Oppenheimer (2023)
Oppenheimer is a 2023 drama movie directed by Christopher Nolan, with a running time of 3h 1m. It stars Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Matt Damon.
Christopher Nolan tells the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Los Alamos laboratory and built the first atomic bomb, then spent the rest of his days reckoning with it. Cillian Murphy plays him as a gaunt, magnetic contradiction: patriot and doubter, celebrity and target. The film cuts between the race to the Trinity test and the 1954 security hearing that tried to unmake him, with Robert Downey Jr. as rival Lewis Strauss and Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Florence Pugh circling. Adapted from the biography American Prometheus, it treats scientific ambition as a moral thriller.
Quick answers
What is Oppenheimer about?
Christopher Nolan tells the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Los Alamos laboratory and built the first atomic bomb, then spent the rest of his days reckoning with it. Cillian Murphy plays him as a gaunt, magnetic contradiction: patriot and doubter, celebrity and target. The film cuts between the race to the Trinity test and the 1954 security hearing that tried to unmake him, with Robert Downey Jr. as rival Lewis Strauss and Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Florence Pugh circling. Adapted from the biography American Prometheus, it treats scientific ambition as a moral thriller.
When was Oppenheimer released?
Oppenheimer was released on 19 July 2023.
How long is Oppenheimer?
Oppenheimer runs 3h 1m.
Who made Oppenheimer?
Oppenheimer was directed by Christopher Nolan.
Where can I watch Oppenheimer?
Oppenheimer is available on Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango at Home and Spectrum On Demand.
Where to watch Oppenheimer
Rent: Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango at Home, Spectrum On Demand
Buy: Fandango at Home
Official site
Cast
- Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer
- Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer
- Matt Damon as Leslie Groves
- Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss
- Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock
- Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence
- Casey Affleck as Boris Pash
- Rami Malek as David Hill
- Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr
- Benny Safdie as Edward Teller
- Jason Clarke as Roger Robb
- Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer
Similar movies
Explore Oppenheimer guides
Oppenheimer in our writing
- Film / Culture War: The Odyssey Dislike Campaign Is a Verdict on Nothing
- Cover Story: See It Big or Wait Until You Can
- Companion guide: Nuclear War & Fallout
A few thoughts on Oppenheimer
Sit with the fallout across media. American Prometheus (book) is the Pulitzer-winning biography Christopher Nolan adapted. Barefoot Gen (comic) shows Hiroshima from the ground, the human cost the scientists debated in the abstract. Watchmen (comic) turns Cold War nuclear dread into myth. The Crucible (play) mirrors the paranoid hearings that pursued him.
The bomb, the lab and the war that built it
Oppenheimer races from a New Mexico mesa to the Trinity flash, dramatizing the crash program that made the atomic age. These films and books stand alongside it, from the Manhattan Project itself to the sabotage of Nazi heavy water and the human wreckage left in Hiroshima once the theory became a weapon.
Brilliant minds and the weapons on their conscience
Oppenheimer treats scientific genius as a moral trap, the maker forever tied to what he unleashed. These stories sit with that weight, following physicists, spies and lone radicals whose intellect builds something terrible, and the reckoning that follows when the power they created will not be put back in the box.
Reputations picked apart in the hearing room
Half of Oppenheimer is a slow public unmaking, the 1954 hearing turned into a quiet execution by procedure. These stories share that dread of the individual ground down by institutions and their era, where a person's name, loyalty and life get dismantled in front of an audience that has already decided.