Interstellar

Interstellar (2014) is Nolan's most emotional film, and it is a story about a father and daughter dressed as science fiction. Agriculture on Earth is failing. Dust storms are worsening, crops are dying out one by one, and humanity is a generation away from starvation. Cooper, a former pilot, is sent through a wormhole that has opened near Saturn to look for a habitable planet. To go, he has to leave his daughter Murph, and nobody can say how long he will be away. The weight of the film rests on time running at different rates. An hour spent on one planet costs years on Earth. Cooper may come home to find his daughter older than he is. The fear here is not death but delay. The physicist Kip Thorne was a producer and consultant on the film. The image of the black hole Gargantua was generated from real equations, and that work fed into published scientific papers. A Hollywood effects team contributed to the astrophysics literature. Nolan avoided computer generated imagery. For the cornfield the production planted five hundred acres of corn in Canada and sold the harvest after shooting; Nolan says they made a profit on it. Hans Zimmer's score was recorded on a church organ in London. It runs 169 minutes. Good for: science fiction, stories about fathers and daughters, and cinema on a large scale. Less good for: it is long, the explanation in the final section is contested, and some dialogue is deliberately buried in the sound mix.