Dunkirk

The reverence that Christopher Nolan has for movies and stories and photography and film stock is absolutely sterling. This is a love letter to exposure. Story-wise, this behaves a lot like those big, old war movies, when you jump back and fourth from one character’s story to another. Think The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Great Escape, or Midway. You never really get to know the characters, except for a recreational yacht owner played by Mark Rylance, sailing into a war zone, as the true story goes, to help evacuate British soldiers. It’s interesting too that this movie starts when most movies begin their final third: at the beginning of the climax. So it’s relatively short and always tense. It’s bold filmmaking. It embraces the tropes of the genre, but twists them slightly to the point where your expectations are unhinged. It’s both a quintessential example of a war movie and also a consummate one. And it’s full of laughs! (Not really. It’s a war movie.)