Blitz

At times this film is up there with Dunkirk or Utøya: July 22 in terms of using tension and suspense to recreate historical horrors. But the slip-ups are distracting. The song and dance sequences make it seem like Germany's biggest crime was performing a sneak attack on musical London. The flashbacks to the mother & son's life before the war aren't needed. And like in Widows, McQueen isn't the best at introducing racial politics into a genre story. Still, marginal recommendation.

Some good parts but a lot I couldn't keep my attention on. Some places were appropriately jarring.

This is a very generic mainstream WW2 film for a generic mainstream audience...and this is where it feels subversive and well worth making (compared with the humongous and mostly pointless back catalogue of WW2 films). Having something to watch with your racist uncle that has a touching 'Proud to be British' Richard-III-esque speech delivered by a Nigerian Air Raid Warden (based on the real life story of Ita Ekpenyon), now we're talkin'!

Unwatchably bland and poorly acted, coud not get through it

Some incredibly immersize production design. Real suspense and fear for the boy. I heard a critic suggest afterwards that some bits might have been left in due to Apple. This would make sense as there some odd moral bits. Some of the most realistic depictions of wartime London it felt like but also some cliched homilies. A little bit more editing could really tighten this up and make this good

A beautifully crafted, cinematic and balanced story of the British people during the blitz.

Disappointingly conventional and strangely lackadaisical from McQueen. I appreciate him trying to extend that familiar "we're in this together" WWII camaraderie narrative to underrepresented groups but with that comes a schmaltziness that doesn't really come naturally to him. It largely lacks the rich texture and characterization his previous work has, and the performances aren't particularly good either. Not much more than a tepid awards play, I'm sad to admit.

I wish more down-the-middle historical programmers were as thoughtful and beautifully crafted as this one. The ending is fascinatingly underplayed in a way that I found unexpectedly haunting and in-keeping with this film’s largely reserved sense of sentimentality as well as its scope of inequity and national grief. This is just one story inside a bigger chapter of our past. When the movie ends, that bigger story isn’t over. It may still not be over now.