How Dunkirk brings new horrors to the war movie

You are never safe in Christopher Nolan's extraordinary new film

Tommy in Dunkirk.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

Most war films use the facts of history to weave a rich and moving tapestry of lost causes and heroic gestures that end up being — in some hopeful, narrative sense — "worth it." You will feel the chaos and lost hope — you'll wonder, with your protagonist, what some poor young person's sacrifice was really for — but there tends to be a poignant answer. The story of the world will go on, and it's that much more poetic for those lost and broken threads.

Dunkirk is a hollowed-out version of this kind of film.

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Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.