Critics reviews

Aa thrilling, moving, morally provoking odyssey through Britain at war... McQueen’s film is big-picture British cinema, of a scale and depth which hasn’t been seen since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.

This is Steve McQueen’s most accessible film to date, without diluting any of his power. Mixing epic sweep with textured detail, despite an episodic second half [Blitz] will make even the stiffest upper lip quiver.

“Blitz” feels stuck between a conventional war drama and something more adventurous and probing. It doesn’t coalesce the way McQueen’s best work does, but the frictions that drive “Blitz” make it a singular and sporadically moving experience.

Although the writer-director platforms issues of race, identity and labor in his recount of the early days of German blitzkrieg bombings of residential London neighborhoods, McQueen unfortunately falls into many of the same conventional pitfalls that have plagued the “hundreds and hundreds” of WWII-era films that have preceded his own.

Blitz is neither a feel-good movie about wartime London nor unrelentingly bleak. The film treads a meandering line, traversing between Spielbergian adventure marred by violence, Dickensian child-in-peril squalidness, and social survey—both dreamy and probing—that feels entirely McQueen’s. It’s a patchwork that doesn’t always stitch together neatly, but is compelling and wrenching as a whole.

It’s the worst movie McQueen’s made, which by wider standards means that it’s still not bad. But Blitz’s admirable intentions consistently outstrip its execution, which is clunky and full of narrative artifices required to keep its angel-faced lead on the run from danger and from the authorities who intend to send him back to the train station.

“Blitz” is a jaw-dropping historical drama intensely driven by its characters’ stories. There is always a sense of dread in the air, thick as a London fog... The film is not just a glossy period piece; it’s an emotional story about human resilience, one that’s sadly still too familiar almost a century later.

Blitz is an earnest, broad-strokes portrait of a bustling city that occasionally succeeds in communicating the unprecedented sensory shock of modern warfare, but its uncritical craftsmanship and quarantining of past atrocities from present-day concerns also render the proceedings mostly lifeless.

What really unifies the film’s mix of the familiar and the uncanny is McQueen’s desire to drill into his country’s history, even when the subject appears to be straightforward keeping calm and carrying on. The frame of Blitz might be too tight to accommodate everything McQueen wants to see and do. But it still holds a frequently beautiful, challenging picture.

The relationship between the film’s two most important people is almost fatally diluted by everything that “Blitz” is trying to do around them, and by the sea of small details that each leave a greater impression... [Still, if] some of the movie is hurt by its failure to bear [McQueen's] imprint, that only serves to remind us just how valuable his imprint has become.

This is McQueen’s first feature film without a co-writer, and while his lens is as incisive and confrontational as ever – despite an Apple TV lacquer on the overall look of the picture – there are moments of heavy-handedness where more restraint may be desired.

[Blitz] is a bit broad-brush sometimes, and I wondered about the liberties perhaps taken with what is realistic and plausible... But McQueen has evidently made a decision to embody a kind of Ealing or Children’s Film Foundation spirit – forthright, muscular, uncluttered and most important of all uncynical... Rightly or not, I was looking for a more radical shock from this film or a more distinctive authorial challenge.