1. Christopher Nolan Kills His Women
The dark knight of superhero cinema and champion of cerebral blockbusters might not seem like a guy who likes to keep going back to the same well (Dark Knight Rises puns aside) for his tropes and movies, but appearances, as Bruce Wayne has taught us many times, can be deceptive. Normally that's no crime as long as it's a fresh well, but unfortunately Nolan's decided to drink from one of the mankiest on more than one occasion. That is to say that Christopher Nolan tends to victimise and villainise women in pretty much every film he's made. Let's start with the 'dead wives and girlfriends' (DWAGs?) trope first, since that's always a crowd-pleaser: Following, Memento, The Prestige, all three Batman films and Inception all feature women who are in relationships with central or supporting characters who die, usually in less than pleasant ways. The only woman in his debut Following dies; Hugh Jackman's wife Piper Perabo drowns and Christian Bale's - Rebecca Hall - hangs herself in The Prestige; Bruce's mother is shot in Batman Begins (with little fanfare; it's Thomas Wayne who receives most of the mourning), then Rachel explodes in TDK and Talia Al'Ghul (Marion Cotillard) is car-crashed to death (she's also a villain, natch); Cobb's wife Mal - again also a villain, again played by Cotillard - jumps off a building because she's nuts; hell, in Memento there are two dead wives - Guy Pearce's is raped and murdered and the possibly made-up Sammy Jenkis' is given an insulin overdose by her own husband. As if that weren't bad enough, most of the other women in Nolan's movies are villains, from Memento's conniving Natalie and the entirety of Marion Cotillard's history with the director to even Hilary Swank's character in Insomnia, whose only crime is being a good cop trying to do her job while the lead played by Al Pacino goes stark raving mad in Alaska. That's quite a list. Here's hoping Interstellar doesn't add to it... Did we miss any directors who use the same tropes in every movie? Share your own picks below.