Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

Tommy: Fionn Whitehead
Gibson: Aneurin Barnard
George: Barry Keoghan
Mr. Dawson: Mark Rylance
Peter: Tom Glynn-Carney
Farrier: Tom Hardy
Collins: Jack Lowden
Commander Bolton: Kenneth Branagh
Col. Winant: James D'Arcy
Shivering Soldier: Cillian Murphy
Alex: Harry Styles
Dutch Seaman: Jochum ten Haaf

Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay: Christopher Nolan
Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Production design: Nathan Crowley
Film editing: Lee Smith
Music: Hans Zimmer

I've said it before: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? I'm sure Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk was something to see in an IMAX theater, but truth to tell, I'm just as happy to have watched it in HD on my 32-inch Samsung. I don't mind losing the giddy spectacle of riding the waves or flying in pursuit of German fighter planes, so long as there's real artistry in the storytelling, the acting, and the production. I've liked Nolan's work with some reservations since I first encountered it in Memento (2000). I admired his ability to revivify the Batman story, but found the films in his trilogy a little wearying. I was kind of bowled over by the audacity of the concepts and their execution in Inception (2010), but Interstellar (2014) made me fear the worst: that he was so infatuated with cutting-edge film technology and with far-out science fiction speculations that he might never come back down to Earth. So Dunkirk was a relief to me: This is traditional war-movie filmmaking with a splendid contemporary spin, mostly in the way the story is told through cuts back and forth in time. This so-called "non-linear" narrative technique bothered some traditionalists, but I found it both illuminated the characters and suggested some of the tension and chaos of the actual Dunkirk evacuation. Best of all, Nolan forgoes CGI for the most part, using actual ships and planes or convincing models of them, giving the action a much-needed solidity. He also doesn't yield to the temptation to lard his film with star cameos, letting mostly unknown young actors carry the burden of the story. The stars who do appear -- Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy -- behave themselves, blending into the cast nicely. Hardy, for example, is capable of scene-stealing physicality, but he spends most of the film acting with only his eyes, the rest of his face covered by his pilot's breathing apparatus. (When he's liberated from that restriction at the end, I almost feared for the Germans who captured him.) Every genre movie has its clichés, of course, but a good writer and director -- Nolan is both -- knows how to work them, how to avoid stumbling over them and instead give them just enough weight to satisfy our expectations, as he does in the scene in which the returning soldiers, fearful that they'll be cursed and spat upon for losing the battle, are greeted at the train station with people cheering and handing them bottles of beer. He also handles the celebrated speech by Winston Churchill with finesse, never introducing Churchill as an on-screen character and having the speech itself read by the rescued men, as it should be. It's as stirring a moment as one could wish.

Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015)

It goes without saying that Steven Spielberg is one of the great directors, with a seldom-equaled skill at visual storytelling and at building tension and suspense. But Spielberg tries too hard to make a statement in Bridge of Spies -- something about defending the Constitution -- when it could have been simply an engaging film about Cold War tensions. It also suffers from the wrong kind of star power: Tom Hanks has devolved from a terrific actor, skilled at both comedy and drama, into the movies' iconic Good Guy. Casting him as the lawyer James Donovan, forced to defend a Soviet spy, deprives the film of any ambiguity about Donovan's defense of Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). Hanks's Donovan can simply wrap himself in the Constitution and we're with him all the way, even as public opinion of the time turns against him. As a film actor Hanks has lost his dark side, so we know that whoever he plays will triumph. Imagine Bridge of Spies with Donovan played by George Clooney or Bradley Cooper, stars with just a touch of shadow in their personae, and you can see what I mean. Fortunately, the film is otherwise well-cast, including Rylance's Oscar-winning turn as Abel, as well as Scott Shepherd's impatient CIA man and Sebastian Koch's duplicitous East German lawyer, and the screenplay by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen manages a good deal of suspense. (Sometimes at the expense of historical accuracy: Donovan was never shot at in his home, as the film has it.) The Coen brothers were brought in to work on the first draft of Charman's screenplay, specifically on the section in which Donovan finds himself negotiating separately with the Soviets and the East Germans to engineer an exchange of Abel for imprisoned U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and an American student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), who has been accidentally arrested in East Berlin. It's the best part of the movie, as Donovan wrangles not only with the conflicting egos and bureaucracies of the Soviet and East German officials but also with the CIA's insistence that only Powers need be included in the deal. Unfortunately, Spielberg doesn't know when his movie is over. Bridge of Spies should end with the exchange of spies at the bridge, but Spielberg keeps it running as Donovan boards the plane for home, returns to the arms of his family just as the news of his successful negotiation is breaking, gives his wife (Amy Ryan) the jar of marmalade he promised to bring her from London, witnesses her realization that he wasn't in London after all, and soon afterward rides to work on the bus where a woman who had previously frowned at him as a traitor now smiles at him as a hero after seeing his picture in the newspaper. All the while, Thomas Newman's score is telling us what we're supposed to feel. It's sheer sentimental anticlimax, of the sort that many critics decry in what are usually regarded as Spielberg's greatest films, Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Schindler's List (1993). (I happen to agree that the frame story of the aging Ryan's visit to the cemetery in Normandy is unnecessary, though I think the Yad Vashem sequence at the end of the latter film can be justified by the enormity of its subject matter.)  Bridge of Spies is by no means a bad movie, but it would have been a lot better if Spielberg hadn't given in to his instinct for overemphasis.