What is the Dunkirk spirit? It has been so thoroughly internalised by the national psyche that, 77 years on, it’s as much a brand, a meme or a slogan as the product of a historical fact: that at the start of World War Two 330,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, cornered on a French beach, strafed and bombed by the Luftwaffe, were ferried to safety by a plucky flotilla of pleasure barques and rickety fishing boats. Triumph snatched from the jaws of unimaginable catastrophe.

How do you capture that spirit on film? People keep trying. ITV made a three-part docudrama in 2004. It is the central event in the film version of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Earlier this year there was The Nancy Starling, the film-within-a-film that lovingly spoofed the stiff-upper-lipped wartime propaganda in Their Finest. The Nancy Starling was a boat captained by a nuggetty old seadog played by Bill Nighy. Mark Rylance, at the wheel of the Moonstone, plays virtually the same character in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk: the embodiment, in a suit and neat tie, of an English refusal to buckle in the face of the grimmest odds. “There’s no hiding from this, son,” says Mr Dawson in a loamy Dorset burr when urged to turn back from danger. “We’ve got a job to do.”Nolan’s Dunkirk is an epic vignette, a story that starts after the beginning and finishes before the end. Fionn Whitehead’s pretty young Tommy (pictured below) escapes from pounding rifle fire in sandbagged Dunkirk and makes it onto the beach where thousands form lines to get back home. In comes a German bomber dropping a petrifying column of bombs which detonate like skimmed stones, spitting up huge booming fountains of sand. The queues disperse, only to reform in a reassuringly British way: we’ll face Armageddon in an orderly fashion, thank you very much.

Tommy isn’t a queuer. His desperation to get off the beach finds him collaring another soldier, grabbing a casualty on a stretcher and barging through crowds of men onto the Mole, the jetty jutting out into the tide to receive naval vessels. Tommy faces drowning any number of times in the course of his homeward odyssey. As ships list, buckle, snap in two - or in the case of one boat which slowly sinks in the rising tide as bullet holes pepper the hull - Nolan recreates underwater hells with knuckle-gnawing realism.Meanwhile up in the skies Tom Hardy (pictured below) and Jack Lowden play an imperturbable pair of Spitfire aces who dogfight their way to the rescue. These airborne sequences are the film’s most beautiful and thrilling: the pilot’s eye view of tipsily swaying wings, Messerschmitts in the rear mirror, the blue briny main below and a black plume of smoke rising from the French coast. One of the boats the pilots can see down below is the Moonstone, crewed by Mr Dawson's son (Tom Glynn-Carney) and a young boy (Barry Keoghan) who might have walked out of the script of The Nancy Starling. They soon encounter the hull of an upturned ship, recently torpedoed by a U-boat, atop which Cillian Murphy sits like a shellshocked Robinson Crusoe.

As Nolan’s script commutes between land, sea and air, it takes the shape of a jagged triptych, a trinity of storylines seeking the oneness of redemption. The three elements do in the end coalesce, but not without some jarring continuity jumps as the scene darts hither and thither, including between night in Dunkirk and day over the seas.Anyone hoping to be guided through all this morass of detonations and drownings by the handrail of dialogue, the nuance and shade of human drama, will have to go whistle. Dunkirk is not about characters but character. While the young cast of mostly unknowns are hurled about like swimming skittles, Nolan has shrewdly cast venerated older actors to embody a single signature attitude. And his stars deliver, even when he overuses the oldest trick in the storytelling playbook, closing in on the faces of Rylance or Kenneth Branagh (pictured below) as a naval commander as their eyes take in coming danger. When Branagh slowly blinks at the diving approach of a Heinkel, it sums up the film’s thespian rule of thumb: the eyes have it.

Much of what people say to one another (including Harry Stiles, who looks the part as a soldier in short back and sides) is drowned out by the clang of Hans Zimmer’s unrelenting soundtrack, a fusillade of yearning strings and kinetic thrums like the growl of an implacable engine. He deploys Elgar’s Nimrod early on, its plangent strains slowed down to a half-recognisable quarter time, and returns to it like a Wagnerian motif. Its most shameless appearance comes when Branagh spots Blighty’s pygmy trawlers through his binoculars, chugging to the rescue out of the sea mist. Nimrod swells, and the triggered heart obediently follows.This is old-fashioned filming on the grandest scale, and yet - mercifully light on SFX - it cannot encapsulate the vastness of the evacuation. There are hardly any ships and boats on screen, the Luftwaffe mainly stay away, and the 330,000 must be taken on trust. As for Tommy, the last time a leading man said quite so little was in The Artist. Only at the end does Fionn Whitehead have an outbreak of speechifying when on a train back from the coast he reads out the newspaper report quoting Churchill’s speech to the house: “we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be”.

As those hoary words, the oratorical coeval of Elgar, bloom freshly in the voice of hopeful youth, it is worth asking the big question about the timing of Dunkirk. Why this particular nostalgic story now? Why in 2017 revisit a modern national myth about the heroic retreat from continental Europe to the safety of our island redoubt, in which shambolic Brits wing it with blind pluck and keep-calm derring-do? One image in particular seems overtly to allude to the UK on the cusp of another darkest hour: the undercarriage of Hardy’s Spitfire creaking sclerotically into position so that this most British of icons can make a safe landing. There is every danger that Nolan's undeniably rousing homage may fall into the wrong hands.

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@JasperRees

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Dunkirk

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“The subject is neither political nor religious; it is fantastical” wrote Verdi to the librettist Piave about his opera Macbeth. “The opera is not about the rise of a modern fascist: nor is it about political tyranny. It is a study in character” adds director Elijah Moshinsky in the programme for this opening production of the 2017 Buxton International Festival.

An enormous amount rides on a musical's opening number. Without explicitly expressing it, a good opener sets tone, mood and style. Take The Lion King, where "Circle of Life" so thrillingly unites music, design and direction that nothing that follows equals it. "Spring", the opener of The Wind in the Willows, repeatedly announces the warmth of the season, and precious little else. Animals dance perkily, but with nothing to dance about, the flatly staged song goes nowhere.

Perfect comedies for the country-house opera scene? Mozart's Figaro and Così, Strauss's Ariadne - and Britten's Albert Herring, now 70 years and a few days old, but as ageless as the rest. With the passing of time it's ever more obvious that this satire of provincial East Anglian tricks and manners also has universal appeal and stands with the best.

Tears were likely to flow freely on this most beautiful and terrible of June evenings, especially given a programme – dedicated by Vladimir Ashkenazy to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire – already prone to the elegiac. It could hardly be otherwise with the music of Elgar and Sibelius, two Europeans with a penchant for introspection whose works Ashkenazy knows well.

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You have to hand it to Felicity Kendal: this ever-game actress is fearless about treading in the footsteps of the British theatre's grandes dames. In 2006, she starred on the West End quite creditably in Amy's View, inheriting a part originated on both sides of the Atlantic by Judi Dench.

Guy Ritchie is back birthing turkeys. Who can remember/forget that triptych of stiffs Swept Away, Revolver and RocknRolla? Now, having redemptively bashed his CV back into shape with the assistance of Sherlock Holmes, the mockney rebel turns to another of England’s heritage icons in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

Do, however, dump that fantasy of yours of a triumphant return to the multiplex for medieval chivalry and courtly romance. Messrs Malory, Tennyson and dear old Lancelyn-Green can start rotating in their tombs now because King Arthur is basically Lock, Stock and One Stonking Sword, in which Ritchie filters national myth through the only aesthetic he knows: the stop-start gor-blimey rock video in which everyone channels their inner Winstone.We begin at max. vol. in Camelot, a bristling castle deep in the digitised heart of soundstageland where Uther Pendragon (Eric Bana) is ousted by his black-hearted sibling Vortigern (Jude Law), but not before sending his infant son off to float in a boat down-river to Londinium, where absolutely no one speaks Latin. Here the boy is adopted by a brothel, studies at the school of knocks and knockers before eventually growing up to assume the guise of Charlie Hunnam.

Who, you may perhaps wonder, the hell is Charlie Hunnam? And where’s Elba, McAvoy or, sod it, Hiddleston when you want a screen hero to beg a selfie with at the prem? “Get me Hunnam” were not the words uttered by whoever was in charge at Warner Bros when the casting merry-go-round started six years ago. But on the first day of production he was the last man still in the vertical and to his credit he certainly looks the part. Whenever he takes off his car coat, that torso is a rubbly cluster of chamfered boulders scarcely contained within a plucked Tinseltown dermis. It’s only when he opens his mouth to declaim the script’s deathless poetry that you think, maybe don’t.

To be fair, that goes for everyone else in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Arfur falls in with a lairy cohort on secondment from the Two Smoking Barrels visitor experience. They're lads called Arthurian things like Goosefat Bill, Wet Stick, Mischief John. You can randomly generate these idiot names. Bob Cobblers, Perry Pliars, Def Geoffrey, Burkina Fatso, Sid Skidmark, Kung Fu Trev, “The Jizza”, Handjob Hannan, Strong and Stable Nige, David Beckham (yes he’s actually in it, pictured: Vinnie Jones can sleep easy).

Meanwhile back at CGIamelot, whither Arfur must journey to draw a sword from a stone and thusly provoke avuncular wrath, Jude Law is holding the fort with just two scowling sidekicks and a thousand-strong army of pixellated stickmen (pictured above). The problem with Jude, whose task is to commit nephewcide so he can assume the powers of Excalibur, is that he’s just not dastardly enough, however much he does that wicked thing with his neck or slumps bolshily in his throne or knifes his loved ones, therein depleting the screen of its last but one speaking female. The only woman who gets to say much at all is called The Mage, which feels like a covert misspelling of Madge to whom Ritchie was once espoused. The Mage (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, pictured below) has lighty-uppy eyes and telekinetic control over various fauna which make sundry plot interventions when the script can’t think how else to get Arfur and co out of yet another slap (and tickle: pickle).

Action comedy is the trickiest of hybrids. Ritchie goes at it with a unfit-for-purpose toolkit of mallets, ping-pong bats and one phallusy broadsword. When the script’s not being clever-clever or funny-funny it’s being stupid-stupid. Enormo-pachyderms, one jumbo basilisk and a three-headed lady octopus all continue cinema’s galloping mania for gigantism (see also Kong: Skull Island and Jurassic World). The plot, meanwhile, is a botched origami.

The industry press is full of theories about the film’s calamitous opening weekend. One factor no one’s mentioned is Brexit. “You are addressing England!” Hunnam intones to a top-knotted delegation of Vikings at the end. Never mind that the best bits are filmed among rocky Celtic outcrops, the rest of the world isn’t that impressed by England these days, and maybe wants no truck with its self-vaunting myths, whether rebooted, mashed up or slapped inside sniggersome inverted commas. Ritchie’s Arthurian ledge has stripped itself of all context. Even the king's famous furniture is subjected to his belittling gift for bathos. “Wossat?” says one of the rainbow nation of newly ennobled knights in a final reveal. “It’s a table,” says Arfur. “You sit at it.” This will be the only sitting.

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@JasperRees

Overleaf: it's approximately this bad