First Reviews of 'Oppenheimer' Emerge
Mostly raves.
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” and the recent “The Beginning or the End,” and has directed three documentary films since 2021, including two for PBS (plus award-winning “Atomic Cover-up”). He has written widely about the atomic bomb and atomic bombings, and their aftermath, for over forty years.
First full reviews of “Oppenheimer” now appearing, so here you go. Rotten Tomatoes score at 96% right now. I’ve been offering my own extensive notes about the movie here at this new blog over the past few days, since seeing it last Saturday, so if you want to catch up with that please go here and here. And for more in coming weeks, please subscribe, it is free.
Vanity Fair: “The antithesis of a summertime popcorn movie.”
The New York Times: “A great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.” [Note: She is wrong though, it does not really do justice to the “horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused….”]
Washington Post: “There is so much substance to “Oppenheimer”: so many ideas and contradictions and philosophical quandaries; so many egos, talents and temperaments, loyalties and lofty ideals.”
Los Angeles Times: “Through it all, Nolan remains the consummate Hollywood theorist and practician, someone who realizes his grandiose conceptual ambitions with a stubbornly hands-on, ground-level command of cinematic craft.”
Rolling Stone: “….both thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and not enough.”
The Guardian: “Oppenheimer is poignantly lost in the kaleidoscopic mass of broken glimpses: the sacrificial hero-fetish of the American century.”
The Atlantic: “The result is a talky biopic with the intensity of an action movie, a series of meetings in offices and bunkers that somehow drives the planet to the brink of apocalypse.”
Hollywood Reporter: “But perhaps the most surprising element of this audacious epic is that the scramble for atomic armament ends up secondary to the scathing depiction of political gamesmanship, as one of the most brilliant scientific minds of the 20th century is vilified for voicing learned opinions that go against America’s arms-race thinking.”
IndieWire: “While ‘Oppenheimer’ invites you to stare at Cillian Murphy’s face in shallow-focus IMAX-sized close-ups for much of its three-hour runtime, it seldom offers serious insight as to what’s happening behind his marble-blue eyes, let alone the opportunity to see through them. The result is a movie that’s both singularly propulsive and frustratingly obtuse; an overwritten chamber piece that’s powered by the energy of a super-collider.”
Daily Beast: “….a technical, visual, and storytelling achievement. It’s also the best film of both Nolan’s career and 2023.”
Mashable: “Pugh, one of the most talented actresses of her generation, is reduced to weeping and nudity, despite playing Jean Tatlock, a politically influential psychiatrist with her own story to tell. Meanwhile, Blunt plays Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, a belligerent drunk whose scenes predominantly see her pep-talking her husband or berating her yowling baby, with her one moment of redemption being captivatingly catty with one of his many enemies.”
Variety: “He fragments the story into parts that keep colliding, immersing us in the heat and energy that all gives off. It’s a style that owes a major debt to Oliver Stone’s ‘Nixon,’ though that movie was a masterpiece. This one is urgent and essential, but in a less fully realized way.”
Discussing Film: “Masterpiece”
A.V. Club: “Masterpiece”