‘Dunkirk’ is Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece

The battle of Dunkirk was not a victory, but a successful evacuation, and Nolan doesn’t try to give it the contours of a conventional tale of triumph. When France fell to Hitler in 1940, it left 400,000 Allied soldiers, most of them British — basically the entire British Army — stranded on the beach, needing transport across the English Channel. To convey a sense of that day, Nolan stays focused, on a handful of soldiers, sailors, RAF pilots and civilian volunteers, all struggling to do their part and go home. If we know the history, we know that almost 340,000 were successively evacuated and lived to fight another day — and for years thereafter — and that Hitler missed his best and only chance to win World War II in a single blow. “Dunkirk” begins, as great films often will, with a scene of wonder and awe that lets us know, virtually from the first frame, that the filmmaker has his teeth into something big. [...] a soldier picks one up and we see that it’s leaflet that has been dropped from an enemy airplane, telling the Allies that they’re surrounded, that it’s hopeless, and that they should surrender. Rather, it depicts a hiatus from personality, an ordeal in which life, under assault, is reduced to the basics. Rather, he enlists us in the war ourselves, so that we jump out of our skins when snipers shoot holes in a boat that we feel that we’re on. [...] we react in terror when the ocean blazes with an oil fire, as men, underwater, hold their breath and try to find a safe spot to resurface.