Tenet

2020 Directed by Christopher Nolan

Time runs out.

Armed with only one word - Tenet - and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.

John David Washington Robert Pattinson Elizabeth Debicki Kenneth Branagh Dimple Kapadia Himesh Patel Aaron Taylor-Johnson Michael Caine Clémence Poésy Martin Donovan Andrew Howard Yuri Kolokolnikov Mark Krenik Anthony Molinari Rich Ceraulo Ko Denzil Smith Jonathan Camp Julia-Maria Arnolds Laurie Shepherd Wes Chatham Fiona Dourif Kenneth Wolf Andersen Haugen Marcel Sabat Marek Angelstok Klaus Peeter Rüütli Daniel Olesk Bern Collaço Ingrid Margus Carina Velva Show All…

Alternative Titles

天能, 테넷, İnanç, 信条, TENET天能

science fiction action thriller

150 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Erin ★★½ 82

hello my name is christopher nolan, welcome to masterclass
today I will be discussing how I add emotional depth to my characters
first I add woman
then i add child

and we're done!
thank you for watching
Review by COBRARocky ★ 85

Half the dialogue is exposition. The soundtrack goes BRRRRM. You will forget the entire thing on the drive home. A film by Christopher Nolan.
Review by brat pitt ★★½ 91

we drove 2 hours from LA to san diego just to see Tenet! At The Drive-In then spent about 75% of the trip home complaining about basically every aspect.
it’s a puzzle box with no reward or sense of satisfaction. i enjoy being challenged by complex films when they proffer some sort of emotional truth, but Tenet is all logos and no pathos — the only time any character exhibited any remotely mortal quality was when robert pattinson got sleepy and laid down. cool how elizabeth debicki’s only there to be 6’3” and relentlessly abused. oh, and to be a mom! in Nolan World, girls have to either be moms or dead. good thing we live in a Twilight World!
Review by vince ★★★ 40

someone tell christopher nolan that time will not sleep with him, no matter how many movies he makes on it.
also, i really hope whoever goes to see this movie has super hearing, because it is impossible to understand the dialogue for about 70% of this movie over that damn soundtrack.
Review by deah ★½

nolan so scared to flop he designed a movie you have to watch twice
Review by Lucy ★★½ 76

popped into the theater during various scenes while at work tonight and realized i’m done having fun with this: what good is a complex plot if it’s too hard to hear or understand, and why hire an actor as good as elizabeth debicki just to be used as a human punching bag? i love plenty of nolan’s other films, but someone as monumental as him doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore when it comes to something as simple as basic characterization. he can create layered stories about space, time, and even dreams, but can’t move past something as old as the damsel in distress trope? grow up
Review by iana ★★★ 32

the first half was the most confusing shit ever and the time stuff hadn’t even kicked in yet they were just talking and talking and i couldn’t process a word they were saying i’m so stupid
CINEMAS THO!!! I’VE MISSED YOU SO MUCH BB
Review by davidehrlich ★★★½ 54

easily Nolan's worst non-Batman movie since Insomnia or Following.
i loved it.
p.s. for my fellow Americans: you can privately rent out a Cinemark in certain places for a LOT less than you think and see this or whatever you want with some peace of mind.
Review by ty ★★★½ 21

I know I should be talking about the movie in general but let me just say how much I appreciated how hot this movie was. 6’3 Elizabeth Debicki, John, Robert and Aaron? Hot. The cinematography? Hot. The score? Hot. The set pieces? Hot. It’s just hot. Tenet is hot. It’s sexy. I’m thinking...
Review by Tyler ★ 109

Nolan’s worst movie. An absolutely insufferable, entirely incoherent stream of trite exposition and indolent writing with absolutely no emotional core nor even the most remote understanding of tone or storytelling structure.
This is a film that rambles from setpiece to setpiece at barely decipherable speed, every so often winking indulgently at the viewer as if to say “if you’re not following this, the joke’s on you”, only to then trip over itself to explain ad nauseum what Nolan, for all his love of spectacle, barely attempts to convey cinematically. The editing is some of the worst in a major blockbuster for years, frequently foregoing logic entirely in the vague hope the viewer will get caught up in its simultaneous “forwards/inverted…
Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 20

nolan finally made a movie that is literally nothing but temporal logistics and somehow it's the most disorienting film he's made. i have no fucking clue what happened, but it felt like watching an ouroboros tie itself into various strange, beautiful, abstract knots while eating itself. with regards to some people comparing this to michael mann's Miami Vice/Blackhat: not seeing it. those films to me are defined by a certain kind of sensitivity, vulnerability and romantic existentialism that exists in the modern digital world. this is something else entirely. more of a logical, tangible disarray drawn outside of time but experienced within it. there's no interiority or emotional expression happening, just a constant sense action (here depicted as a changing…
Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★ 56

We rented a truck and drove to San Diego to see Tenet at the South Bay Drive-In, and I had a lovely time. Went to the beach, saw a beautiful sunset, made a silly video, and spent a good 90 minutes or so laughing about this big, dumb film. Nonsense movie. Absolutely unintelligible and confusing, but somehow still very predictable and rote. A miracle. He spent so much time figuring out the logistics of the central time mechanics that he spent absolutely no time on the dialogue or plot and decided to just have his characters try and explain what’s happening with every line– and I still don’t fully get what was happening for a bunch of the scenes.
I…

Recent reviews

Review by Ron ★★★★½

big brain movie make my small brain hurt.
Review by Josh the Boss ★★

I ordered that hot sauce an hour ago!
- the Protagonist
That hot sauce line is written by the same pandering liberal minds that thought Hillary Clinton should say she keeps hot sauce in her purse to appeal to black people. I think Nolan is going to blame this film's box office failure on the virus but the truth is that I avoided this film because I could see it was his attempt at being woke.
Nolan could only praise John David Washington's athleticism as he sleep walks through the exposition and is a charisma vacuum. His characters are only there to explain his next expensive set piece is and sound like Nolan himself saying "I want to crash a…
Review by Heisenberg ★★★★

It's a complicated movie. But i like it.
I admired the effort nolan, i really do. It's a one hell of a work. Technical vise it have so much greatness. Nice. This movie takes complexity to a whole new level. Sometimes it's too much. You need to concentrate on this film, like seriously!! I heard lot of people complain that they hadn't a clue what they'd just watched. If you concentrate enough you can grab it. Not 100% but something like that. I got the meaning of the film. It's ok. But i don't have enough knowledge to grab whole scientific meaning out of it. But as a cinematic viewer i I have the clues. Base of the movie is…
Review by shafa ★★★★

setelah second viewing, aku makin sukaaa. terlepas dari berbagai kekurangan dan bbrp bagian inversion yang masi agak ngebingungin buatku, ni film seru banget buat diikuti. ditonton berkali2 kayaknya juga bakal tetep seru wqwq
Review by pavanpb ★★

I've liked some of Nolan's work and can see why people enjoy his films. But with every passing film, I get this feeling that his movies are not for me. One note characters, convoluted plots, quite awful dialogue at times (expositional). He reigned most of these aspects in with Dunkirk, which was a very good film. But Tenet is Nolan being Nolan.
Review by i_z ★★★★

Best color, music, lighting, editing, production design, textiles, vibes, and all around performances of any Nolan picture. Estonian arterial highways, untaxed ports, shipping containers, cargo tarmacs... there is nothing cooler than seeing a bunch of good looking people hang out in the liminal zones of global capitalism. Didn’t understand a single thing that was happening. 3.9 stars which I am rounding up to 4 due to the limitations of this webpage.
Review by marco_zero ★★★½

kojima without finesse
Review by Tim Vertigan ★★★

This is complete and utter nonsense and felt like Nolan parodying himself, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't the most fun I've had watching a new film in ages. Probably my favourite film of the year.
Review by Gyayak ★★★★½

Nolan, you fuckin beauty ♥️
Time travel movies always fascinates me. I think this is the only movie after 'primer' which actually challenged my brain. I was curious about every detail on the screen and how it happened. I guess the key to understand this movie is simple as that:
- watch the movie
- do a lot of reading about it (theories, flow diagrams and all)
- re-watch the movie
I know its a lot of work but if you're into quantum physics and alert af then you can skip last 2 of those steps lol.
The idea of this movie is damn fascinating. The film takes reality and plays it backwards and forwards at the same time. From…
Review by Michelle ★★

No puedo creer que este conchesumadre haya creído que esta película era suficientemente buena para arriesgarse a contraer covid porque claro, el lindo no quería mover el estreno de julio. Personajes muy planos, terminé la película solamente porque el cast es hermoso.
Elizabeth Debicki sweetie im so sorry.
Ludwig Goransson se hans zimmermeó o quizás eso era lo que quería Nolan y el se adaptó a eso. Pero la verdad es que las mejores partes del soundtrack son cuando le sueltan la correa a Goransson y efectivamente se siente como un compositor en derecho propio y con sus ideas.
Esta película es muy bella, en reparto, colores y escenarios, pero es terrible de escuchar, el score supera el diálogo y bueno, no es como que el diálogo sea digno de escuchar tampoco porque es una exposición eterna, sin razón y corazón.
Review by Tintin ★★½

What if a James Bond movie took itself too seriously?
Review by Eric_S ★★★★

Tenet is yet another mind-binding action thriller from director Christopher Nolan that deals with the convoluted nature of time. After having seen the film, I'm rather curious as to how it's box office figures would have ended up if we didn't have the pandemic. As it is, this film will remain interesting from a historical perspective as the first major wide-release during the pandemic.
Tenet is a hard film to describe, at least as far as the minute details go. From a broad perspective, the film is about an unnamed CIA agent (John David Washington) who is assigned to a mission where the sole task is literally nothing less than preventing the end of the world. This leads our protagonist…