Oppenheimer Surpasses The Dark Knight as Christopher Nolan's Best-Rated Movie on Rotten Tomatoes

By Cameron Bonomolo

Is "Barbenheimer" a box office white knight? After tentpoles The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny bombed at the box office, two star-studded movies are blowing up in ticket presales: Greta Gerwig's Barbie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. While Warner Bros.' live-action adaptation of the iconic doll is projected to win the weekend with a $90 million opening, Universal Pictures' epic about the making of the atomic bomb is anything but a bomb with critics: Oppenheimer currently sits at 97% on the Tomatometer, besting Barbie's 89% and giving Nolan the best reviews of his career. 

Oppenheimer is better critically reviewed than The Dark Knight, which was Nolan's highest-rated film on the review aggregator at 94%, and has a stronger reception than his previous film: 2020's Tenet, "fresh" at 69%. After reviews dropped online Wednesday, Oppenheimer's 97% shot past Memento (93%), Dunkirk (92%), Insomnia (92%), The Dark Knight Rises (87%), Inception (87%), Batman Begins (84%), Following (82%), The Prestige (76%), and Interstellar (73%).

"After a long string of crowd-pleasers that also manage to inject ambitious philosophical and existential components, Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan's most intellectual and internal experience in years. It showcases the universality of humanistic struggles without hingeing upon them entirely, while also subtly yet exponentially layering in explicit critiques of global war machines," writes critic Patrick Cavanaugh in ComicBook's Oppenheimer review. " Despite chronicling events that unfolded 70 years ago, exploring an arms race or being given conflicting information by government authorities and being expected to honor ever-changing ideologies feels immensely contemporary."

Cavanaugh adds, "With Oppenheimer, Nolan orchestrates a talented symphony of performers at the top of their game to explore an overlooked corner of history, treating it with nuance and respect while lesser hands would lean into melodrama. The movie is a tribute not only to the true-life figures who pushed the limits of science forward, but also to those who suffered the consequences of those forward-thinkers' quest for fire."

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Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy and Inception star Cillian Murphy plays theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, leading a starry cast that includes Emily Blunt (A Quiet Place) as Oppenheimer's wife, biologist and botanist Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer, Matt Damon (AIR) as General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey Jr. (Avengers: Endgame) as Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Oppenheimer also reunites Nolan with his Batman star Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman and features Florence Pugh (Dune: Part Two) as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie (Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret) as theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano (Minx) as Robert Serber, and Josh Hartnett (30 Days of Night) as pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence.

Oppenheimer opens July 21st in theaters.

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