Blitz

Steve McQueen's Blitz is an unfortunate vehicle for Saoirse Ronan and not the star from which she might wish to shine. You may remember her multi-dimensional performance in Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird (2017). She no doubt fared better as a gifted high school student in Sacramento rather than a single mother of a mixed-race child in war-time London. J. G. Ballard's imagination has a monopoly on portrayals of children in deserted or destroyed cities--somethiing which Steven Spielberg exploited elegantly in Empire of the Sun (1987). Here it's a gigantic mess. It's sad not only to turn a talented actress into a stock character out of central casting for wartime femme fatales, but even sadder to use stylization in the service of melodrama. Blitz is not Goya. Rather it becomes a series of stereotypes from cockney predators to a heroic Nigerian, who discovers the lost boy and fights against the racism which infects Londoners seeking safety in The Underground. One of them most terrible things that a work of art can do, when it pretends to take on history, is to turn it into something which avoids the reality of what actually transpired.