Dunkirk

The part on the sea is “The Sea.” The part in the air is “The Air.” So why’s the part on the beach “The Mole”? Here’s the answer.

With Dunkirk hitting theaters this weekend, you’re probably well-aware that a certain mega-famous pop star has a role in Christopher Nolan’s World War II drama. Those unfamiliar have likely wondered, “Who the hell is this Harry Styles person?” But casting the former member of wildly popular British boy band One Direction (there it is) has the potential to attract a different sort of army: Thousands of Harry Styles fans who may not have been interested in seeing a war movie from the guy who made those Batman films. Sounds sensible enough, and yet if your familiarity — like mine — with Harry Styles begins and ends with a vague awareness obtained from Twitter, you might have trouble spotting him in Dunkirk.

The director of ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘Dunkirk’ says he wants his movies to play in a theater before they show up on streaming.

The director of ‘Inception’ and ‘The Dark Knight’ takes you to World War II for a terrifying story of survival.

Dunkirk is a big movie for a lot of reasons: it’s Christopher Nolan’s first war epic, it’s told from multiple perspectives featuring all of America’s favorites from across the pond, and it’s the feature film debut of one of the biggest pop stars working today. Harry Styles being in Dunkirk no doubt influenced a lot of the buzz that swirled around this movie early on, and, hey, maybe it’ll get today’s teen girls into Nolan movies. But, apparently Nolan himself had no idea how famous Styles was before he cast him in the movie.

If you’re going to see Dunkirk in a few weeks, I hope it’s for Christopher Nolan’s taut visceral direction and not to hear Tom Hardy say a lot of stuff.

See what the first wave of critics have to say about Christopher Nolan’s newest blockbuster.

Hans Zimmer has become kind of the rockstar of movie soundtracks (I mean, he did literally play a set at Coachella this year). Zimmer’s been scoring Christopher Nolan’s movies ever since Batman Begins, so it’s no surprise that he’s back for Nolan’s World War II thriller Dunkirk, and man, is he back. WaterTower Music just released the fourth track off the score, titled “Supermarine,” and it’s intense.

Are Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino rivals? The answer is “no,” and yet that’s still how I prefer to imagine them, and what’s more, it helps makes sense out of a recent news item. In 2015, Tarantino mounted his Hateful Eight “70mm road show” to great fanfare (much of it self-generated), offering audiences around the country an opportunity to see his Western thriller in all its splendor and glory. It was a massive undertaking: corralling the necessary equipment, shipping it to the participating theaters, installation costs, training multiplex projectionists unfamiliar with the 70mm format, the whole deal. And in what I can only assume is a diss aimed directly at Q.T., Nolan has now announced a 70mm engagement for Dunkirk dwarfing anything attempted in recent memory.

Christopher Nolan doesn’t do small movies — if he’s going to mount a war picture, you can bet it’s gonna be one of the biggest (and priciest!) to date. He’s seemingly spared no expense for his new film Dunkirk, reportedly corralling thousands of extras, destroying vintage planes, and dominating the land, sea, and air all for a grand new vision of combat. And in order to fully convey the enormity of his ambitions, Nolan went all-in and mounted his production on 70 millimeter film. For laymen, that means he used a larger film strip while shooting to capture more brilliant colors, richer sound, and a greater sharpness of detail. For those who don’t give a hoot, it means this film will rattle your bones.