Within one month of its global release, the movie Oppenheimer has grossed $700M in cumulative worldwide box office, making it more successful than Interstellar, the 2014 space movie by the same director, Christopher Nolan. The movie benefited from the social media trend of viewing both Oppenheimer and Barbie on the same day, and word of mouth made Oppenheimer a must-see of the season among young and older viewers alike. Marketing considerations aside though, the biographical tale of the creation of the first atom bomb has little to do with Barbie, but a lot to do with the director’s unique storytelling style, which places him in the category of the cinema auteurs of the last century, such as Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, or artists of the French Nouvelle Vague. Nolan’s years of experimentation with narrative, timelines, and imagery—as expressed in the visuals of folding houses in Inception or the sequences of time reversal in Tenet—have now culminated in the way he tells the true and frightening story of the WWII arms race.

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