Dunkirk

AroView: Christopher Nolan’s grandiose staging of the famous evacuation of the French port of Dunkirk in May 1940 is a departure from the fantasy pictures the director is known for, but remains a stylistic, conceptual exercise that depicts events from three perspectives: land, sea, and air over three time periods.

Extravagantly filmed on 65mm film stock, it’s epic in scale but scaled back from epic length, deploying thousands of extras, period aeroplanes, and even boats that participated in the actual evacuation - the effort paying off as the highest-grossing World War II film of all time. But with all the emphasis on this spectacle, sound and vision, it arguably limits emotional investment.

“A monumental, unconventional, and frequently stunning war movie.” ~ IGN.