Man of Steel (2013)

When this came out, I got the impression of a middling reception that didn't live up to the hype. More recently, I've seen it counted among the more popular DC Comics non-Batman movies. Perhaps Dark Knight Trilogy writers Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer helped. It was time for an informed opinion.

You might see this as something of a remake of both Superman: The Movie and Superman II, minus Lex Luthor. It begins with the birth of Kal-El shortly before riding away from the explosion of his home planet, Krypton. When we first see him as an adult on Earth going by Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) among other names, he hasn't started calling himself Superman, wearing the iconic costume, saving the day regularly, or even reporting news for the Daily Planet; he's just working odd jobs and vanishing whenever someone catches him using his powers. Reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) tracks him down just as he discovers the answers of his origin left for him by his father, Jor-El (Russell Crowe). But her testimony isn't what really draws the world's attention to the existence of ETs, because a group of renegade Kryptonians under General Zod (Michael Shannon) publicly demands that Kal-El be turned over. You see, Jor-El sent a crucial MacGuffin with him to prevent Zod from kickstarting a "pure" society....

Oppenheimer (2023)

I knew my dad and I would have to see this while it was still in theaters. Not only is it popular, but it loses something on a smaller screen. Not that nuclear explosions, "real" or imagined, make up much of the three hours.

The story covers the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) from his doctoral student days in 1926 to his receipt of the Enrico Fermi Award in '63. His key work on the Manhattan Project and reactions to its aftermath tend to dominate the focus, but there's more to it than that. He hangs out with communists too much for the comfort of authorities, and two party members, eventual wife Kitty Puening (Emily Blunt) and codependent Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), become his love interests.

Dunkirk (2017)

Wow, Christopher Nolan writes, directs, and co-produces the depiction of a real event for a change. Well, to a point. The individual characters involved are fictitious. But given his usual penchant for sci-fi and mindscrew mystery, it was bound to be unusually realistic for him. Perhaps he wants more of a shot at the next Academy Awards than he had with Inception.

Unlike any other war film I've seen, this one divides itself into three perspectives corresponding roughly to land (designated "The Mole," an architectural term I didn't know), sea, and air. On land, in the course of a week, Allied soldiers at Dunkirk are in the process of retreating, but German forces don't make it easy with all the ship bombing. At sea, in the course of a day, Captain Dawson (Mark Rylance) takes his yacht to join the rescue effort with his young adult son, along with an unexpected rash teenage assistant. They soon pick up a lone survivor of a bombed ship (Nolan mainstay Cillian Murphy), who exhibits PTSD and reeeeally doesn't want to return to Dunkirk. In the air, in the course of an hour, three members of the Royal Air Force (one of them played by Tom Hardy) face off with German fighters in the vicinity.

Interstellar (2014)

Christopher Nolan is so popular that today's top news on IMDb is that he'll direct a movie in 2017 -- with no word on the title, subject, or actors. Personally, I have very mixed feelings about his work. It's consistently admirable and entertaining but always contains bothersome elements that prevent me from loving it, such as an obsession with dead wives and girlfriends. (How does his wife feel about that?)

The protagonist of Interstellar -- identified somewhat confusingly by just his last name, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) -- is a widower, but at least he's not loaded with guilt or vindictiveness. After all, in his time, crop blight has decreased the human population so dramatically that he fears that his daughter Murphy's generation will be the last. (For once, the disaster is not evidently the fault of humans or aliens.) A former astronaut, he's disappointed that schools now teach that the moon landing was a hoax so that kids will be less inclined to become anything other than farmers. Of course, he's not alone: The stealthy remains of NASA have been looking for a habitable world to reach before it's too late. As Cooper discovers, their methods now involve aid from a mysterious source to travel by extra dimensions. He's game to head a mission despite Murphy's protests, but no one can be fully prepared for what happens in the uncharted territory of physics....