Christopher Nolan is widely regarded as one of the best directors of the 21st century (despite the lack of recognition he has recieved at the Academy Awards). He has produced classic films such as The Dark Knight, Memento, and Inception and has recieved tons of critical praise. He has set several high bars for filmmaking and it sounds as if he's done it again with his new World War II epic about the evacuation of Allied troops trapped in the French town of Dunkirk.
Dunkirk is getting praised from critics everywhere and is currently one of the highest rated movies of 2017 on not only Rotten Tomatoes but Metacritic which develops an average score based on all of the submitted reviews with scores. At the time of writing, the film sits at a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 97 on Metacritic making it the second highest rated movie of 2017 and the 12th highest rated of ALL TIME. Dunkirk is already in the running for a Best Picture nomination in the eyes of many critics, this is a film you won't want to miss out on. Below you can view some excerpts from a handful of reviews for Dunkirk.
IGN
Dunkirk doesn’t dwell on the horror of war but instead successfully conveys the sheer terror of it all through both small, human acts and deafening scenes of conflict. This isn’t a war story that leads to victory – that’s not what the story of Dunkirk is about – it was a retreat, an inglorious defeat. The war would continue for five more years. But through its miraculous events, Nolan and an outstanding cast of both young unknowns and veterans are able to depict not only the overwhelming, inhuman forces in play but the power of small acts of decency and bravery.
Empire
Christopher Nolan’s new film may be his The Longest Day, but it’s very close to being his shortest film. In fact, at a mere 106 minutes, Dunkirk is the first Nolan movie to dip beneath two hours since Insomnia, and is only undercut by his micro-budget 1998 debut Following. But discard any suspicions that may prompt about scaling down of ambition. Effectively one enormous, stunningly rendered and thunderously intense set-piece stretched to feature-length, Dunkirk thrusts you into a pressure cooker and slams the lid on. It doesn’t have anything like the gore of Saving Private Ryan, but that doesn’t lessen its power. In fact, there’s a very good reason it doesn’t have a more fulsome runtime: audiences would likely have staggered out with PTSD.
Entertainment Weekly
"This race-against-the-clock rescue operation (and the tense days leading up to it) is the subject of Christopher Nolan’s miraculous new massive-canvas epic, Dunkirk. Nolan has for all intents and purposes conjured the British response to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. If you can imagine that film’s kinetic, nerve-wracking 29-minute opening D-Day invasion stretched out to feature length, this is what it would look like. It’s a towering achievement, not just of the sort of drum-tight storytelling we’ve come to expect from the director of Memento, The Dark Knight, and Inception, but also of old-school, handmade filmmaking."
"By the end of Dunkirk, what stands out the most isn’t its inspirational message or everyday heroism. It’s the small indelible, unshakeable images that accumulate like the details in the corner of a mural. A PTSD soldier walking into the surf to his death. The sight of a hit German plane silently pinwheeling down into the sea like a paper airplane. The female nurses handing out tea and comforting words to the haunted men when they’re rescued. This is visceral, big-budget filmmaking that can be called Art. It’s also, hands down, the best motion picture of the year so far."
Rolling Stone
"From first frame to last, Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk is a monumental achievement, a World War II epic of staggering visual spectacle (see it in IMAX if you can) that hits you like a shot in the heart. Leave it to a filmmaking virtuoso at the peak of his powers to break both new ground and all the rules – who else would make a triumphant war film about a crushing Allied defeat? And who but Nolan, born in London to a British father and an American mother, would tackle WWII without America in it?"
"This is not a film about politics or the major figures of the era (a Churchill speech is heard, but only as read by a soldier on the ground). In fact, Nolan argues that he hasn't made a war film at all, but a story of survival. Point taken. But there's little doubt that he has, without sentimentality or sanctimony, raised that genre to the level of art. Dunkirk is a landmark with the resonant force of an enduring screen classic. The Oscar race for Best Picture is officially on."
Forbes
Dunkirk makes a case for the theatrical experience in an era when those still championing the multiplex must yell that much louder. It is a powerful meditation on mere survival in a war zone as a triumph, and about how we act during a time of seeming defeat providing the key to eventual victory. The picture ends on a note of measured optimism, acutely aware of both the past (it wasn’t always certain that the Allies would win the war) and the present (our current political madness). This is just remarkable, superbly-crafted major studio multiplex entertainment, and it damn well deserves to be seen on a big screen.
The Hollywood Reporter
Dunkirk is an impressionist masterpiece. These are not the first words you expect to see applied to a giant-budgeted summer entertainment made by one of the industry's most dependably commercial big-name directors. But this is a war film like few others, one that may employ a large and expensive canvas but that conveys the whole through isolated, brilliantly realized, often private moments more than via sheer spectacle, although that is here, too. Somber, grim and as resolute in its creative confidence as the British are in this ultimate historical narrative of having one's back to the wall, this is the film that Christopher Nolan earned the right to make thanks to his abundant contributions to Warner Bros. with his Dark Knight trilogy. He's made the most of it.
Uproxx
After you see Dunkirk, you will need something to calm yourself down. I made a joke that I needed a Quaalude, but I really don’t know much about Quaaludes other than what I learned while watching The Wolf of Wall Street. But Dunkirk isn’t quite like anything I’ve seen before. It’s certainly something to behold, even though there are times during the film that you forget to do things normal like breathe. It is, no kidding, a non-stop barrage of war imagery that will leave you physically exhausted after it ends.
Christopher Nolan isn’t here so a viewer can catch his or her breath during Dunkirk, or slow down for any kind of character development. His sole motivation seems to be to put you into the World War II evacuation of Dunkirk – or at least as close as humanly possible via film. When bullets are fired (oh, this happens a lot) the sound is ear piercing. When a fighter plane cranks up its engine to do an evasive maneuver, it’s like that engine is right underneath your seat. (I should mention I saw Dunkirk in 70mm IMAX, which doesn’t so much submerse a person into the experience as much as it commands you to pay attention. I think it almost tricks a person into believing his or her life might be in danger.)
The Guardian
"Nolan’s Dunkirk has that kind of blazing big-screen certainty that I last saw in James Cameron’s Titanic or Paul Greengrass’s United 93. It is very different to his previous feature, the bafflingly overhyped sci-fi convolution Interstellar. This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified with defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen."
"In military terms, Dunkirk is almost entirely static for most of its running time: the battle is over before the film has begun, and there is no narrative context of the sort offered in Leslie Norman’s version. Nolan surrounds his audience with chaos and horror from the outset, and amazing images and dazzlingly accomplished set pieces on a huge 70mm screen, particularly the pontoon crammed with soldiers extending into the churning sea, exposed to enemy aircraft. It is an architectural expression of doomed homeward yearning. There is a tremendous image when some of the soldiers do manage to scramble aboard a destroyer, and are welcomed with tea and that now vanished treat, bread-and-jam, and so tiny rectangles of red surreally speckle the grey-and-khaki picture. It is also persuasively horrible when soldiers wait by the surf’s edge, which has become a lapping scummy froth, as if these are the survivors of some horrible natural disaster."
Dunkirk hits theaters on July 21st, 2017, select theaters will be showing it in 70 MM IMAX which is Christopher Nolan's ideal way of seeing the movie. Click here to see if there are any cities near you playing the film in 70 MM IMAX.
