<PERSON>
I am become Death. Destroyer of worlds.
<PERSON>'s latest is a grand vision through the smallest of scopes. As history teeters on the brink of Nazification and then nuclear annihilation, <PERSON> examines <PERSON>'s moral quandary in coming to terms with what he has wrought.
The director, famous for his chilly, <PERSON>-esque pictures of doomed men faced with impossible odds keeps the trademark brooding that have made his pictures so eminently watchable. 285
But, he trades the stark realism - the military-fetishistic gadgetry of his Batman pictures to the clicky NASA-punk imagery of Interstellar - for something altogether more impressionistic. Here, <PERSON> seems liberated by the reception to his non-linear storytelling in Dunkirk, as he slips in and out of moments in <PERSON>'s race to produce an atomic bomb before the Nazis, weaving in moments from previous relationships, his tenure at Berkeley, his testimony before acolytes of <PERSON>, foaming at the mouth for even the slightest whiff of anything left-wing of outright fealty to American nationalism.
It's a broadly successful picture, mostly because it is so steadfast in understanding the moral convictions of the man. And though it slides in at 180 minutes, the time whizzes by because <PERSON> leaves not a second of room to breathe.
This is one of <PERSON>'s best and, maybe, the best picture of the year. 285