Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk is breathtaking. It's a remarkable, immerse cinematic achievement in any number of ways - a white-knuckle war drama with a psychological component that's straightforward in the moment and startlingly complex in hindsight.

It's also a beautifully constructed and finely calibrated work of storytelling engineering that packs a powerful emotional wallop. In a career that has seen the writer-director of intelligent, provocative large-scale entertainments like Inception and the Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan may have delivered his finest work to date with Dunkirk.

The evacuation of hundreds of thousands of British troops from the Dunkirk beach in France, only a handful of miles across the water from home, has become part of WWII legend. Therefore, one could naturally expect a dramatisation of the event to focus solely on its more heroic aspects, especially given that scores of civilians formed a flotilla to help ferry the soldiers - under constant fire from the enemy - out of harm's way.

The film certainly does that, and there are depictions of courage, both great and small, that are among the most moving and affecting an audience may see on the big screen this year. But Nolan is equally interested in the many and varied traits of human nature that emerge under fire - the flaws and virtues that arise in desperate, dangerous times.

He rarely overplays these scenes and sequences, so the moments of bravery, struggle and sacrifice are all the more powerful when they do occur. But the cumulative effect of everything he presents lingers long after Dunkirk comes to a conclusion. His skills as a storytelling technician come to the fore as well, with three separate but intertwined strands, all taking place over different time spans, making up the whole.

It may seem unnecessarily tricky and show-offish to begin with, but the week endured by young soldiers on the Dunkirk beach, the day spent by a civilian sailor and his young colleagues travelling across the water on a rescue mission and the hour a fighter pilot spends in the air taking on enemy aircraft are all vivid depictions of the call to protect and defend and the desire to stay alive.

The cast is a mix of new faces and established names (oh, and One Direction singer Harry Styles, acquitting himself well), and there's not a single weak link in the chain, with Oscar-winner Mark Rylance (as the sailor) and Tom Hardy (as the pilot) giving outstanding portrayals of understated, stiff-upper-lip courage and certainty.