Christopher Nolan is an interesting film maker in that instead of responding to common criticism about parts of his work, he's intentionally doubled down on those elements. Are there any other directors who have done the same?

High profile directors will have their careers and filmographies highly analyzed and discussed, and often it seems like many of these film makers really pay attention to a lot of the discussion. For film makers who have been around long enough, and can choose or curate their projects, you'll see a lot of directors seemingly respond to said criticism.For example, Steven Spielberg's entire career has seemingly been reflective of this, and even a director like Martin Scorcesse will do so. The Irishman (especially the final act) seemed like his response to the critiques of his prior gangster films. That's not to say that directors will simply try to improve on their criticisms, or should they be obligated to.However, Christopher Nolan seems like a really unique case. In the face of common criticisms about his films, he's instead charged head first and doubled down.For many years he's been criticized (even by fans of his work) of being too exposition heavy, and that his films are "cold" or "emotionally detached". I actually feel like this wasn't a totally fair assessment for his earlier stuff- something like Batman Begins actually has always struck me as quite a warm film, despite the subject matter.Regardless, the noise around this got really loud around Inception and Interstellar, and it was interesting to see that he essentially leaned into the criticisms with Dunkirk. I really enjoyed that movie, but for the life of you I couldn't tell you any of the character names. The movie is filmed with an interesting sense of detachment, almost as if you were watching a documentary or raw footage from the event. I think in spite of this, it works, due to the multiple storylines and wide cast of characters.However after watching Tenet, it's become clear that Nolan has taken a similar approach, and this is a trend of his. The movie is very high concept, which sort of necessitates a good chunk of exposition, but there isn't a single moment where the movie is allowed to breathe. The actors try their best, and at times you can see John David Washington's charisma forcefully breaking out of the utilitarian dialogue.The problem is that unlike Dunkirk, massive portions of the plot revolve around the relationship between JDW and Elizabeth Debicki. The audience is asked to believe that he cares enough about this stranger to risk everything to save her, but it never really clicks.It's pretty clear that he doesn't really have all that much interest in developing human characters as opposed to chess pieces that advance his complex plots. I mean JDW's character is literally called "Protagonist"- sure there are some attempts to work that into the script, but it's clunky.Anyways, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. There are a lot of directors out there who keep "doing their thing" despite criticism, for better or for worse. For example, you have guys from Michael Bay all the way to Tarantino and Wes Anderson, who very clearly have their style and stick to it. But that said, I feel like Nolan stands out due to the fact that he's almost actively ignoring the criticism and seeing how far he can dive into it. via /r/movies https://ift.tt/3rSYQsl