The six most jaw-dropping Christopher Nolan movie moments

Credit: Far Out / Universal Pictures / Paramount Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures / Melinda Sue Gordon / Ratpac-Dune Entertainment / Melissa Moseley

Sun 2 August 2026 13:30, UK

If you’ve sat wide-eyed in an IMAX cinema lately, taken aback by the majesty of what Christopher Nolan did this year with The Odyssey, you might well have realised that he appears to be operating on a completely different level to anyone else.

Almost every three years now, we get a new Nolan movie, and almost without fail, he manages to elevate cinema to new heights with what he’s attempting – filmmaking on a massive scale, pushing the limits of audio and visual, dragging career-best performances out of his cast and, like greats including Alfred Hitchcock before him, keeping twists and secrets from us until the very last scenes. 

It has led, over a near-30-year career, to some genuinely astonishing moments, whether he’s doing franchise blockbusters like Batman or his own bizarrely creative one-offs like Memento or Inception, playing with viewers’ expectations and even time itself like a puppet master.

So let’s take a look back at half a dozen times that the new master of movies showed us quite how spectacular the ideas in his head could be when translated to the big screen. 

The six scenes only Christopher Nolan could have made: ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE