"Dunkirk" is the first Christopher Nolan movie since "Memento" that I've actually liked, mostly because he does the exact opposite of what he does in most of his movies. Rather than build a baffling, incoherent epic around a concept too ambitious to ever make sense as a movie, he crafts a spare, naked film about a very specific and compressed series of events, namely the military disaster that resulted in the messy evacuation of Allied forces from the beaches of Dunkirk in France.

The film is technically brilliant. Its stars are its editor, composer, and cinematographer, who work seamlessly together to maintain a throbbing pulse of dread throughout the entire film. There are some big stars in the movie -- like Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, and Tom Hardy -- but they mostly blend into the background of the faceless and nameless many who tried to find a way, any way, to get off the beach before the German forces arrived. Nolan can't resist getting up to some of his old tricks, like some mixed up chronology that makes things somewhat disorienting for the viewer at first. But they're used well and serve the story rather than overwhelming it.

I didn't much care for the heavy handed, schmaltzy passages that pepper the later part of the film and feel more like Steven Spielberg than anything that came before it. Indeed, the whole film does feel a bit like "Saving Private Ryan" in that it spends most of its running time creating a visceral, almost documentary-like recreation of events and then can't help throwing in some old- fashioned Hollywood sentiment as if the director feels he has to reward his audience with some feel- good pap to make up for putting us through the ordeal of everything that precedes it.

Overall I admired "Dunkirk" for its technical craft, but I was mostly left cold by it. It doesn't have any emotional core to it, the feel-good passages aside, which are more bombastic than emotional anyway. There are people to care about in the abstract, but no real characters. These men don't have inner lives, none that we're shown in any case, and that limits the impact of what happens to them. They're representations of men rather than the flesh and blood real thing.

Grade: A-