The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
9. 2017 - Dunkirk
Honourable Mentions: Get Out, Personal Shopper, Phantom Thread
Christopher Nolan is Hollywood's mainstream auteur, a filmmaker who cut his teeth on Batman's pointy ears and has since leveraged that acclaim and popularity to repeat success in other genres. The British director's non-Batman works were noted for their dense approach to science fiction (The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet), but arguably his best films have a different thing in common: they're rooted in history instead.
2023's Oscar-homerun biopic Oppenheimer is, weighted by sheer awards success alone, Nolan's most successful film. But years before he told the story of the Manhattan Project and the new world it unleashed, he delved deep into a different part of World War II, and the results were, in retrospect, even more compelling.
2017's Dunkirk feels like it's secretly Nolan's finest film. Not because it underperformed compared to the director's other works (it performed very well), but because it fits into an easily definable canon of war cinema and, by convention, is less intricate or heady than his typically high-concept productions.
It is that very simplicity, however, that enables Nolan's gifts to shine more brightly here - his eye for detail, technical authenticity and realism, and the ratcheting up of tempo and suspense are all on display in Dunkirk, which is much more a mood piece that seeks to capture a desperate hour than a dialogue-laden drama invested in the context of the event itself. The end result is his most gripping work as a director yet, and surefire proof of the old idiom that less can sometimes be more.