As a delivery system for the thrills, I think the film gets a long way, and you can kind of sit back and enjoy it. As a delivery system for the ideas, I think it trips itself up an awful lot.

| Mar 13, 2021

Something like the epitome of [Nolan's] temporally twisty canon, distilling his many cinematic signatures and preoccupations down to their entrancing abstract essence.

| Feb 3, 2021

[Christopher Nolan] is very clever, but mostly irritating is what I find. [His movies] are not cerebral - they're fake cerebral... He doesn't even do the time travel right.

| Dec 22, 2020

I am a big fan of [Christopher Nolan's] films -- I usually enjoy the time puzzle of it -- but this seems even more intentionally inaccessible and challenging than everything else... Confusing, distancing, and chilly.

| Dec 22, 2020

"Tenet" is indeed impressive, although I gave up trying to follow the plot.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 17, 2020

"Tenet" is difficult to understand, but even worse, it inspires little desire to understand it.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Dec 17, 2020

The auteur doesn't show much growth in his most recent self-indulgent work.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 18, 2020

It is easy to sit back and revel in the wonder of the big-screen experience, and to immediately want to see the film again. And again.

| Sep 14, 2020

For a writer often accused of being humorless, this may be his most playful script, often arid in its dry humor, and much of it provided by Pattinson playing an inverted Felix Leiter to Washington's stoical Bond riff.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 11, 2020

Tenet is what happens when Nolan forgets Borden's wisdom [from The Prestige]. He's so obsessed with how impressive his 'secret' is that the trick he uses it for is nothing.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 4, 2020

What strikes you is how determinedly bare of feeling it seems, even when emotional opportunities present themselves.

| Sep 4, 2020

Telling a story backward sounds bizarre - it is bizarre - but it works. The backward stuff in "Tenet" sounds bizarre - worse than bizarre, goofy - and for a while it works. But once it doesn't, it really doesn't.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 4, 2020

It's the first Nolan movie in a long while that I've left feeling disappointed. And yet there is enough good stuff buried beneath its antiseptic, perhaps overly showy technique, once you get past the clankier bits, that is worth exploring.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 4, 2020

It's a shiny clockwork contraption with a hollow center: a convoluted Rubik's Cube blockbuster that, once solved, reveals little more than the complexity of its own design.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 3, 2020

John David Washington has crossed a bridge. He's no longer just the son of a superstar actor. He is a superstar actor.

| Sep 3, 2020

Both utterly dazzling and increasingly bewildering.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 3, 2020

Maybe you could follow what is happening if you wrote it all down on a flow chart with circles and arrows and multiple colored inks, but it wouldn't be worth the effort - and that's hard to do in a dark movie theater.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 3, 2020

These amazing set pieces, while respectable for their reliance on practical effects and impressive for Nolan's commitment to his craft, often feel divorced from the rest of Tenet.

| Sep 2, 2020

Nolan has finally zoomed out so far with a story that fundamentals of physics have themselves become character motivations.

| Sep 2, 2020

The more everyone explains the plot, the more needlessly complicated it becomes. The "grandfather paradox" is mentioned, but Back to the Future and The Terminator handled the same idea with less heavy lifting.

| Sep 2, 2020