Movie review: By land, by sea and especially by air in ‘Dunkirk’

With a bare minimum of dialogue, and a brutal maximum of scenes depicting near-drowning situations in and around Dunkirk, France, in late May and early June 1940, Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” is a unique waterboarding of a film experience. Many will respond to it, primally, as a grueling dramatization of what the English call “the Dunkirk spirit,”…