* There's a free outdoor screening of Dunkirk tomorrow night at Silo Park so we thought we'd revisit our review of Christopher Nolan's award-winning World War II epic. The movie starts at 9pm, but DJs, food trucks and the Silo bar start the fun at 4:30pm.
Christopher Nolan
affirms his status as contemporary cinema's boldest blockbuster director with this intensely immersive and relentlessly stirring chronicle of the famous World War II evacuation.
Previously glimpsed during a bravura one-shot sequence in the 2007 film Atonement, the Dunkirk evacuation is an iconic World War II moment that has remained relatively under-explored in cinema. Until now.
In what history revealed to be a major turning point in the war, 400,000 allied soldiers found themselves stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk, France in June 1940. Without nearly enough military transport to reach safe shores just across the English channel, a flotilla of hundreds of civilian boats was engaged to bring the lads home.
Although Nolan's film is spread upon an impossibly huge canvas, it maintains a firm and confident focus on its own humanity. The gargantuan scale of the events is effectively conveyed via three very human perspectives. The action on the beach, on the sea and in the sky is all driven by character first, a remarkable achievement considering the epic magnitude of what is happening around these characters.
