Contenders: The flop of Dunkirk and the beauty of Loving Vincent

Double Feature of Oscar contenders: First, Dunkirk. What a disappointment and what a waste. Give Christopher Nolan some credit for trying to break out of the Batman and the scifi mold and developing an original historical drama, a vivid account of the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, employing the aid of a fleet of volunteer private boats, ranging from fishing trawlers to pleasure yachts, that crossed the Channel to aid in the evacuation, but this movie is a serious mess: Extremely hard to follow the 3 plot strands such as they are, no development of character, little sense of the overall scope of the evacuation (which looks like it involves 3 airplanes and two boats!), terribly muddied dialog, so imprecise that we had to resort to closed-caption to decipher it. Much of the movie, intentionally I think, looks as if it was shot on a cell phone - which did give the evacuation (treated much better in Atonement, btw) a contemporary look, like coverage of a breaking news event today - but ultimately the film devolved into a few overproduced, over-scored scenes - flooding the hold of a ship, rescue of a sinking aircraft - and by the end I just had a bunch of question marks floating over my head. I felt I knew less about the historical event than before I started. Oscar? No chance. Second: Loving Vincent, an animated film (will probably win the Oscar this year) that "brings to life" many Van Gogh settings and characters from his landscapes and portraits. remarkable above all for the beautiful animation artwork done by they say 100 artists working in VG's style and from his templates. It's a pleasure to watch (and would have been more so in a theater). The narrative involves one of the portrait-characters, the Roland, the son of the postmaster of Arles whom VG painted often, who embarks on a quest ostensibly to deliver a letter from VG to his late brother's family but eventually into an examination of the report that VG died after shooting himself in the gut. There are no definitive answers, but the movie raises # of questions and points of doubt. As a plot, it wears a little thin - but the plot is just the line that leads us to the beautiful artwork and the imaginative evocation of Van Gogh's style, worth watching for that alone.