Blitz (dir. Steve McQueen, 2024)
Very rarely these days does a film make every right visual decision for two solid hours, but Steve McQueen’s Blitz , which focuses on the WWII air raids on London in 1940, does precisely that. As the feats of technical innovation and virtuosity throughout Blitz amply prove, McQueen is one of the finest mainstream filmmakers since Spielberg. Saoirse Ronan, radiant as ever, stars as the mother of a young boy named George (played by the truly fantastic Elliott Heffernan), whom she puts on a train to travel to a new school out in the countryside under much duress, as a way of attempting to protect him from the bombs falling all over their city. George has grown up there with her and her father (Paul Weller, in his first feature film role) and is quite reluctant to leave. So he jumps off of the train a short distance into the journey, in order to find his way back to his mother in London, traversing the c...