Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk opened in 2017 and won three Academy Awards including Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. The film became Nolan's first major-prize technical-Oscar success and consolidated his post-Inception, post-Interstellar reputation as the most commercially confident auteur director working in Hollywood. The film was shot largely on 65mm IMAX with practical effects, including real Spitfires and real period vessels, in a continuing Nolan commitment to physical-set production.

May 1940. Approximately 400,000 Allied soldiers are stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk as the Wehrmacht closes in. The film tells the story across three intercut timelines and three vantage points, a week on the beach (Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard, Harry Styles in his acting debut), a day at sea aboard a small civilian boat sailing from England with a teenage crew (Mark Rylance, Tom Glynn-Carney, Barry Keoghan), and an hour in the air with three Spitfire pilots (Tom Hardy, Jack Lowden, Michael Caine in voice-over). Kenneth Branagh, as the Royal Navy commander on the mole, anchors the beach perspective.

Hoyte van Hoytema's photography on 65mm IMAX produced one of the most spectacular wartime image-registers in 21st-century cinema; Hans Zimmer's score, structured around a continuous tick-tock motif, sustained the film's tension across its 106-minute runtime. The film's structural conceit (three different time-scales running in parallel) is one of the more controlled Nolan-temporal experiments, less reliant on the dialogue-explanation that Tenet would later require.