Critics reviews

The action was not memorable to me. It was too seamless. I lost interest in the perfection of the film’s technical achievement, which I never doubted for a minute would be anything but complete and astonishing. I longed for just one moment where something wasn’t perfect, to remind me that humans had made this study of improvised naval success.

Seeing it in 70mm IMAX was like witnessing an alternate history of cinema, a history where capitalism's wolf in the sheep's clothing of the digital revolution didn't necessitate the surrender of film's projection to digital. . . . Here there are intense sound shifts, a color palette of elemental blues and golds, macro and micro perspectives, and especially the texture of human faces on photochemical film, yielding visual and auditory access to the genre unlike anything I've ever seen or heard.

In the film, all the big ships seeking to rescue troops are sunk in dramatic circumstances, leaving small craft to do the business. This is a travesty. The Royal Navy sent thirty-nine destroyers to Dunkirk, of which only six were sunk, although many were damaged. Two thirds of all the men brought home sailed in big ships, notably including the destroyers, just one third in smaller ones.

Nolan has taken the conventions of the war picture, its reliance on multiple protagonists, grand maneuvers, and parallel and converging lines of action, and subjected it to the sort of experimentation characteristic of art cinema. . . . Nolan exploits one feature of crosscutting: that it often runs its strands of action at different rates. . . . As a sort of cinematic tesseract, Dunkirk is an imaginative, engrossing effort to innovate within the bounds of Hollywood's storytelling tradition.

...Let's assume that Dunkirk does arouse emotions in most viewers, though using an approach that departs from that of conventional war films. Let's also assume that the story being told is fairly simple, though made elaborate by the ingenious intercutting among the three time frames.

In spite of all the intelligence and technical wizardry on display, I found something lacking in Dunkirk. I couldn't help but regard it as a contraption, a collection of intricate parts that suggests an impressive diorama... Dunkirk is, for better and for worse, an immediate experience—it encourages engagement but not reflection.

The sensory overload of "Dunkirk" is also an anti-intellectual barrage that effaces the actual differences that were overcome with difficulty in pursuing the war... "Dunkirk" seems, rather, like one of the self-censoring exhortations of wartime itself. Nolan's sense of memory and of history is as flattened-out and untroubled as his sense of psychology and of character.

Aside from some gorgeous shots of planes in flight, most of Dunkirk consists of spectacles of survival, and they pile up in dreary repetition. There are three emergency landings, two on sea and one on land... We get used to seeing members of the minimally delineated ensemble pull through. Hans Zimmer's score is a manipulative set of variations on crescendos that never crest, mimicking sirens, heartbeats, and ticking clocks.

Nolan's images come on coolly at first but soon begin to pile on with ferocity as hell breaks loose. Yet to make a film about such an event takes a streak of madness, of understanding of what it feel like to have the world drop out beneath your feet, and the capacity to revel in it. And if there's one thing certain about Nolan, it's that he doesn't have a mad bone in his body.

Any historical drama is necessarily a summary, and will approach a threshold at which distillation becomes dilution. Nolan doesn't seem too worried about this, and Dunkirk's eruptive brevity is almost refreshing. The war-movie milieu serves him well by easing the burden of exposition... Nolan here reduces the laborious explanatory dialogue that's long been a toxic byproduct of his ambition, concentrating freely on the structural mechanism, those ticking rhythmic units.

For Nolan, the central conceit is everything, and the film exists to justify it. Memento and Inception generally succeed because Nolan is a gifted enough filmmaker to craft a framework justifying his conceits. Dunkirk, like Interstellar before it, fails not because it errs too far in one direction, but because of the same fundamental flaw — Nolan is not a gifted enough filmmaker to justify these films' more demanding conceits.

This approach might sound chilly, but Dunkirk turns out to be one of the best things Nolan has ever done, a cerebral act of shock and awe that plays into all of his strengths as a filmmaker... It's a film that indicates the tide coming in by showing bodies washing on shore, and that finds its greatest moment of grace in a man coasting knowingly toward doom. It isn't a standard war movie, but it sure is some beautiful, difficult thing.