Dunkirk has arrived in cinemas with an almighty impact. The latest from one of the few auteurs who are at the peak of their directing prowess (sorry Spielberg, Scorsese, and Malick), it has arrived in the sludge of over-caffeinated, CGI-binging blockbusters as a beacon of what cinema can be. And it might just be Nolan's finest achievement to date.

Telling the story of the evacuation of 400,000 soldiers from France after the colossal early defeats of World War II, the plot is slim, part of paring Dunkirk to the essentials that makes it such an effective cinematic experience. The film is divided into three timelines; 'The Mole' which takes place over the course of a week, in and around the beaches of Dunkirk; 'The Sea', tracking one of the thousands of small boats instrumental in the rescue mission across the day it takes to travel to France; and 'The Air', following a trio of Spitfires over the course of an hour as they seek to halt the bombing of boats by German forces. Initially separate these timelines begin to catch up and intersperse, building to the merging that forms the film's climax.

As with previous Nolan films, the exploration of time here is fascinating. Each sequence has their own rhythm and tonal shifts, yet fits into the overarching film impressively. 'The Mole' has moments of unbearable tension and terror (the sound of the Luftwaffe attacking the beach is singularly one of the most frightening moments I've seen in cinema in recent years) but it is also punctuated by sequences of boredom, echoing the soldiers' frustration. 'The Sea's' tension builds as the final destination approaches; it is defined by a sense of duty, with the desperation of Dunkirk bleeding into the timeline to heartbreaking effect. And 'The Air' is focused and thrilling: the planes can only carry an hour's worth of fuel, and this limitation has an important impact. It is how the three stories merge together that develops the film's complexity beyond its initial premise and will be one of the avenues cinephiles will explore with this cinematic masterstroke.

Nolan's films have often been criticised as cold, lacking in emotional depth to match their technical scope. Dunkirk, aided by its cast, focuses unrelentingly on the individual to powerful effect. From the quiet solemnity of Mark Rylance, to the incredible eyebrow acting from Tom Hardy, the film's impact lies in the unspoken. Almost as a necessity caused by the loud IMAX cameras, the director favours the stripped back and, at times, the film resembles a silent movie. The horrors on screen do not require words, the action feels too devastating for them.

The closest a blockbuster has come in recent years to Dunkirk is another Tom Hardy film, the frenetic, kinetic Mad Max: Fury Road. Both retain an incredible momentum throughout: essentially long action sequences, punctuated by surreal moments of calm. And both are bravado pieces of cinema, working on a scale that the age of CGI can rarely seek to meet. There are 4,000 extras in Dunkirk, a staggering number when it would be far easier to reduce the number and pop in CGI blobs instead. But this is not how Nolan works.

The quality of Nolan's work (even in some of the more questionable sequences of Interstellar) is often demonstrated by the strength of talent behind the scenes. Hans Zimmer, as always, has produced a stellar score, that seeks to redefine what a score can do in the film; while the sound design here is incredible, and the entire sound department must be held aloft next February at the Oscars. Another outstanding contributor is cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, and Dunkirk is a staggeringly beautiful film, capturing cinematic moments with a truly epic scope.

It is difficult to say what Dunkirk's place will be in the canon of Nolan's work. In the immediacy of its release it seems his first masterpiece, a film that answers many of the criticisms levelled at the director. I will need to experience the film again, explore the nuances of it before I can decide where I place it amongst his work. I hold a candle for Inception, as it is a film that thrills and intrigues on each new visit. But Dunkirk is a remarkable achievement; a terrifying, haunting, unrelenting epic that is quite unlike anything I have seen in recent years.

Dunkirk (35mm screening)

What’s your idea of a war film? Blood and guts close-up, hours of relentless combat? Big name characters hogging the limelight? Action stories marching in linear progression? Then prepare to reset your expectations.

It seems to start predictably enough, with a few British soldiers running through the deserted town, silence punctuated with gunfire. We track a (very) young surviving soldier as he pounds down a street that leads to – the beach. And the scene is set. It opens wide and still in an extraordinary expanse of sand and sea, distant figures tiny against the vast stretch of silent shoreline. We too are brought up short – this will be a war film like no other.

Dunkirk. The 1940 defeat sublimated by Churchill’s ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ speech into the essence of island heroism. The evacuation of 338,00 of the defeated remnants of the British Expeditionary Force from France by thousands of ‘little boats’, because their shallow hulls meant they could approach close to shore where warships could not.

The film structures this story with 3 narratives: on shore (‘The mole’ – harbour breakwater), sea and air, each formally introduced with short titles. The tales are intercut from the outset: at first, these interlacings allow a more extended development of each story – the young soldier (Fionn Whitehead) on the Dunkirk beach desperate for a passage home, the amateur sailor (Mark Rylance) on the English coast readying his yacht and setting sail for France, the Spitfire pilot (Tom Hardy) in his cockpit. As the battle in Dunkirk progresses, and as the Spitfires and civilian flotilla head closer, the stories switch with increasing frequency until at moments of climax they interslice with real-time rapidity between sea and sky, air and water into a maelstrom of intermingled, tumultuous confusion. The pilot catches the briefest glimpse of an English merchant vessel below; we see his face change but hardly long enough to decode the emotion starting to pass across his face – or to know whether he had time to register it himself before responding to the next assault.

You are immersed in sensory experiences – you look up, up, up the towering side of a warship to the little figures above climbing the great stretch of rope-net to the deck and safety; you look up the immense smooth grey mountain-hull of a sinking ship to the men looking down the same immense distance in the moment they have to make the decision to leap. You are sucked into and beneath the sea, feel its unstoppable pull, semi-opaque underwater shots of legs and arms passing. In the cockpit, you are all but in the pilot’s seat and behind his goggles, processing and responding in real time.

A struck ship is an increasingly confused tangle of interior shots, slanting at bizarre angles, making implications rather than direct statements about what is happening. As a colossal warship out of control drifts closer to a giant harbour structure, the camera shows us the men in the water between them and the gap inexorably closing; when kerosene burns orange-red against an electric blue sea, we know what happens to everyone within its range: much of the film’s power comes from its spare approach – no self-indulgence here.

The soundtrack (Hans Zimmerman) intensifies and reinforces the visual experience. It throbs and pulses with marine motors/beating hearts, judders as the pilot uses all his force to control the plane in a dogfight. The aural dimension is integrated rather than overlaid, drawing us deeper into the experience. Later, as the boats approach England, the music opens into an Elgar-ian theme, releasing tension but also perhaps alerting us to the patriotic ambiguity of the end of the film and the ‘public myth’ that will be formed from their experience.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the fact that the film was shot in 65mm film (both normal and IMAX), but I certainly didn’t anticipate making comparisons with painting, bringing to mind Dutch seascapes, seaside Impressionists and Dutch genre painting. Nolan uses palette and perspective to intensify an experience, to imply the impact of tranches of narrative – as when we look back to Dunkirk harbour at nightfall and see dock fires at regular intervals, silhouetted like dark mini-volcanoes, or contrast the previous jolly blue sea and regular white-crested waves with the drained early morning palette as a group of soldiers stand at the water’s edge waiting for more bodies to be brought back with the tide. With the soldiers’ return train journey through the English countryside, the palette shifts to Janet-and-John tones of green, yellow and tan.

The train journey is one of various framing devices that put the intense, immediate experience of combat in context. Another comes from the other end of the hierarchy, where the stoic, pragmatic admiral (Kenneth Branagh) provides a strategic context in fragments of conversations with an army officer. Each of the 3 narratives encompasses a series of mini-dramas: the dynamics in the small group of soldiers (including One Direction’s Harry Styles) as the upturned fishing boat they are hiding under is first holed with shots, then starts to flood; the impact on the little boat’s crew as they pick up a downed airman who is appalled that they are heading for France. Nolan is a master of understatement. In the ‘Air’ narrative, tension gradually builds from the almost incidental moment when the pilot first chalks rough calculations on his instrument dials, the camera passing non-committally over rubbings-out and re-chalkings, their potential implications ratcheting up the tension in a further final solo climax as the story in the air continues while those at sea are heading for home in relative safety.

Film buffs will debate the analogue/digital question (The Phoenix has screenings of both); for the non-specialist, it wears its technical and logistical expertise lightly.

This is a multi-sensory film that compels engagement. If you want stunning immersion in combat, a stream-of-consciousness experience of the shore, sea and sky, where terror and brutality are intersliced with moments/vistas of stillness and beauty, then this is a film you cannot miss.