Writers equating or comparing Nolan (and Inception) to Kubrick are revealing how tragically inept their reviewing skills are. Nolan is a product of the age of criminal science, his films are primarily tales of crime and guilt.  Their overlap is minimal at best: he employs only rarely similar symbols of Kubrick, they share neither themes, nor archetypes and certainly not storytelling or visual styles. While both may be misidentified as pessimists, equating them is like saying Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are similar because they both wrote in Russian during the 19th century. On very basic levels they are in complete opposition: Nolan gravitates programmatically towards 'gotcha' plots, stories that reveal twists in mechanics forced into the camera's foreground to shock an audience, Kubrick kept a sedate, steady distance from his characters and arcs to allow the audience to find his numerous mode-jerks on their own, if they even really wanted or needed them, and in most cases they were entirely unnecessary, his films could succeed without an audience detecting any of them. To label Nolan as "Kubrick with a heart" is the dullard's paradox, Nolan might properly be argued as "Kubrick without a heart," but audiences seem to be seduced by Nolan's orgiastic suffering that operates as soul. Nolan is really "James Bond with a heart" but reviewers probably feel low expressing that cold reality. Strange culture we inhabit now, isn't it?