Interstellar review, Sight & Sound

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Christopher Nolan is, by almost any standard, a monumental figure in the landscape of contemporary cinema. He has enjoyed a near-unblemished track record of massive box-office success for going on a decade. He has remained committed to shooting on film in the face of an almost industrywide shift towards digital, which he has been a most reasonable voice in opposition to, and he has used his pull to make sure that cinemas equipped to project his latest, Interstellar, in either 35 or 70mm, will get first dibs on playing it for a paying audience. As the blockbuster has become increasingly formulaic, made-by-committee, and dependent on tie-in world-building – see for example Marvel Films’ recent unveiling of their release strategy for the next several lifetimes – Nolan, after his three Batman films, has evinced an interest in making big movies that are self-contained, freestanding edifices, bearing a personal imprint. All of this is, on paper at least, to the good. So it is without great relish that I must report that Interstellar, like Inception before it, is a movie that feels like being tangled up in a pile of infinitely-unfolding some-assembly-required instructions in the watching, full of dialogue that’s like the recital of a How To manual.