Every Best Picture Oscar Movie Winner Of 21st Century Ranked Worst To Best

9. Oppenheimer (2023)

Oppenheimer is the kind of lighting-in-a-bottle masterclass only Christopher Nolan could deliver; a booming biographical epic charting the rise and fall of a brilliant man who sells his soul for his work, his pride, and his ego.

Concerned with all the trappings that have coloured Nolan's work up to this point, Oppenheimer first and foremost serves as a technical marvel, its stunning visuals and operatic score mixing with its time-jumping narrative and bursting ensemble to create a drama so enveloping - so tense and so creatively deep - that its three-hour runtime sprints by.

Outside of its technical achievements - which includes a horrifying bomb test that rattles the room - Oppenheimer is also an actor's paradise; the likes of Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr, Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh (amongst too many more to name) delivering breathtaking performances as conflicted and painfully human as they steeped in great tragedy.

A deserving Best Picture it may be, Oppenheimer still loses points for a third act that victimises its central character, thus losing the compelling ambiguity of its first half. But even then, that's easy to overlook when everything around it is so effortlessly dazzling.