Parents' Guide to Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan's first history movie is bold, visceral, and powerful, with many moving sequences -- though some of his filmmaking choices can be challenging. As with some of Nolan's other movies (especially his great Memento), Dunkirk experiments with time. The story's three sections are told at different rates; the beach sequences take place over one week, the boat sequence takes one day, and the plane sequences take one hour. But unlike in Memento, here, this technique lacks clarity, mainly because Nolan doesn't visually distinguish between many of the aircrafts or ships, nor does he make it easy to tell many of the young soldiers apart.

Dunkirk wants us to follow two of the soldiers in particular, but that becomes increasingly difficult, especially as they get covered in dirt and grime. Many characters also have thick English accents (to a U.S. ear, anyway), and the sound mixing and Hans Zimmer's heavy score often drown out the dialogue. All this can make the movie tricky to follow, especially if you don't have the option of subtitles. Sometimes it seems that Nolan is deliberately trying to strip his story of traditional character arcs and dialogue, perhaps to find its essence. This doesn't always work, but Dunkirk is such an immediate horrors-of-war experience, throwing the viewer so vividly into the picture, that it's difficult to dismiss.