Tenet review: Christopher Nolan’s latest puzzle movie is missing a key piece.

Though it may seem hard to believe after its release was scheduled, rescheduled, and re-rescheduled, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is now playing in theaters all over the world. A globe-hopping adventure shot in Nolan’s favored IMAX and 65mm formats, Tenet has plenty of big-screen spectacle, but unlike Interstellar and Dunkirk, it doesn’t feel like a movie that will be made or broken by its visual presentation—and in any case, the bar for “must-see” is exponentially higher now than it was the last time one of his movies made it into theaters, when the only person breathing through a mask was Tom Hardy. So many of Christopher Nolan’s movies are built around playing with time that making one in which it’s actually the core of the plot feels redundant—or perhaps it’s just the high point of one end of a pendulum’s arc, a pause at the apex before it starts moving in a different direction. Interstellar’s time travel was vetted by physicists, and Inception’s dreams-within-dreams could be de-nested if you took the time, but since Nolan’s brother Jonathan decamped for the puzzle-box universe of Westworld and left Chris to write on his own, his movies feel less like equations and more like hedge mazes, where the impetus is to get lost in them rather than find your way out. It’s a movie that advises its hero “Don’t try to understand it—feel it,” but makes that nameless hero so nondescript that it’s hard to feel anything for him.