May 312018
 
Dunkirk

Rating: ★★½☆☆
The portrayal of the evacuation of more than three hundred thousand British soldiers from Dunkirk, France across the Channel back to England, Dunkirk is a disappointment, despite an excellent start. Essentially forty minutes of story shown three times from different perspectives, the film’s main weakness is that it takes a script suitable for a television episode and transforms it into a movie by simply showing the same scenes over and over. Director Christopher Nolan had a vision of a waking nightmare, a mix of terror and confusion. Since he wrote the screenplay and directed the film, he succeeded in transferring his vision from his mind to the screen. As a work of art, that is an admirable achievement. As a portrayal of a key moment in WWII, it is less successful. Read More…

May 092013
 
Atonement

Rating: ★★½☆☆
At first glance, Atonement appears to be a compromise movie, which is primarily a tragic romance to attract women, but has a battle scene to satisfy their husbands and boyfriends. Unexpectedly, the earlier scenes of the romance between a young couple separated by the social divide in England before WWII are much more interesting and coherent than the scenes set during the Dunkirk Evacuation. Far more comfortable with sexual tension and class issues, director Joe Wright’s emphasis on stunning images rather than actually explaining how the British army was successfully evacuated from France at the beginning of WWII proves that he does not know how to direct a war film. Read More…