Dunkirk

Tom Hardy is one of Hollywood’s last old-fashioned movie stars — a big, magnetic leading man of the school of Marlon Brando and Orson Welles. He’s a performer of incredible subtlety and teeth-gnashing intensity in the same breath, drawing pools of weary wisdom from his big, soulful eyes one minute before screaming in a goofy accent in the next. Hardy has the capacity to be both menacing and sweet, pained and predatory; despite the go-for-broke marquee madness that usually follows him, one often misses that Hardy’s bluster goes hand in hand with a wounded vulnerability. Of course, like Nicolas Cage before him, Hardy (at least in his perception to the general public) is more meme than man, the finely-tuned layers of his performances hidden behind layers of prosthetics or that ever-present ma...