Dunkirk is many things, but I don’t think you could call it entertainment. And yet it comes from Christopher Nolan, the director whose DNA is all over the modern-day popcorn blockbuster. Nolan has raided his stockpile of cinematic tricks and techniques to make a bravura, you-are-there document of the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation, in which a makeshift fleet pulled more than 300,000 British soldiers off a beach on the northern tip of France as German forces had them virtually surrounded. The result is almost unbearably intense—if you’re prone to cinematic trauma, or if you suffer from actual PTSD, Dunkirk might be more than you’re able to take.
For the rest of us, Dunkirk is imperative viewing—not simply because it offers a vital history lesson, but because it reminds us how moving images and recorded sound, when orchestrated under the baton of a maestro, can work as a kind of teleportation.