Tarantino writes catchy pulp situations through a lens of pop-culture and history. It's definitely simplistic and lowbrow in its approach, but with a ton of verve and tension building. He's gotten better over the years, trying to address bigger issues instead of just the meaning of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" lyrics. For the first few movies he was paying homage to his favorite drive-in type movies as well as just copying other works, but in the past three or four films he really stretched himself and tried for depth. I think "The Hateful Eight" might be his best-sustained effort. "Inglorious Basterds" danced around a bit from one interrogation scene to the next, and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is a love letter and hate letter written on opposite sides of the same sheet of paper. But "The Hateful Eight" is a sustained set piece that carefully lays out characters and spacial relations while setting up themes of corrupt American divisions rising up together against utter vicious lawlessness. If you look at Tarantino's trajectory he's definitely making a sustained moral case where he takes a hard look at the corruption and failings of people while arguing that they're still a cut above those who have completely given way to nihilism.

By contrast, Christopher Nolan seems like he's trying to amuse himself with elaborate puzzle boxes, nesting-doll stories, funhouse-mirror temporal gimmicks, game-theory thought experiments and the like, with a one-note veneer of dark psychology that's generally the same from one movie to the next. I don't get any sense of him gradually maturing as an artist, but rather just trying to find another approach to creation of a puzzle box. I also don't see him caring much about finer details of characterization or how action unfolds. Nolan is content with cartoonish generic characters whose motivations are either to solve the puzzle or to become one of its obstacles.