OK, time for me to turn in my Christopher Nolan card.

Ever since "Memento," I've been waiting for Christopher Nolan to make another film that isn't a big hot mess, and it seems I will be waiting forever. He comes up with terrific conceits that clearly make sense to him, but he simply cannot translate them to the screen and make them intelligible to anyone else. "Interstellar" is his latest load of hooey, nearly three hours of sci-fi mumbo jumbo queasily married to a sentimental father/daughter drama. It goes on forever and includes all manner of tangents that a more concise writer or editor (anybody, please!) would have excised. Indeed, Nolan's biggest failing as a writer/director is that he can't seem to get his thoughts organized, and every movie he makes feels like a rough draft that no one ever got around to assembling into a coherent narrative. To give him credit, "Interstellar" isn't anywhere nearly as incoherent as "The Prestige" or "Inception," and it's not as leadenly humorless and self-important as "The Dark Knight," but it's just as exasperating as all of those other movies in its tendency to start with a good concept that it then buries under a heap of directorial self indulgence.

I learned a long time ago to simply stop going to see Oliver Stone or Spike Lee movies when I realized that neither was ever going to make a good movie, and I guess I now have to add Nolan to that dubious list.

Grade: C