Every Christopher Nolan Sci-Fi and Fantasy Movie, Ranked

Image via Universal Pictures Published Oct 25, 2026, 12:23 PM EDT Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account There are recognizable elements found in a good many Christopher Nolan movies, since he’s collaborated with quite a few different actors and other individuals behind the scenes, he likes playing around with time, and he also seems fond of blending psychological drama/thriller elements with action and spectacle. That’s just for starters, but it’s worth highlighting because he’s not really someone most well-known for tackling a certain kind of genre, since he’s done superhero movies (The Dark Knight), mystery films (Memento), a biopic (Oppenheimer), and at least one war film (Dunkirk… also Oppenheimer again, to some extent), alongside tackling various other genres. To date, he’s done a few science fiction movies, so if you tackle his filmography, you're going to find quite a bit of that, though they're different sorts of sci-fi films, in some ways. He’s also done one fantasy movie, and that one’s going to be ranked alongside his sci-fi movies below. Call them “genre films” if you want, but they're the Christopher Nolan movies that most break from reality, and they're also all pretty great, so ranking them is a challenge. Just know that things kick off with something that, at worst, is still pretty great, and then things ultimately conclude with the Nolan sci-fi and/or fantasy movies that feel honestly close to perfect. 5 'The Prestige' (2006) Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures If you're ranking all of Christopher Nolan’s movies and get to The Prestige, even if The Prestige is in the bottom half, it should be stressed that once you get to The Prestige, things are pretty great in any event. That’s mentioned because putting it last here when it’s not a broad ranking of everything Nolan-directed also feels like sacrilege, but that’s a testament to how good the other movies are that something this strong ends up kind of low down. Really, The Prestige is about as good as a movie about magic could probably ever be (sorry, Now You See Me… but hey, Michael Caine shows up there, as well as in The Prestige). To go into how it becomes a bit more heightened and works in some science fiction elements might be saying too much about the plot. There’s a high-concept premise here which might sound a bit silly, but The Prestige finds genuine drama within it, because it’s about two rival magicians who keep pushing each other and themselves to do increasingly outlandish acts. To go into how it becomes a bit more heightened and works in some science fiction elements might be saying too much about the plot, and sure, people have had 20 years to watch it, but it’s still too interesting a film (especially in its final act) to run the risk of ruining it. 4 'Tenet' (2020) Image via Warner Bros. If you don’t like Tenet being ranked above The Prestige, then you can make like someone who gets on the wrong side of The Room’s Mark and leave your stupid comments in your pocket. Okay, maybe that was a bit aggressive, because it’s admittedly not the easiest thing in the world to get on the same wavelength as Tenet, but it’s worth a shot. Without being particularly easy to break down, it does end up being a good time, and certainly unique as far as action/spy films go, mostly because of the sci-fi elements it works in. There’s time going backwards and forwards here, and that leads to action sequences that get very inventive and unlike anything else you'll see, even in other Nolan-directed movies. For better or worse, Tenet is also mind-bending enough that rewatches can still feel surprising, in part potentially because you'll never really get everything, no matter how often you rewatch it. Maybe Nolan gets it. Or maybe he was just having fun. Either is a possibility. 3 'Inception' (2010) Image via Warner Bros. Pictures Ordinary heist movies are great and all, and Christopher Nolan could definitely make a whole movie about people robbing a bank if he wanted to (well, beyond The Dark Knight kicking off with a memorable bank heist), but Inception is famously a different kind of heist movie. At the risk of over-simplifying things, it’s about people who infiltrate a man’s subconscious and try to implant an idea there, which involves going into more than one layer of a dream, and also battling certain unique obstacles within the dreamscapes they venture into. This does give Inception the feeling of a heist movie where criminals tackle a series of targets, with each one being more well-guarded than the last, just with everything being more distinctive here because of the psychological nature of it all. There are lots of rules that need to be laid down, but the exposition is handled well, and the set-up proves almost as engaging as the more action-packed payoffs found throughout Inception’s second half. It is really well-executed, and most other directors would love it if their best sci-fi and/or fantasy movie was this good, but with Nolan, he’s a great enough filmmaker that there are arguably two others even better. Speaking of… 2 'Interstellar' (2014) Interstellar is almost definitely the most emotional Christopher Nolan movie, or if not (and if that’s kind of hard to decide objectively), then maybe it’s worth deeming it his most sentimental movie. It’s definitely going for an emotional thing, and thankfully it isn't sentimental in a bad way, nor could it really be called sappy. The emotional core is there from the start, with a man having to leave his children on a dying Earth so he can take part in a mission that involves searching throughout deep space for some other planet that humanity might be able to move to and survive on. Those are the basics of Interstellar, and the premise means it can begin as hard sci-fi and stay operating in that zone for a while, but then the emotional core gets more emotional and in-your-face, and the final act proves incredibly moving. It’s a sci-fi movie about wanting to get home, in some ways, even with the mission involving finding another home, and so it would work as a great double feature with Nolan’s best fantasy movie, which is also an adventure sort of film and, like Interstellar, debatably one of the very best epics of the 21st century so far. 1 'The Odyssey' (2026) Image via Universal Pictures Since it’s still a relatively recent release at the time of writing, it has to be conceded that, to some extent, time will tell whether it remains feeling like one of the biggest and best movies of 2026, but for now, The Odyssey is that. It’s a truly special sort of epic, and yeah, perhaps even better than any of Nolan’s sci-fi movies, seeing him tackling the fantasy genre in a very Nolan kind of way, just like how all his science fiction movies have a certain flavor to them. And it’s the movie that was alluded to when talking about Interstellar, since The Odyssey is undoubtedly about a man trying to get home, and finding that endeavor so much easier said than done. For now, it does feel immense, and hopefully for a while to come, it'll continue feeling immense. Since The Odyssey is such an ancient and quintessential story, it’s possible that it'll be adapted again at some point, in another movie, in who knows how many years, but it’s not going to be easy to exceed this one in terms of quality. The Odyssey is maximalist and does everything it wants to well, and it does a whole lot, with the almost three-hour runtime here being packed. It’s got some remarkable horror-heavy sequences, a good deal of action, some truly emotional parts, and then some of the best music composed for a film in recent memory (all hail the great Ludwig Göransson). Sure, it’s easy to get caught up in all the hype when a movie’s recent and instantly felt like a big deal, but in this instance, the level of hype feels well-deserved, and The Odyssey is just that good.