Don't get me wrong; I like Christopher Nolan as a director - he's made some of the best Hollywood blockbusters of the last two decades, but he proves as consistently frustrating as he does exemplary. Excellent though many of his films might be, it's often in spite of his own foibles as a director; there are a number of irritating quirks, both in terms of how the story is composed and how Nolan chooses to shoot it, that hold him back from being an unqualified auteur and one of Hollywood's true greats. For all of the good he's done, here are 10 indisputable reasons Christopher Nolan is a bad director...
9. He's Cold & Emotionless
Christopher Nolan has earned countless comparisons over the years to Stanley Kubrick of all directors; both filmmakers have been cited as being cold and clinical, helming films that don't have a particularly powerful emotional thrust despite the material itself suggesting an innate emotion. This the problem; cold and disconnected is fine if that's what the material demands, but when Nolan attempts to broach the themes of lost love, dead parents and so on, a director is needed with the emotional intelligence to bring these ideas home. Take Inception, for instance; Dom Cobb trying to get back to his children should make for a riveting, emotive motivation for the character and for the audience, but Nolan doesn't do enough to hammer Dom's anguish home. We get a phone call, we get to see the kids in very brief shots (with their faces mostly obscured), and all of this means that the film is not quite as cathartic as it should have been. Nolan has seen himself improve recently in this regard - the finale to The Dark Knight Rises certainly stirred up emotions in me - but he still has a long way to go.