Christopher Nolan is a masterful cinematic craftsman who compulsively calls attention to his own striking craft. As opposed to Steven Spielberg, his most obvious ancestor, Nolan is largely disinterested in engulfing an audience so completely in the feelings of the piece that the gap between them and the screen magically disappears. Instead, the tense of intricacy of his art — even material as inherently escapist as a superhero movie —  demands close attention. The intellectual outweighs the visceral, even as Nolan ventures into tales that can’t help but stir base emotions. Dunkirk thrives on that teetering contradiction, depicting the events around the Dunkirk evacuation during World War II with a pummeling, frightful authenticity while simultaneously engaging in an ingenious puzzle box of fractured narrative timelines that illuminate the import of the historic moment. Dunkirk represents the first time in his career that Nolan has taken on a topic of genuine gravity. It is to his great credit that he fully honors that seriousness of his subject matter while retaining his clear, sharp voice. Coming from him, the film is both unexpected and — in its riveting particulars — a project only he could make. There is no better way for a filmmaker to move forward.