Christopher Nolan’s much anticipated new film, exclusively showing at IFI on the director’s preferred 70mm format, stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, whose achievements were mired in guilt at the devastation his work unleashed, and how the continued development of even more powerful weapons of mass destruction fundamentally destabilised world peace forevermore. Based on Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Nolan weaves a dual narrative, exploring Oppenheimer’s era-defining role as director of the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, where he led a crack team of scientists to develop an atomic bomb before Germany did so first, while looking ahead to the Cold War period, when Oppenheimer’s ambiguous pre-war Communist associations led him to be harassed, interrogated, and ultimately humiliated in a series of hearings led by the relentlessly red-baiting Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.).

Oppenheimer is also screening in 70mm and 35mm formats.

Notes by David O’Mahony