Christopher Nolan · 2017 · survival

Christopher Nolan's 2017 film of the 1940 evacuation, told in three interlocking timeframes - a week on the mole, a day at sea, an hour in the air. Four hundred thousand men are pinned on a French beach with the Channel in front of them and the enemy closing behind, and the rescue comes in the shape of a fleet of small civilian boats.

1. 1
   Dunkirk

   On the mole and the open beach at Dunkirk, hundreds of thousands of soldiers queue in the sand with nothing to do but wait, while the ships that come for them are bombed and torpedoed one after another in the shallows.

2. 2
   The Channel

   Out on the Channel, a civilian pleasure boat crosses under her own owner rather than be requisitioned, picking survivors out of the water - while overhead a handful of Spitfires fly the last of their fuel in defence of the beaches.

3. 3
   Weymouth

   The little ships bring them home to the English coast, where men who expected to be spat at are handed blankets and beer through the carriage windows - a deliverance, as the newspaper puts it, and not a victory.