Nolan returns to form

Rating: 9/10 (19 July 2017)

Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk is brutal but surprisingly bloodless - the most blood on screen is probably when a character has an accidental fall in the stairs. It is also a total return to form for a director whose previous two outings were meandering, bloated messes.
The movie follows three groups of people and their different timelines that are of uneven length. This causes some momentary confusion when things cut back and forth too often. But I guess this is not anything that a second viewing wouldn't fix.
We get almost no background for the characters. Many don't even have a name and are limited to few lines of dialog. They are kept on screen for a time and then they are gone. Their stories start from random positions in their lives. Some go on living, some die useless, some die useful deaths. This may distance some of the audience from their fates to the degree that they become meaningless, but it certainly works better for Nolan than his sappy attempt to make sense of human emotions in Interstellar. Melodrama is not Nolan's thing. Tom Hardy gets to wear a mask for almost all of his screen time, just as in Nolan's last Batman.
Zimmer's score is present literally throughout the movie. Thankfully he keeps himself perfectly in line with what is unfolding on the screen. The score still rings in your ears for a long time afterwards.