Memento is one of the best movies of the last 10 years. That should be reaosn enough.
But he is a competent director who may not be trying to make the movie of a generation or say something intricately complex and wise about our generation/culture/media/world which many great directors have....
but he knows how to make a great movie that entertains without taking himself so serioiusly he gets lost in his own hype (a la Shamylan). Insomnia was a typical thriller but he manages to always get great actors to give great performances that lent the movie some life and the way he has his films edited and juxtaposed keeps things lively, entertaining, and the audience involved enough to not see how the mechanics work.
The Presitge very much was a film about his style. All of his non-Memento films are arguably completely consumatory after a single viewing (albeit I still enjoy watching The Prestige and BB to a lesser extent), but for that viewing he keeps the audiences enamored enough to completely manipulate them so they don't see what's coming from up his sleeve, which is just a sleight of hand. He visually makesh is films interesting. The Prestige did not look like your typical stogey film set in the Victorian era. Besides when the greats like Coppola or Scorcesse set a movie in that era, it is almost always in the Merchant Ivory vein of water-color painting styled and stately (aka boring) camera work that merely follows the audience around (you could argue Branaugh broke this with Hamlet, but he was too enamored with himself to let the story feow past his spinning tracking shots).
There is a life and vitality to The Prestige that makes it all feel in the moment and present (even if it is during the turn of the century) and the atmosphere of what the chnological revolution was in that age.
And yes he can do the same with Batman Begins, because BB makes a superhero feel somewhat realistic. He balances the cliches of the genre, the studio mandated **** (bad lines and needless action scenes) and puts in car chases and train chases and an overabundance of explosions and a beat-by-beat storyline.
But it works to marvelous affect beccause Nolan uses the tricks of the trade adn the mise en scene to give it enough versimilitude that audiences believe in the material and give a damn about what is happening but still sits comfortably asn an etertaining action movie meant for disposable fun (despite what fanboys say) but with enough depth to be worth revisiting. And again he has an amazing cast that take some pretty thin characters (because outside of Batman and Alfred, no one is that terribly developed in this film) and makes them feel real, breath easy and makes the audience feel them through their small bits and impacting performances to care. It doesn't go through the motions like most action movies but takes the contrivances of the genre and under nolan's style makes them work as well as a Paul Haggis movie, which due to "politicallly and socially important messages are brilliant."
Yes fanboys overpraise him because of BB and thinks he should direct every movie with a geek interest....ever. He has not reached the same plateau as ay Alfred Hitchcock or other populist directors (Steven Speilberg being another exaple), but snobs are too dismissing ofh is work, simply because he is a populist. But hey in his heyday Hitchcock had no respect and people still claim that Speilberg is low-brow and uses puppets in the face of movies like Schindler's List, Munich, Empire of the Sun and Saving Private Ryan.
Now Nolan as of yet hasn't reached that level of quality or prestige (no pun intended) but wh try and argue with elitists who today kiss the asses of Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock and other AMAZING DIRECTORS THAT DEFINED THE ARTFORM, but under the same pretenses can be dismissed as genre filmmakers who "don't make anything of substance."
Right....
