3. Interstellar (2014)

Interstellar, Nolan’s ninth film, is easily among his best. Matthew McConaughey takes lead as a widowed NASA pilot who, in our desolate future, rediscovers the agency’s remnants and is tasked with leading a mission to find humanity’s new home.

Between its holy depictions of space and black holes, and an all-time score by Hans Zimmer, Interstellar is an achievement in its marriage of science and art. It’s a movie brimming with urgency about our climate apocalypse while insisting we take pause and look up at the sky to wonder what else we’re meant to see. It is also his most romantic movie to date, even though that’s not what it sounds like. As verbalized by Anne Hathaway as Dr. Amelia Brand, who utters the greatest line in any Nolan movie: “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.”