Dunkirk Review

Nolan builds a survival thriller around three clocks. The mole runs a week, the sea a day, the air an hour, and the strands are cut so they converge at the close, which means the same Spitfire passes overhead at three different points in its own life. Hoyte van Hoytema shoots nearly all of it on 65mm and IMAX with real boats and real Spitfires, and the difference is legible in every water shot. Hans Zimmer runs a Shepard tone underneath, a scale that seems to rise forever, so the tension has no floor and no release until the Elgar arrives.

There is very little dialogue and almost no interiority. Fionn Whitehead's soldier is barely named, Tom Hardy spends the film behind a mask, and Mark Rylance carries the only real conversation in the picture. That trade is deliberate and it does cost something, because nothing here is written the way Nolan's best scripts are written. As pure filmmaking, image and sound and structure doing all the work, we have not seen him better.