This film revolves around a single event: the evacuation of British and Allied troops from the beach at Dunkirk during WWII. It happens in a mashup of 3 time spans: a week on the beach, a day on the English Channel and an hour in the sky. This unique approach usually makes sense, but is rendered slightly confusing by the dialogue, which is often hard to decipher (the accents and the music mix). Still, director Christopher Nolan has crafted a masterpiece of epic cinema with a continually tense undertone. Several POVs provide the human angle, but it’s less about personal endurance and more about desperate survival. The action scenes are less explicitly violent than “Saving Private Ryan” or “Hacksaw Ridge,” but still manage to create cringeworthy moments. An enthralling approach to telling a war story.

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