Phantom Thread (ed. Dylan Tichenor) [87 points / 14 votes]
Second place:
Baby Driver (ed. Paul Machliss and Jonathan Amos) [91 points / 16 votes]
And the winner is...
Dunkirk (ed. Lee Smith) [156 points / 23 votes]
“In some ways Christopher Nolan's eccentricity is obscured by his success. It's why he got away with making a superhero film about liberal democracy's vulnerability to fascism and the complacency in the upper and lower classes in the implementation of same (in 2012!). It's why he got away with making a sci fi blockbuster about a team of criminals brainwashing someone, which built its emotional climax around memories we knew to be manufactured. It's why he made the most widely hyped hard sci fi film in decades and turned in a deeply humanist fable instead. And it's why the reception of Dunkirk has been surprisingly muted and why even the people defending it do so a bit sheepishly. Acknowledging that the movie is a bit old fashioned and square. After all, quasi Bressonian war films, fueled by existential fear which shred linear time to confetti while destroying actual World War 2 artifacts for verisimilitude are quite common aren't they?
“No. No they are not.
“The reason these daring ventures in form and theme aren't appreciated more widely is because Nolan doesn't draw attention to them. A weaker, showier director would have drawn pointed to the technique and their own cleverness in implementing at the cost of narrative immersion. Simply, and somewhat ironically given the gains the movie reaps from spatial confusion, Nolan values clarity above all else.
“The showy structure of Dunkirk works because its end is not its own cleverness but a fairly clear, even pat point. Time during war is subjective. A doomed week rushes by in an hour, an hour lasts a week. Lee Smith, Nolan's editor since Batman Begins, moves the conceit into the realm of instinctual. Perhaps used to handling stack timelines from Inception, which used an endlessly plunging van as a metronome and stacked five intersecting time streams on top of one another, never allowing the thread to be lost there either.
“Precision is not only necessary for Dunkirk's story but for its greatest moments of emotional effect. It is a film whose greatest strength is in its juxtapositions. Of lone heroism against masses of desperate men on a beach. On a faceless enemy versus frames crammed full of hopeless, fearful faces. Of the sea and sky. Of the monochrome beach and the breathtaking pastoral greens that the film opens up into in its final moments.
“Nolan is no mere proficient journeyman the way his detractors, and sometimes even his champions claim. He is a craftsman, a smuggler and here, a poet.” ~ Bryce Wilson
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