Writer–director Christopher Nolan is locked in an ongoing, well-documented wrestling match with linear time. With each new film, he attempts to find some unique way of slicing, dicing, and interrogating it. Memento (2000) gave us a crime thriller told entirely out of order; Inception (2010) used an ingenious nesting-doll conceit for its thrilling dream heists; Interstellar (2014) dabbled in relativity; Dunkirk (2017) juggled three parallel timelines. Most recently, the overblown and underbaked Tenet (2020) tried to package a spy caper as a palindrome. Even Nolan’s more straightforward outings, like The Dark Knight trilogy or The Prestige (2006), rely heavily on a chronological sleight of hand; he deploys flashbacks as casually as other directors might use a close-up.