Metacritic-Rezensionen

McQueen’s film is big-picture British cinema, of a scale and depth which hasn’t been seen since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Both London and the countryside are shot with a classical elegance that calls to mind David Lean, while the sequences portraying the bombings themselves flare with panic and horror.

I’ve been to whole film festivals with less cinema than Steve McQueen packs into just two hours.

On the whole, there is an old-fashioned grandness to Blitz, charged by a cumulative sense of civic toughness and rebellious spirit that always spreads itself over a people, a city, or a country when they are collectively faced with unspeakable tragedies they have to endure.

With immersive action set pieces, heartfelt snippets of character-driven stories, and fantastic performances all around, Steve McQueen shows again his adept ability at bringing such enormous scope to deeply personal human stories.

An impressively cinematic drama that fully immerses viewers in a time and place but offers links to our divided present.

McQueen, who wrote and directed Blitz, has an effortless technique that whisks you along. Yet I can’t say that Blitz ever enters terrain that’s morally fascinating or dramatically complex.

Steve McQueen finds the key of C major for this well made and unashamedly old-fashioned wartime adventure, heartfelt and rousing and – yes – a bit trad overall, sometimes even channelling the spirit of Lionel Jeffries’s The Railway Children, although for me that’s no put-down.

The film is interesting and informative, but all those bomb blasts don't leave you as shaken as they should.

While there’s much to admire here . . . the drama too often lacks the subtlety that distinguishes the British writer-director’s work at its best. Two hours long, practically to the second, this feels like a project that’s been excessively trimmed, snipped and tapered to fit an arbitrary running time.

Oddly enough, in trying to capture a time that was wracked by scarcity, by the idea of make-do-and-mend, by the plucky spirit of the men and women under the might of the machines, Blitz just fires far too much heavy artillery.