How Long Is The Odyssey? Every Christopher Nolan Film, From Shortest to Longest
Time is everything in the cinema of Christopher Nolan.
Since emerging as an innovative filmmaker with Memento in 2000, the English-born L.A. native has consistently built movies that feel as complex as pocket watches and as gripping as ticking time bombs, regardless of how epically long or forgivably short they happen to be.
This July, the director is returning with his hotly anticipated 13th feature, The Odyssey, an adaptation of perhaps the most famous epic of them all—but will it be the most epic, in terms of run-time, of Nolan’s career?
In the list below, I’ve ranked every Nolan movie so far by its IMDb-listed running time, including this new adaptation of Homer’s timeless Greek classic. Read on for a bit more info on each of them and use the guide to find where to stream them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
Made for a budget of around £3,000 when he was still just a few years out of university, it’s no surprise that Following, Nolan’s feature debut, is by far his shortest feature.
The black-and-white, noir-like tale focuses on a struggling writer as he follows some shady characters in the hope of finding inspiration—a hobby that inevitably gets him into a few sticky situations.
If you’re a fan of Nolan, as well as early Hitchcock movies like The 39 Steps, you’ll probably get a real kick out of it.
Runtime: 69 minutes
This one might surprise you, but Nolan’s WWII movie Dunkirk is the shortest he's made in his Hollywood career. Coming in at 106 minutes, it’s a full hour shorter than Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Considering that it is essentially (at least in part) filmed in real time, it kind of makes sense that Dunkirk would be this lean, though.
The movie, of course, recounts the story of how over 300,000 Allied troops were evacuated from the beaches of the eponymous French town as the Nazis were closing in. Nolan’s ingenious idea was to present this countdown story from three perspectives, each of different length, but each converging on the same moment.
It’s a WWII movie, but the kind that only Nolan could dream up and execute.
Runtime: 106 minutes
It would be too much to say that Nolan’s breakout movie, Memento, is the filmmaker’s most time-focused project, but it’s certainly in the running for the crown.
Starring Guy Pearce as a man with a major short-term memory problem, the movie (which essentially plays in reverse, and not in the way that Tenet would 20 years later) put Nolan on the map by showcasing his generational ability to think outside the box for storytelling.
Runtime: 113 minutes
After Memento, a story about a man who’s constantly losing his memory, Nolan moved to Insomnia, a story about a man who’s constantly losing sleep.
Starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams, this remake of a 1997 Norwegian movie of the same name is probably the most underseen and conventional movie of Nolan’s career. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to see him put his aesthetic stamp on a studio thriller, however, you might be interested in checking it out.
Runtime: 118 minutes
Real ones know that The Prestige is an A-tier Nolan movie. This one doesn’t exactly have a time element like Memento or Dunkirk, but Nolan does allow the story to jump back and forth enticingly as he follows the rise and fall of two rival magicians in London during the Victorian era.
It’s a story as deliciously captivating as any of the tricks that Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale’s illusionists play on their audiences throughout the movie.
It does come in at a chunky 130 minutes, but no matter how many times I see it, it never seems to drag.
Runtime: 130 minutes
For a superhero origin story, Batman Begins is relatively lengthy, but Nolan puts those 140 minutes to good use.
The director's decision to kick things off with a long training sequence set high in the Himalayas might have been a tough sell to Warner Bros. at the time, but it makes the eventual reveal of present-day Gotham all the more enticing.
Seen today, the movie offers a slick reminder of just how much style Nolan brought to the superhero genre in the early ‘00s. It also changed his career.
Runtime: 140 minutes
Ten years before Dunkirk, Nolan played a similar narrative trick with Inception: i.e. he wrote a screenplay containing differently paced sequences that converged brilliantly on one climactic moment.
This is a movie about dream worlds layered on top of dream worlds that proved an absolute sensation upon release. No matter how much it's been picked apart since, it still confounds audiences today.
There are plenty of people who will happily tell you that Nolan was simply stealing from movies like Paprika and The Matrix, but Inception remains perhaps his defining masterpiece.
Runtime: 148 minutes
When it comes to time-based Nolan movies, they don’t get fiddlier or more fun than Tenet. The movie is as much about bullets shot from the future that fly in reverse as it is about temporal pincer movements—whatever the hell they are.
The movie stars John David Washington and Robert Pattinson as two CIA operatives, or possibly the same operative—it really doesn’t matter. What does matter are moments like the incredible truck heist or the sight of a real Boeing 747 crashing into an airport building. Good stuff.
Runtime: 150 minutes
If Nolan could get away with 140 minutes on the first Batman movie in his Dark Knight trilogy, his sprawling and really quite awesome follow-up certainly deserved to go for 12 minutes longer—at least.
With a vibe more like Michael Mann’s Heat than Batman Begins and an Oscar-winning performance for the ages from Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight deservedly became the first superhero movie to make a billion USD at the box office.
It also barrels through its 152-minute running time like it was shot from a bazooka.
Runtime: 152 minutes
When you consider that The Dark Knight Rises is just five minutes shorter than Interstellar, it does kind of explain why the movie feels, with respect, a little drawn out.
Granted, Nolan had to go a little longer than the last instalment in the trilogy while also providing satisfying arcs to a whole bunch of characters who weren’t called Bruce Wayne—and yet, maybe tighten up that second act a little more next time?
Thankfully, most of the set pieces in this one absolutely rip, not least Bane’s phenomenal introduction at the start—which is a bit like Joker’s bank heist in the previous movie except in mid-air. Shame it’s hard to hear what anyone is talking about.
Runtime: 164 minutes
