Christopher Nolan's Directorial Debut Just Got a Rotten Tomatoes Glow Up Ahead of 'The Odyssey'

Christopher Nolan has spent nearly three decades building one of the most consistent reputations in modern filmmaking, with critics tracking his Rotten Tomatoes scores almost as closely as his box office numbers every time a new project rolls around. That kind of scrutiny usually gets reserved for his splashy blockbusters, the ones with nine-figure budgets and awards season buzz attached.

But with ‘The Odyssey’ now closing in on release, attention has circled back to the very beginning of Nolan’s career, long before IMAX cameras and Warner Bros. marketing budgets entered the picture. That starting point is ‘Following,’ the ultra low-budget black and white noir he shot on weekends in London back in 1998 using friends, family homes, and whatever natural light he could find.

That scrappy debut just received a fresh coat of critical polish. Rotten Tomatoes announced it had added fourteen contemporaneous reviews to the film’s archival page, a move that pushed ‘Following’ over the threshold needed to earn the site’s Certified Fresh designation.

The film now sits at 87 percent, based on a total of 89 reviews, a number that has clearly grown over time as older write ups continue getting folded into its official page. That climb tracks with how the score has moved over the years, since ‘Following’ reportedly sat closer to 80 percent with only around 20 reviews counted as recently as the early 2010s.

To hit Certified Fresh, a film needs a Tomatometer score of at least 75 percent along with a minimum of five reviews from Top Critics, and limited release titles specifically need at least 40 reviews counted toward that total. ‘Following’ clears both bars comfortably now that its archival page has been fleshed out with reviews that existed at the time of its original release but had not yet been logged into the system.

This kind of retroactive review sweep is not unique to Nolan’s debut, either. Rotten Tomatoes has been actively mining its archives for older titles that never got their full due, having recently done something similar for 1996’s ‘Independence Day,’ which jumped to Certified Fresh status after 77 contemporaneous reviews from its original theatrical run were added to its page.

For ‘Following’ specifically, the timing feels almost too perfect. With ‘The Odyssey’ approaching its own release and inevitably drawing comparisons across Nolan’s entire filmography, having his very first feature freshly stamped with a Certified Fresh badge gives fans one more data point in an already well-regarded body of work.

The film itself has aged into something of a cult curiosity within Nolan’s catalog, a tight, fragmented story about a struggling writer who starts following strangers and gets pulled into a criminal underworld, told with the same nonlinear structure and obsession with form that would go on to define movies like ‘Memento’ and ‘The Prestige.’ It runs barely over an hour, but the fingerprints of everything Nolan would build his career on are already visible in it.

Consensus opinion has generally framed ‘Following’ as a shockingly assured calling card for a filmmaker working with essentially no resources, and the freshly expanded review count only reinforces how well that reputation has held up over time. Getting Certified Fresh status more than a quarter century after release is a rare distinction, and it speaks to just how much attention Nolan’s earliest work continues to attract.