‘Oppenheimer’ review: Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy dissect the tortured conscience behind our atomic age

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan has presented us with so many dark splendors and unsettling displays of destruction in his career — in science fiction, in Gotham City or in “Dunkirk,” his first real-world historical thriller.

Now we have “Oppenheimer,” his second in that real-world category. People will be talking about it for a long time; they already are, largely because of what it’s not: not a sequel, not an overbudgeted franchise product, not junk.

It’s Nolan’s most haunted film to date, and with this subject — J. Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist, “father of the atom bomb,” anguished, conscience-stricken victim of America’s errantly shifting political