May 1940: over 300,000 Allied soldiers are stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk as the German army closes in. Told simultaneously from three perspectives — the desperate soldiers on the beach, a civilian sailor crossing the Channel with his son, and a Spitfire pilot battling overhead — the film strips war down to raw survival. Christopher Nolan constructs a relentless, near-wordless tension that makes the miracle of evacuation feel both impossible and inevitable.
