Ranking the collaborations of Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy
With Michael Caine having announced his retirement, the door is now wide open for Cillian Murphy to step into the breach and become Christopher Nolan’s new lucky charm.
To be fair, he’s not that far away from eclipsing the veteran icon, with Oppenheimer marking his sixth collaboration with the distinguished writer and director. Caine worked with Nolan eight times on the Dark Knight trilogy, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet, meaning Murphy has only two more features to go in order to match him.
That’s almost certainly going to happen eventually, seeing as excellence tends to be the order of the day whenever the actor and filmmaker reunite on a new project. Having tackled comic book adaptations, mind-bending blockbusters, war epics, and biopics already, there’s plenty of ground still to cover.
Murphy and Nolan have proven to be a match made in cinematic heaven, with their sextet of movies so far having experienced consistently high levels of critical and commercial success, so long may it continue.
Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy movies ranked:
6. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Expectations were through the roof for The Dark Knight Rises, which faced the pressure of both rounding out a seminal superhero trilogy and following up what’s regarded by many as the greatest comic book adaptation ever made.
The closing chapter is a lot better than certain corners of the discourse would suggest, even if it does suffer from some narrative leaps in logic, an occasionally indecipherable villain, cavernous plot holes you could comfortably drive the Batmobile through, an excessive running time that drags a touch too long, and an ending that hasn’t gotten any less polarising more than a decade removed.
The Dark Knight Rises was never going to please anyone, and while Murphy’s involvement is minimal and restricted to a cameo appearance as Gotham City’s escaped villains hold their own trials, his returning Jonathan Crane is a welcome and malevolent sight. Visually dazzling but a touch overstuffed for its own good, it’s an accomplished ending that nonetheless left many fans disappointed solely because it wasn’t an all-timer.
5. Inception (2010)
Nolan finds his name linked with James Bond every time the franchise is in need of a new director, but he simply opted to channel his lifelong adoration of 007 into an espionage epic of his own, with the snow-capped final showdown in particular clearly, obviously, and lovingly indebted to the long-running spy saga.
Murphy’s Robert Fischer might be the mark targeted by Leonardo DiCaprio and his crew, but the relationship with his father that offers a door into his subconscious allows the actor to bring heartfelt emotion and genuine pathos to the role while also serving as the emotional anchor of the story.
A complex and intelligent blockbuster that requires undivided attention from its audience while still delivering a string of explosive and expansive action sequences, Inception has been oft-imitated but never bettered in terms of striking the ideal balance between ingenuity and spectacle.
4. Batman Begins (2005)
Nolan’s first collaboration with Murphy proved so influential that Batman Begins inadvertently gave rise to an entire cinematic subgenre, with dark and gritty reboots becoming the standard practice when any recognizable property found itself in need of a fresh coat of paint.
Very few have come close to matching Christian Bale’s debut under the cape and cowl, though, with Murphy’s Scarecrow foregoing the scenery-chewing villainy of the franchise’s past in favour of cerebral smarts and an unnerving charisma that buries itself under the skin.
The third act finale is a little shaky, but everything up until the CGI-assisted chaos of the grandstanding climax is nothing short of phenomenal. It was a simple concept on paper to imagine a grounded and realistic world where Batman could logically exist and how that would impact his base of operations, but the execution was borderline revolutionary as it relates to Hollywood blockbusters.
3. Dunkirk (2017)
History has been littered with countless classic war movies, but the majority of them have simply retold events from either a real-world or fictional perspective, which makes the sheer ambition on display in Dunkirk all the more impressive.
Splitting the narrative into three strands separated by land, sea, and air, the triple-pronged structure and Hans Zimmer’s metronomic score create palpable tension in each and every scene. It would have been a lot easier for Nolan to recreate the titular evacuation as a straightforward A-to-B story, but that’s never been how he operates.
Murphy is limited to a solitary scene and credited as Shell Shocked Soldier, but there’s no shame in being a small cog in such an expertly oiled machine. One of the greatest war stories ever told on screen, Nolan’s mastery of scope, scale, and imagery combine with frantic pacing and technical excellence to concoct an immersive maelstrom of unforgettable cinematic conflict.
2. The Dark Knight (2008)
Another top-tier Nolan effort where Murphy is awarded limited screentime, his short-but-sweet cameo in The Dark Knight nonetheless establishes where things are heading, with Batman inspiring a wave of vigilantes seeking to take the law into their own hands. As a result, it puts them directly in the Joker’s line of fire.
Having told one of the best origin stories in history, Nolan then opted to craft a slow-burning epic that played more as a crime thriller that happened to be set in Gotham City as opposed to a standard comic book adaptation, bolstered by Heath Ledger on instantly iconic form as the Clown Prince of Crime.
Setting the tone from the very opening scene right through to the final frame, The Dark Knight may not be flawless, but as far as cinematic superheroism goes, it’s about as close as anyone has ever gotten.
1. Oppenheimer (2023)
A three-hour biographical drama earning close to a billion dollars at the box office is insane, but Nolan and Murphy’s most recent collaboration proved to be their best yet and stands an exceedingly good chance of finding major recognition during the upcoming awards season.
Finally ascending to leading man status as part of the director’s regular repertory, Murphy seizes the chance with both hands and embodies the spirit and mannerisms of J. Robert Oppenheimer without ever coming close to descending into either impression or caricature.
Backed by a massive ensemble and predicated on one of the most important events in modern human history, Oppenheimer required a spectacular central performance to succeed, given its interweaving narrative strands and decades-spanning story that all lead straight back to the title character, with Murphy knocking it clear out of the park and into the stratosphere.
