Blitz

Blitz feels like the natural outcome of Steve McQueen’s recent work. The writer-director’s five-film Small Axe series from 2020 about the Black experience in Britain and his four-hour documentary Occupied City (2023) about Amsterdam under Nazi rule feed into this account of London during the Blitzkrieg of 1940. The sweeping World War II drama also shares more than a few notes with Steven Spielberg’s 1987 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. Both follow a child separated from his parents through a harrowing and decidedly Dickensian wartime experience, narrowly surviving death while witnessing the most generous and darkest aspects of humanity in a series of episodic encounters. All the while, McQueen portrays an authentic, racially diverse London, not the whitewashed version that has been typical in so many war films about this era. He acknowledges that, despite other films portraying the Blitz as a time when London came together, bigotry remains even in the harshest of times. It’s a timely message, and it’s contained within an accomplished, if somewhat narratively slight film.

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