days in Europe, to his time as a professor in California in the 1930s, and then to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret US programme to build nuclear weapons in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where his team races to create a bomb to end World War Two. Oppenheimer is Nolan's most mature work, combining the explosive, commercially-enticing action of The Dark Knight trilogy with the cerebral underpinnings that go back more than 20 years to Memento and run through Inception and Tenet.Ĭillian Murphy, staring with icy blue eyes, dominates the film, playing Robert Oppenheimer with a restraint that perfectly suits this charismatic yet chilly character. Those artful images are sporadic in a film that never loses its sense of story and drama, but they reveal how boldly imaginative and sure-footed the film is.

At times circles race across empty darkness or wiry orange strands of light appear, depicting the fears and the science occupying Oppenheimer's mind. But they aren't the only fiery images in Christopher Nolan's magnificent film, as it tells the story of the man who helped create the atomic bomb and wrestled for the rest of his life with the deadly consequences. Bursts of fire fill the screen throughout Oppenheimer, at times making it seem as if a thousand volcanoes were about to engulf us.

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