Release Date: November 5, 2014 (IMAX); November 7 wide
Rating: PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language
Genre: Drama
Run Time: 169 min.
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Michael Caine, Topher Grace, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow

Christopher Nolan has joined a short list of directors whose films are considered events. Ever since his breakout film Memento (2000), which played with basic narrative conventions by telling its story backward, Nolan’s work has grown both larger and more complex. He rebooted the Batman franchise with Batman Begins (2005) and took up more sinister themes with The Dark Knight (2008), which explored both human depravity and the dangers of the security state. Between his Batman projects, Nolan wrote and directed The Prestige (2006) and Inception (2010), and he wrote the script for last summer’s Zack Snyder-directed Superman reboot, Man of Steel.

Nolan doesn’t play directorial small-ball. He develops heady stories that are best absorbed on a large screen, where the visual presentation matches or exceeds his scripts’ ideas. But Nolan often gets carried away. His biggest weakness as a filmmaker is a tendency toward bloated storytelling—the antithesis of the streamlined narrative on which he made his name with Memento. He sometimes just doesn’t know when to quit.