John Maguire on film: It’s a 5-4 win for Oppenheimer in the cinematic showdown of the year

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the director’s 12th feature film and a soaring, immersive triumph, tells the story of the creation of the atomic bomb from three points in time – before, during and after – through the conduit of theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, magnetically played by Cillian Murphy.

These three perspectives are overlaid in a complex, looping chronology reminiscent of Memento and Inception, thrillers where time was a malleable property, while carrying forward the central idea from Nolan’s last film, Tenet: what if humanity could uninvent a terrible technology?