Oppenheimer, which a quick search shows has only popped up in the 'would NOT recommend' thread.
I have half a mind to stick it in the 'unreservedly recommend' thread because I really did like it quite a bit, but there's no doubt that it's jam packed with all of Nolan's flaws—cringey exposition, clunky dialogue, bombastic music etc.
However, I will also say that there's something so WEIRD about Nolan's films, including their flaws, that makes them worth watching. Like the editing. The first hour or so is a bit like the typical Hollywood biopic but it moves along at such a ridiculously frantic pace that it feels almost avant-garde. And although I was rolling my eyes a lot and also feeling turned off by the absence of breathing space (this is the opposite of 'slow cinema'), the pace definitely hooked me in.
Then there's the way it's shot, all those IMAX shots—which make predictable sense applied to sweeping (gorgeous) aerial shots of landscapes but also render these fairly standard dialogue scenes hyper-vivid.
The sequence leading up to the first test is really gripping, tense and anxiety inducing. There's a sense of horror accruing around the bomb, this cursed object. The explosion itself, as many have said, was a big let-down visually, it just doesn't manage to convey the scale of the explosion at all, which is a shame, because everything leading up to it manages to convey the scale of the threat. (Also there's these snapshots of the quantuum world in Oppenheimer's mind that are effective in inducing dread, presumably done with CGI, as the bomb arguably should have been.)
I didn't fancy watching this at the cinema /IMAX much at all (mainly due to the length but also I didn't really understand what was so interesting about Oppenheimer) but now I wish I had.
