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Matthew McConaughey · "Stay" · Hans Zimmer · The wormhole — 260gsm museum-grade Interstellar print from £3 at 98types Camden

The Film That Made Scientists Cry

Interstellar (2014), directed by Christopher Nolan from a screenplay by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, is the most emotionally ambitious science fiction film ever made by a major Hollywood studio. Physicist Kip Thorne served as executive producer and scientific consultant, ensuring the film's depictions of relativistic time dilation, wormholes, the Gargantua black hole and the Tesseract are the most scientifically accurate representations of these phenomena in mainstream cinema. Thorne wrote a companion scientific book, The Science of Interstellar (2014), explaining the physics behind the film's visual choices.

The film's central emotional premise is deceptively simple: a farmer (Cooper, played by McConaughey) who was once a NASA pilot is recruited for a last-chance mission to find a habitable planet for humanity. He leaves Earth with his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy, then Jessica Chastain) watching from the driveway. Time dilation means that for every hour near a massive gravity well, years pass on Earth. When Cooper watches the video messages from his children after emerging from near the black hole Miller, he has been gone for a few hours; they have aged 23 years. This is the "stay" sequence — the most devastating single scene in any Nolan film.

Hans Zimmer's Pipe Organ Score — The Finest Film Score of the Decade

Hans Zimmer was given only a title — Interstellar — and a brief thematic description by Nolan, and was asked to compose music before seeing a single frame of the film. The result — dominated by pipe organ (played at the Temple Church, London) rather than the orchestral palette of most film scores — is the finest Zimmer score and arguably the finest film score of the 2010s. The organ's association with the sacred and the infinite gives the film's space sequences a spiritual quality that no conventional orchestral score could have achieved. "No Time for Caution" (the docking sequence score) is one of cinema's finest pieces of accompanying music.

The Tesseract — What Happens at the End

The Tesseract sequence — in which Cooper falls into the Gargantua black hole and finds himself inside a five-dimensional construct built by future humans to allow him to communicate with his daughter across time — is the most visually inventive sequence in Nolan's filmography. Cooper reaches back through the bookshelf to communicate the quantum data that Murph needs by manipulating the second hand of a watch. The sequence's logic is precisely constructed: the future humans built the Tesseract because Cooper's love for his daughter was the specific gravitational force strong enough to create the communication across time. Interstellar argues that love is a physical force with measurable properties.