Dunkirk

Beat back by German troops to the French port city of Dunkirk as hundreds of thousands of Allied troops wait in desperation for an unlikely deliverance. Over the course of this harrowing week, we witness a French soldier trying to smuggle his way onto a fleeting British carrier, a dogfight between RAF and Luftwaffe pilots, and a civilian and his sons answering their country’s call to aid in the evacuation. Christopher Nolan’s most solemn and serious movie to date is a visually arresting, fluid, even balletic experience told with minimal dialog and the aid of fine performances including Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, and Tom Hardy. The movie does reach a problem area however when the panoply of the filmmaking itself starts to take precedence of the actual events it is depicting. *** ½ out of ****