My favorite kind of story is a crime story--I think because I know what it's like to make bad choices. I have deep love for Billy Bigelow--who decides on a life of theft as a way of supporting "my boy Bill." (Billy dies in a knife fight before his child is born.) People can be sloppy, thoughtless, and weak, and still relatable; this is something that becomes clear in fiction and drama, over and over again. So it's a brilliant choice to build a movie around J. Robert Oppenheimer. This guy is a criminal; we're aware within the first twenty minutes of the movie. He becomes enraged with a particular tutor, and, in a nod to the Bible, and to fairy tales, he poisons the tutor's apple. Hours later, he realizes what he has done, and he seizes the apple right before it kills a man--not the nefarious tutor, but an esteemed scientist who has wandered into the lab. Actions have unintended consequences: This is the blueprint for the entire film, in a five-minute interlud...