Didn’t think Nolan had it in him to make this film, and certainly wasn’t expecting it to shake me like it did. Plays like a single, tumbling montage, not so much scenes as suggestions of them — and if this left me occasionally gasping for air, I'll admit it makes for a thoroughly absorbing watch. It also feels retrospectively justified by the film’s structuring around the Trinity test, the moral black hole at the centre of the movie that pulls everything before and after towards it; Oppenheimer’s actions and his belated self-reckoning as represented by the awesome, blinding flash and then the awful, deafening crash. Lest anyone misconstrue this as spectacle for its own sake, Nolan follows it up with the most horrifying sequence of his career, all the pain and trauma of Hiroshima displaced onto celebration of barbarity, laughter just as chilling as screams.

Some reservations, especially the need for a smug bit of cathartic upbraiding, out of place in a film that largely resists Nolan’s compulsive neatness (Ehrenreich delivering his “didn’t you get the memo” equivalent to RDJ), and Nolan’s treatment of women remains lazy, at best. But almost everything else works fantastically, from Murphy’s hollowed-out performance to Göransson’s score, which does the whole Hans Zimmer thing better than Zimmer’s been able/bothered to do it for years. Wary of overstating the film’s political credentials, but still quite amazed to see a historical blockbuster of this scale unequivocally state the dropping of the atom bomb was both evil and wholly unjustified, that the McCarthyist hounding of Oppenheimer was also wrong, and that no amount of guilt and half-hearted martyrdom could ever redeem a man — and a country — who lacked real moral conviction about anything. Astonished too, from a filmmaker who’s built his career on so much trickery and complexity, to receive an ending so brutally blunt, and a film so much better for it.