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Two more reviews!  
Dunkirk review: Easily the best movie of the year so far
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Dunkirk is easily the best movie of the year so far: EW review
CHRIS NASHAWATY POSTED ON JULY 17, 2017
Dunkirk
TYPE: Movie | GENRE: Drama, Historical Drama | RELEASE DATE: 07/21/17 | PERFORMER: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Harry Styles, Mark Rylance | DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan | CURRENT STATUS: In Season | MPAA: PG-13
It was still just the early months of World War II, but it was beginning to look like the end. In the last week of May 1940, more than 300,000 British soldiers along with French, Belgian, and Canadian troops were beaten back to the beaches of Dunkirk by the Germans. A small coastal town at the northernmost point of France, Dunkirk was an especially unfortunate place to be pinned down. The harbor was so shallow that large British naval ships couldn’t get close enough for a rescue. The men on the beach were stranded with nowhere to go. Lined up in columns on the sand, they were sitting ducks waiting for either deliverance or, more likely, death. Perhaps the cruelest irony of all was that they could actually see the coast of England just 26 miles across the channel. Salvation was so close, yet so far.
From that seemingly hopeless situation sprang one of Britain’s finest moments of the war. Had all of those soldiers been slaughtered or taken prisoner, Britain would have, in all likelihood, been forced to surrender to Hitler. The history books wouldn’t just look very different today, they’d also be printed in German. But thanks to countless civilian sailors who assembled a flotilla of small, non-military ships and pleasure boats to cross the channel and evacuate their boys, the country stayed alive to fight another day. In the decades since that death-defying turning point in the war (codename: Operation Dynamo), Dunkirk has become synonymous with stiff-upper-lip British resolve—a shining example of how to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
This race-against-the-clock rescue operation (and the tense days leading up to it) is the subject of Christopher Nolan’s miraculous new massive-canvas epic, Dunkirk. Nolan has for all intents and purposes conjured the British response to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. If you can imagine that film’s kinetic, nerve-wracking 29-minute opening D-Day invasion stretched out to feature length, this is what it would look like. It’s a towering achievement, not just of the sort of drum-tight storytelling we’ve come to expect from the director of Memento, The Dark Knight, and Inception, but also of old-school, handmade filmmaking.
I don’t think the director would mind being called “old school.” I certainly don’t mean it as a backhanded compliment. Like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, he’s a throwback and cinema purist who’s messianic in his belief in celluloid. He argues (convincingly, I’d say, from the evidence on display) that something ineffable gets lost in all of those cold ones and zeroes of digital technology: the warmth, grain, and poetry of actual film stock. Shot in 65 mm and IMAX film (if you live near an IMAX theater, spring for the upgrade), Dunkirk is a totally immersive experience. For two hours, all of your senses are taken over.
Nolan, who also wrote the film, tells his story from three different perspectives: land, sea, and air. And he weaves his three narrative threads together seamlessly. On the ground, the story zooms in on a young, scared baby-faced infantryman named Tommy (newcomer Fionn Whitehead), who scrambles amidst the falling bombs and chaos to stay alive until he (and any One Direction members among his comrades) can be rescued. He doesn’t say much. He doesn’t have to. You can read the fear and confusion on his face. On the sea, we’re on board a sailboat called Moonstone with its stoic captain (Mark Rylance) and his teenage son and his son’s best friend. As they motor across the channel to do what they believe is their duty and shepherd the boys out of harm’s way, they take on a shell-shocked survivor of a torpedo attack (Cillian Murphy) who protests going back to the hell he just escaped from. And in the air, we are in the cockpit of a Spitfire with a cool-under-pressure RAF pilot (Tom Hardy), who’s flying on fumes and dogfighting against German planes providing cover to the doomed men on the ground.
Nolan cuts between these there arenas of combat slowly at first, then faster and faster, heightening the sense of urgency and danger. His editing is like a metronome, picking up speed and nail-biting suspense. We’ve come to expect the exceptional from Nolan as a visualist over the years, but what sets Dunkirk apart from his previous films is how his visual language is heightened by what we’re hearing. A pulsing, pounding beat on the soundtrack feels like the blood rushing into your eardrums during a panic attack. The sound of a stopwatch ticking adds a sense of ratcheting tension until you almost can’t take it anymore. Layered on top of it all is Hans Zimmer’s propulsive score. Zimmer, an A-list composer who has provided some of the more bombastic scores to the past decade’s biggest blockbusters, has dialed down the orchestral shock and awe here and has gone for something more harrowing and unrelenting (in a good way). As fine as some of the performances are (especially Rylance’s and Hardy’s), this isn’t a film of big, dramatic, for-your-consideration moments. (For the Directioners wondering, Harry Styles is also solid, seamlessly blending into the ensemble.) It’s a full-body sensory experience that sweeps you up in its thrall and places you directly into the fog of war. It leaves you emotionally exhausted by the time the end credits roll.
By the end of Dunkirk, what stands out the most isn’t its inspirational message or everyday heroism. It’s the small indelible, unshakeable images that accumulate like the details in the corner of a mural. A PTSD soldier walking into the surf to his death. The sight of a hit German plane silently pinwheeling down into the sea like a paper airplane. The female nurses handing out tea and comforting words to the haunted men when they’re rescued. This is visceral, big-budget filmmaking that can be called Art. It’s also, hands down, the best motion picture of the year so far. A
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'Dunkirk' Review | Hollywood Reporter
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'Dunkirk': Film Review
7/17/2017 by Todd McCarthy
Christopher Nolan's new film follows soldiers from Belgium, the British Empire, Canada and France as they're surrounded by the German army and evacuated during the eponymous World War II battle.
Dunkirk is an impressionist masterpiece. These are not the first words you expect to see applied to a giant-budgeted summer entertainment made by one of the industry's most dependably commercial big-name directors. But this is a war film like few others, one that may employ a large and expensive canvas but that conveys the whole through isolated, brilliantly realized, often private moments more than via sheer spectacle, although that is here, too. Somber, grim and as resolute in its creative confidence as the British are in this ultimate historical narrative of having one's back to the wall, this is the film that Christopher Nolan earned the right to make thanks to his abundant contributions to Warner Bros. with his Dark Knight trilogy. He's made the most of it.
With multiple Winston Churchill/darkest-hour films hovering about these days, the story of England's resolve in the face of Nazi aggression three quarters of a century ago is once again common currency. Nostalgia for effective leadership and a Britain that no longer exists doubtless play a part in this, but, for all its emotional potency, this film doesn't trade in cheap sentiments, stiff-upper-lip cliches or conventional battle-film tropes. It's about resolve, determination and survival on the ground, on the water and in the air. When one of the soldiers finally makes it back home after a harrowing journey, he's greeted with a, “Well done.” “All we did was survive,” comes the reply. “That's enough,” says the soldier, who, almost miraculously, will live to fight another day.
Using a risky, even radical narrative structure that splits the storytelling into three intercut chronologies of different duration, Dunkirk dramatizes the calamitous climax of the attempt by the British Expeditionary Force to help French, Belgian and Canadian forces stem the Germans' stunningly swift sweep through France in the spring of 1940. Some 400,000 mostly British soldiers ended up on the beaches of Dunkirk, in northern France, desperate for a way to make it across the 26 miles of the English Channel — so near, practically close enough to see, and yet so far.
There are essential practical and logistical matters that need to be understood — that the shallow waters prevent the arrival of large ships and that English owners of “little ships” were encouraged to make the crossing to help rescue as many soldiers as possible. Still, the sight of so many men waiting in endless queues hoping to be picked up makes it all seems like a true mission impossible.
Nolan, who wrote the script himself, presents the brutal truth of the situation with lashing, pitiless directness. The first scene has several English soldiers being shot at as they run through city streets, and all are cut down except one. Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) makes it to the beach, where he finds countless thousands of other soldiers already lined up waiting for transport; the arbitrariness of who lives and dies is established at once. One of Nolan's bold decisions is to never even show a Nazi; we see the result of the enemy's aggression, especially from the air, but not once is a villain, or a swastika, offered up to function as a target for the viewer's own aggressive emotion.
Tommy shortly teams up on the beach with two other soldiers, Gibson (Aneurin Barnard) and Alex (Harry Styles), and the three finesse a plan to get out on the mole, a long narrow pier where boats can tie up under the supervision of naval Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh), the closest thing to an even-handed type on view here, and his army counterpart, Col. Winnant (James D'Arcy).
With naval vessels largely useless, the only real effort the English military can muster is air power, represented here by three Spitfire fighter planes sent to bring down as many Luftwaffe bombers and fighters as they can. The ace flier is played by Tom Hardy, whose face is once again largely hidden behind a mask (as in Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises as well as in the more recent Mad Max: Fury Road). The aerial sequences are brilliantly and excitingly filmed, and Nolan has made a special point of showing how difficult it was to line up a moving target and score a hit.
The third major narrative thread involves the brave effort of a middle-aged civilian sailor, Dawson (Mark Rylance), and his teenaged-son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) to sail their small private yacht across the Channel to bring home whomever they can. They're joined at the last moment by a friend of Peter's, George (Barry Keoghan, who made quite an impression in Cannes this year as a loathsome teen in The Killing of a Sacred Deer), a greenhorn who has no idea what he's in for, especially after they take on the shell-shocked lone survivor of a sunken ship (Cillian Murphy).
Nolan's daring gambit, which only comes into focus with time, is to intercut these three related but distinct narratives, each of which has its own time frame and duration: The general evacuation went on for nine days (during which the Germans held back from delivering the coup de grace, for reasons that are still debated), Dawson's crossing of the Channel occupies just one day and the air battle probably lasts, in real time, little more than an hour. Yet all these actions are combined as if they are happening simultaneously, a strategy that ultimately works to emphasize that what we are seeing is a highly selective representation of the whole, both in number of participants and time span.
Dunkirk also vividly contrasts the hugely different ways in which the soldiers experienced the same event. On the beach are tens of thousands of men standing in queues waiting for passage, sitting ducks for any sort of aggression the enemy might exert; above them are solitary pilots roving the brilliantly clear skies for enemy aircraft, engaging in aerial duels and, in one breathless scene, ditching in the Channel; several of the soldiers spend excruciating time hiding in the hull of a capsized boat as random bullets persist in blasting through the metal; and a Red Cross hospital boat is sunk in the harbor, creating massive panic. The hundreds of thousands of soldiers are at once all in this vast struggle together and quite on their own to respond as each moment demands.
All of Nolan's films are intensely visual, but it's fair to say that Dunkirk is especially so, given the sparseness, and strict functionality, of the dialogue. This is not a war film of inspirational speeches, digressions about loved ones back home or hopes for the future. No, it's all about the here and now and matters at hand under conditions that demand both endless waiting and split-second responses. Hardy probably has a half-dozen lines in the whole picture and, given his mask, does most of his acting with his eyes, something at which he's become very good indeed. Quite properly, though, no one stands out in the large cast; as required, everyone just does his job.
Although the film is deeply moving at unexpected moments, it's not due to any manufactured sentimentality or false heroics. Bursts of emotion here explode like depth charges, at times and for reasons that will no doubt vary from viewer to viewer. There's never a sense of Nolan — unlike, say Spielberg — manipulating the drama in order to play the viewer's heartstrings. Nor is there anything resembling a John Williams score to stir the emotional pot.
Quite the contrary, in fact. In what has to be one of the most adventurous of his countless soundtracks, Hans Zimmer enormously strengthens the film with a work that equally incorporates both sound and music to extraordinary effect. Mostly it's effectively in the background, reinforcing the action as a proper score is meant to do. But at times it bursts forth on its own to shattering effect. On initial experience it registers as an amazing piece of work that would require repeated exposure to analyze just how it has been conceived and applied to the narrative drama.
Similar levels of top-marks work have been turned in across the board here, notably by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, whose second consecutive feature with Nolan was shot on a combination of Imax and 65mm film to stunning effect with a boxy aspect ratio; the format certainly plays a significant role in one's almost instantaneous immersion in the world of the film. Production designer Nathan Crowley, costume designer Jeffrey Kurland and the visual and special effects teams have also made major contributions to the film's thoroughly authentic feel. Editor Lee Smith has helped the director tell the tale in a brisk 106 minutes, making this Nolan's shortest film since his small, homemade 1998 first feature, Following.
A decimation of the British at Dunkirk would almost certainly have resulted in the U.K.'s capitulation to Hitler and no American involvement in the European war. So the climax of the film, as beautiful as it is thanks to the visually stunning presentation of Hardy's character's fate, is more like the beginning of the real war. Even here, however, Nolan has figured out how to counter convention by having an excerpt from Churchill's famed “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech of June 4, 1940, heard, not as intoned by the great orator himself, but by an ordinary soldier in very ordinary tones.
In Dunkirk, Nolan has gotten everything just right.
Production company: Syncopy
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy
Director-screenwriter: Christopher Nolan
Producers: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan
Executive producer: Jake Myers
Director of photography: Hoyte van Hoytema
Production designer: Nathan Crowley
Costume designer: Jeffrey Kurland
Editor: Lee Smith
Music: Hans Zimmer
Visual effects supervisor: Andrew Jackson
Special effects supervisor: Scott Fisher
Casting: John Papsidera, Toby Whale
Rated PG-13, 106 minutes
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Last edited by CityGal; 07-18-2017 at 11:27 AM
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thanks! 
