BLITZ

Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Blitz 2023
Location: SilverCity
Showtimes: 6:30 & 8:40 pm


Director: Steve McQueen
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clémentine
Running Time: 120 minutes
Language: English


Washington DC Area Film Critics Association Awards, Best Youth Performance: Elliott Hefferman. Middleburg Film Festival: Director Visionary Award: Steve McQueen; Critics Choice Awards Celebration of Cinema and Television: Director Award for Film. 21 other nominations. 


“…it works as a fine McQueen war drama that shows how the racially diverse Londoners endured the 1940 Nazi Blitz.” Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews 


Blitz is a powerful film about the German bombing of London in 1940. It’s told through the eyes of George, a 9-year-old boy. Young Elliott Heffernan does a remarkable job of carrying the emotional impact of many key sequences.


Even through the eyes of an innocent, writer-director Steve McQueen provides heightened realism in terms of the continuous numbing aerial attacks upon London. 


Hefferman is matched by Saoirse Ronan as Rita, who suddenly finds herself a single mother as her lover and the lad’s Grenadian father is deported. She has to raise her mixed-race son at a particularly tricky time. 


A factory worker like so many young women of that period, she has done the responsible thing and sent the youngster away from London but he stubbornly refuses to stay on the rescue train and jumps off at his first opportunity, determined to make his way home. His many and varied misadventures make up the rest of the narrative.


London citizens were renowned for their bravery, resilience and “stiff-upper-lip” attitude towards the Nazi onslaught. But McQueen inserts another reality reserved for those fellow citizens and neighbours who represent a different ethnicity.  Blitz exposes some of lesser known social and racial chasms found beneath the surface of stalwart unified resistance.


The movie is certain to pull at the heart strings as George resolutely attempts to be reunited with his mother and grandfather (Peter Weller).  


Also worthy of acknowledgement is Adam Stockhausen’s (“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”) production design which is impressive, brimming with gritty authenticity.