"The Wolf of Wall Street," directed by Martin Scorsese, is based on the true story of Jordan Belfort and his escapades as the leader of a stock brokerage firm that ended up breaking federal laws. The movie was well-received by both critics and audiences, according to Rotten Tomatoes.

"'The Wolf of Wall Street' is a magnificent black comedy: fast, funny, and remarkably filthy," wrote The Atlantic.

"Oppenheimer," one-half of the biggest movie phenomenon of last year ("Barbenheiemer"), stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.

The film follows Oppenheimer from his time as a university student in the United Kingdom through World War II and the atomic bomb detonations, the security clearance hearing that ended his career in politics, to the end of his life.

The Ringer wrote that the "level of shock and awe" exhibited in "Oppenheimer" is "breathtaking," yet sometimes also "taxing."

Kevin Costner both starred in and directed the 1990 film "Dances with Wolves," which follows a Civil War-era lieutenant in the US Army who is positioned in a remote outpost on the western frontier. He eventually becomes part of a Native American tribe.

His directorial debut was applauded and even earned Costner the best director Academy Award. It also won best picture. Newsweek wrote, "Costner directs with the confidence of a Hollywood veteran well aware that entertainment comes before earnestness."

"Avengers: Endgame" didn't have an easy job to do — tie up a full decade of Marvel movies while simultaneously setting the stage for Phase 4. But somehow, it worked. It also managed to rake in nearly $2.8 billion at the box office.

As Business Insider's Kirsten Acuna wrote, "'Endgame' is an emotional punch straight to the gut," and "a very satisfying conclusion to this adventure that started back in 2008 with Tony Stark."

"The Deer Hunter" combined the star power of Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken in a movie about the effects that the Vietnam War had on residents of their small Pennsylvania town.

The Hollywood Reporter called it "the great American film of 1978."

Notorious 2001 flop "Pearl Harbor" only garnered a 24% on Rotten Tomatoes — probably for its less-than-stellar performances.

"For all the 118 actors listed, the movie offers almost no sense of authentic humanity," wrote the Associated Press.

"The Green Mile," based on Stephen King's novel of the same name, is about a death row inmate who appears to have supernatural healing powers.

The Montreal Film Journal called it "a wonderful picture with a deeply human core."

"Babylon" is an epic story of Old Hollywood, following three characters, played by Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, and Brad Pitt, as they make their way in 1920s Los Angeles.

The film was divisive. The London Evening Standard called it a "disaster of biblical proportions," while the Wall Street Journal said it was one of the "richest and most ambitious films" of the year.

Real-life lovers Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton teamed up to play historical power couple Cleopatra and Mark Anthony in "Cleopatra."

Rotten Tomatoes said it best: "This colossal and opulent $60 million spectacular was epic in every sense of the word — an epic investment, an epic in the annals of Hollywood gossip, and, ultimately, an epic flop."

Director James Cameron's long-awaited follow-up to 2009's "Avatar" (which itself is 2 hours and 42 minutes long) came 13 years later and is even more of a spectacle than its predecessor.

"The Way of Water" continues the story of Jake Sully and his love, Neytiri, along with their blended family of biological and adopted children, as they once again face the greed of the human race trying to exploit Pandora's natural resources.

Business Insider's Jason Guerrasio called the film an "astounding epic."

"The Right Stuff" is based on the true story of Chuck Yeager and his fellow test pilots who were chosen for Project Mercury, the first crewed spaceflight.

"Rarely has a film made a historic accomplishment seem so vivid and personal," wrote The Hollywood Reporter. "It makes you wonder, quite suddenly, why there aren't more movies like this."

The tragic love story of Jack and Kate, two passengers on the doomed RMS Titanic, was forever immortalized in this tearjerker.

Vox reviewer Alyssa Wilkinson watched the film for the first time in 2017 and found it to be still effective.

She wrote that it "swept me off my feet almost from the get-go, a grand epic romance-disaster that reminded me, in the middle of my overstuffed-with-movies life, of what we mean when we talk about the power of cinema."

Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning drama is about the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German man who defied the Nazis and saved more than 1,000 Jews by employing them at his factory.

"With seemingly effortless grace and skill, 'Schindler's List' balances fear and exaltation, humor and horror, love and death," wrote The Chicago Tribune.

The final movie of "The Lord of the Rings" saga concluded with the entire Fellowship of the Ring working together to save Middle Earth from the evil all-seeing eye of Sauron.

Though its running time tired some people out — "Yes, the running time is long, and yes, those many endings in a slow, dreamy coda left me feeling spent — better spent than I can ever remember," wrote The Wall Street Journal — it became the first and only "Lord of the Rings" movie to win the Academy Award for best picture.

This follow-up to "The Godfather" combined the origin story of mob boss Don Vito Corleone with the rise of his son, Michael, in the rare sequel that's just as good as, if not better than, the original.

"One of the most ambitious and brilliantly executed American films, a landmark work from one of Hollywood's top cinema eras," wrote The Chicago Tribune.

Denzel Washington starred as the titular Malcolm X, one of the most famous and divisive leaders in Black history.

Newsweek wrote, "[Director Spike] Lee and company have performed a powerful service: they have brought Malcolm X very much to life again, both as man and myth."

"Barry Lyndon," directed by Stanley Kubrick, follows the titular character, played by Ryan O'Neal, for around 40 years of his life, as he rises from a lower-class gambler to the husband of a lady — and then sinks back to being a gambler.

As Rotten Tomatoes wrote, the film is "cynical, ironic, and suffused with seductive natural lighting."

One of the best movies of last year was "Killers of the Flower Moon," starring frequent Scorsese collaborators like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, along with new additions like Lily Gladstone and Jesse Plemons.

The film is based on the real murders of members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, also known as the Reign of Terror, in the 1920s.

"Killers" was called "grand, classic film-making" and "an American tragedy of the highest order" by The New Statesman.

"The Irishman" reunited De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and more of some of the most iconic actors of the last 50 years to tell the decadeslong story of Union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino), mob enforcer Frank Sheeran (De Niro), and mob leader Russell Bufalino (Pesci).

Even though it's a hefty 3 1/2 hours, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "there are 209 minutes in 'The Irishman' and not one of them is wasted."

Charlton Heston, one of the most legendary actors in history, starred as the titular Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince who is sold into slavery and must journey back home to Jerusalem, all the while meeting historical figures like Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ himself.

The Telegraph wrote that "the story of how a man takes on the tyranny of the Romans, with all sorts of horrible consequences to himself and his family, is powerful and gripping."

"The Brutalist," which is directed by Brady Corbet and hits theaters on December 20, is the story of Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) as he moves to the United States in the aftermath of the Holocaust. When he is hired by an enigmatic client (Guy Pearce), his life begins to unravel.

"Similar in tone to such Paul Thomas Anderson films as 'There Will Be Blood' and 'The Master,' Mr. Corbet's often-staggering movie casts an unsentimental look at the price of greatness," wrote The Wall Street Journal.

"Lawrence of Arabia," based on the life of British soldier T.E. Lawrence in WWI-era Middle East, is separated into two parts and even has an intermission.

"'Epic' is an over-used word in cinema, but David Lean's 1962, near-four-hour journey with T.E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) into the Arabian desert is surely the gold standard for films grand in scale, design and delivery," wrote Time Out on the film's 50th anniversary.

This nearly four-hour sprawling story is about Scarlett O'Hara, a Civil War-era woman who lives on a Georgia plantation and deals with love, loss, and eventually is determined to start her life anew.

While the film has been criticized for its dubious portrayal of the Civil War and slavery, Time Out wrote, "No one watches 'Gone with the Wind' for historical accuracy. What keeps us coming back is four-hours of epic romance in gorgeous Technicolor."

Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer, née Puening, married the scientist in 1940, only two years before he joined the Manhattan Project.

Kitty had been married three times before, as she wed musician Frank Ramseyer in 1932 before their marriage was annulled in 1933. 

Shortly afterward, in 1934, she was involved with the Communist Party of America, and became John Dullet Jr.'s. common-law wife when they lived together in Chicago, before separating in 1936.

Kitty then married Oxford doctor Richard Stewart Harrison in 1938, but had an affair with Oppenheimer while Harrison was working in California. She divorced Harrison in 1940, and married Oppenheimer a day later. 

They remained married until Oppenheimer's death from throat cancer in 1967, and Kitty scattered his ashes into the water by the island of St. John in the Virgin Islands, where they had spent plenty of time with their children, Peter and Toni.

Kitty spent the rest of her life with Robert Serber, another physicist from the Manhattan Project, whose wife had died by suicide. Kitty died in hospital in 1972, just as the pair had set out to go sailing to Japan, the Galapagos Islands, and Tahiti.

Oppenheimer had two children with his wife, Kitty. Their oldest child, Peter, was born in Pasadena, California, in May 1941, before the family moved to Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project.

When Peter was just two months old, the Oppenheimers left him with friends Haakon and Barbara Chevalier, according to "American Prometheus." Robert said his wife was exhausted. The couple then spent two months at the family's ranch, Perro Caliente, in New Mexico.

According to the Nuclear Museum, Peter struggled with anxiety as a child and didn't have a good relationship with his mother. 

"Robert thought that, in their highly charged, passionate, falling in love, that Peter had come too soon, and that Kitty resented him for that reason," Oppenheimer's secretary, Verna Hobson, said during a 1979 interview.

When his father died in 1967, Peter moved back to the family's Perro Caliente ranch in New Mexico. He's worked as a carpenter over the years and has three children.

Toni Oppenheimer was born in 1944 and lived at Los Alamos until she was three. That's when her father became director of the Institute for Advanced Study and moved the family to Princeton, New Jersey.

As a baby, Toni lived with the Oppenheimers' friend Pat Sherr for several months. Robert visited regularly but asked if she wanted to adopt Toni, Sherr later recalled. When Sherr asked him why, he said, "Because I can't love her," adding that he wasn't "an attached kind of person." 

However, a childhood friend of Toni's described Robert as a "loving dad" in an April interview with The Winchester Star.

Toni had polio when she was young, which is largely why the family started visiting St. John in the Virgin Islands; the warmth seemed to help her condition.

Toni had a complicated relationship with her mother, largely because of Kitty's alcohol use. 

"She leaned on Toni an awful lot and it was difficult for her in that way, but she wanted only good and happiness for Toni," Hobson said of Kitty in 1979. 

Two years after Robert's death in 1967, the United Nations rejected Toni's application to become a translator. The FBI wouldn't grant her the appropriate security clearance for the job.

She struggled to cope with losing her father and her job opportunity, and after living on the island of St. John for a while, she died by suicide in January 1977, just a month after she turned 32.

Although Toni didn't have any children before her death, Peter Oppenheimer has three: Charles, Ella, and Dorothy. 

Dorothy Vanderford, who was born in 1973, is Oppenheimer's oldest grandchild. She works in the nuclear industry and has a PhD in English. 

In 2023, she spoke to KSNV about the film and said that Christopher Nolan didn't consult the family about making his movie.

After seeing the movie, she said, "There were a few things that I didn't agree with and didn't like, but overall I felt like it was a good movie."

Charles Oppenheimer was born in 1975 and has worked in software development for many years. 

The youngest sibling, Ella, keeps her life private. 

Both Dorothy and Charles took part in a lengthy interview in 2015 about their grandfather for the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

At the time, Charles said that many historians find his grandfather a mysterious figure.

"In particular, people are having a hard time pinning down who this guy was. I guess it's made it difficult to deal with for the family, for some people. Not for me," he said.

Charles has two daughters with his wife, Karen Pak Oppenheimer, which means that Oppenheimer has at least two great-grandchildren.

Both Charles and his wife are co-executive directors of the Oppenheimer Project, which honors Robert's legacy. 

In a recent essay for The New York Times, Charles wrote that nuclear war would end the world as we know it. "I'm not afraid to be the voice calling for increased unity in the world, even though my grandfather was eventually attacked for this," he wrote.  

This story was originally published in July 2023 and was updated on December 17, 2024.