Cillian Murphy as theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer." Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures/dpa
"Oppenheimer" has been justly praised for its attempt at historical fidelity in telling the life story of the brilliant, agonized physicist, but it's not a documentary. The movie gets most things right about Oppenheimer's role in the Manhattan Project, the government effort to build the atomic bomb, as one would expect given that filmmaker Christopher Nolan based it on "American Prometheus," the superb 2005 biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. But artistic imperatives and Nolan's understandable choice to tell his story from Oppenheimer's point of view led him t...
