A lot has been written about Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (read Emma’s review) in the months leading up to and during the film’s release. There was the event-level hype that surrounded the Barbenheimer phenomenon, the debate over whether films like these glorify a man directly tied to the deaths of between 129,000 and 226,000 people in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the discourse over whether Nolan should have shown the tragedy from the Japanese perspective.

Let us not forget conversations regarding the portrayals of the women in J. Robert Oppenhimer’s life or the social media jokes about every white actor of a certain age being cast in the film.

The fact that there has been so much ink spilled on Oppenheimer speaks to just how fascinating the film is overall. Arguably one of the year’s best, Nolan constructs a work that feels both expansive and measured at the same time. Taking viewers into the mind of Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the film constructs a captivating mosaic of the ways ambition, ego, genius, and politics can collide in game-changing and destructive ways.

Similar to Jeff Goldblum’s speech in Jurassic Park, Oppenheimer is a fascinating examination of a man’s desire to push the scientific needle forward and his wrestling with whether he should have after the fact.

Part of what makes the central dilemma riveting is the cast of characters who aid in both Oppenheimer’s rise and fall. While there is some truth to the aforementioned discourse about the whose who of white male actors in the film, there is no denying that the ensemble cast is outstanding from top to bottom. Whether it is Robert Downey Jr.’s villainous turn as Lewis Strauss or Josh Harnett’s conflicted portrait of Nobel-winning nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence or Rami Malek’s quiet work as physicist David L. Hill, each performer is riveting to watch.

Even if one is not onboard with the arcs that befall Emily Blunt’s Katherine Oppenheimer, the wife of the theoretical physicist, and Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock, one of Oppenheimer’s love interests, the performances still resonate.

For all its technical mastery, especially when it comes to giving the audience the sense of the magnitude of the bomb’s power, it is the work of the actors that ties it all together. Oppenheimer is not alone in this mind you. This year has produced a great number of ensemble performances. The other film in the Barbenheimer event, Barbie, had an all-star cast firing on all cylinders, and the same can be said for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. General audiences will soon discover that other high profile works like May December and The Color Purple join this illustrious list as well.

This trend is not limited to the star-studded works. Smaller films like The Holdovers, Past Lives, and All of Us Strangers also feature strong performances from top to bottom.

While every year we get a few standout ensembles – the Screen Actors Guild award’s top prize is the Best Ensemble award, which is essentially a Best Picture award – scales between quantity and quality feel balanced this year. Works like Oppenheimer allow audiences to truly feel the collaborative nature of film. They allow viewers to get lost in the story and overall spectacle while being moved by the performances at its core.

Oppenheimer is a marvel on many levels and its stellar ensemble is the foundation that everything else is built on.

Oppenheimer arrives on 4K UHD/Blu-ray combo on November 21.

Bonus Features: The Story of Our Time: The Making of Oppenheimer (Now I Am Become Death, The Luminaries – Oppenheimer, The Manhattan Project, The Devil of Details, Walking A Mile, Can You Hear Music?, We Can Perform this Miracle); Trailers; Innovations in Film: 65mm Black-and-White Film in Oppenheimer; Meet the Press Q&A Panel: Oppenheimer; To End All War: Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb

Get Physical is a regular column featuring ramblings loosely inspired by the latest physical media releases.