Oppenheimer (2023)

This is a stand out because despite the fact that this is a solid three hour movie, for once I did not feel that the same story could have been told in a considerably shorter time frame. Once of the reasons it runs long is because it is not just telling the story of Oppenheimer's life or how was came to create the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also about the politics of war. Oppenheimer is depicted as a driven man who saw physical principles in his head, while dreaming and awake. He was not an all round physcicist--he was clumsy in the lab, his math was not up to snuff, but his ability to take the information that was known and create a theory around it and move forward was unparalleled. He was also Jewish and had studied in Eurpoe leading up to the war, and he knew that it was his people that Hitler was targeting, so he was passionate about beating the Germans to developing the atomic bomb. As a person he was complicated at a time when sublety was unappreciated, and he came under fire time and again for Communist ties. Both his wife and his former lover were card carrying members of the Communist Party, as was his brother, so the scrutiny was not unwarrented, and while the film doesn't go too far into this, in J. Edgar Hoover's America being Jewish meant you were suspect, even without the Communist ties, and after the war, people that Oppenheimer had offended plotted to get even with them, including Lewis Strauss (played brilliantly by Robert Downey, Jr.), who was particularly bent out of shape about him, but it is easy to see how it happened--Oppenheimer, as portrayed here, cared little about what people thought of him personally, and struggled with not pissing people off. This is well worth watching.