Any mention of the K-word in relation to Nolan has long prompted sneers, but his 10th film is dizzying, dazzling and diamond-hard. It could be his Paths of Glory

For quite a while now – at least since the release of Inception in 2010, Christopher Nolan has been regularly touted as the modern counterpart to the late, great Stanley Kubrick, whose dazzling accomplishments across multiple genres are generally held as the benchmark of American cinema. Back in 2010 those comparisons seemed absurd: how could the writer-director of classy-but-overthought superhero movies, as well as middling oddities such as The Prestige, be seriously thought of in the same bracket as the lambent mind behind Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon?

Well, it probably helps that Nolan and Kubrick share a studio – Warner Bros – whose marketing department have been probably the most active in seeding the whispers of equivalency. Nolan – wisely or not – made the link himself when Interstellar emerged in 2014, comparing his film to Kubrick’s 2001. The obvious conclusion is that Nolan’s work, while not exactly trivial, has never measured up to Kubrick’s direct embrace of the big ideas: war, love, sex, social breakdown, human consciousness. That’s not to say Nolan hasn’t aimed high in his “big” films. Interstellar in particular approached some rarefied intellectual heights with its time-bending narrative, but as the Guardian’s critic Peter Bradshaw concluded, it “leaves behind the subversion, the disquiet and Kubrick’s real interest in imagining a post-human future. What interests Nolan more is looping back to a sentimentally reinforced present.”

But with Dunkirk, Nolan may at last be able to walk the Kubrick walk. Most obviously because as a high-impact, morally scrupulous war film, Dunkirk bears direct comparison to Paths of Glory, Kubrick’s diamond-hard fable of outrage from 1957. Having made his name with time-shuffling racecourse-heist thriller The Killing – which although not a commercial success on its release, had accrued considerable critical acclaim – Kubrick lost no time in leaving behind the B-movie pulp world and heading toward the impassioned dramatic theatre of the first world war. Paths of Glory is “about” something very big indeed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fable of outrage … Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex

So is Dunkirk. In re-creating the large-scale troop evacuations in the early part of the second world war, Nolan has not only taken on a cornerstone national myth – the “little boats”, “we shall fight on the beaches” and all that – but he has also made a film as stylistically bold as anything Kubrick engineered. With its (largely) context-free and time-jumping narrative, minimal dialogue and near-total absence of blood-soaked combat scenes, Dunkirk is about as far from Saving Private Ryan or Hacksaw Ridge as you could imagine. War porn it isn’t – and it may indeed spell the end for big-budget cinema’s fascination with eviscerated intestines and shrapnel carnage.

Dunkirk review – Christopher Nolan's apocalyptic war epic is his best film so far Read more

Nolan has also brought his polish and skill in directing action, be it in fraught undersea scenes showing drowning men fight for their lives or dizzying, feather-light aerial combat sequences that convey the primitivity of it all. And he has found an interestingly narrative method – two of his main characters, Tommy and Gibson, pretend to be stretcher bearers to try and get on a rescue boat – to convey the sheer scale of the operation.

Dunkirk is Nolan’s 10th feature film: you can argue that Kubrick got to a major cinematic statement in three. (That is, if you discount Fear and Desire, his largely disregarded feature debut about an group of soldiers behind enemy lines.) Nolan started out with promising material – Following, Memento – but in retrospect looks to have been diverted by the demands of big-budget Hollywood film-making, even if he managed to retain a certain intellectual credibility in the midst of it all, as well as positioning himself as a champion of traditional cinematic values. Nolan would make his reputation with fantasy and sci-fi, and it’s not to belittle either genre: Kubrick was a major genre-hopper too, and were he around today he would undoubtedly be noodling at a superhero film himself. But it’s fair to say that Nolan – while accruing armies of fans and spawning oceans of hype – has not elevated and uplifted genres in the way Kubrick managed time after time.

But Dunkirk is different. With it, Nolan has – at last – put himself in the Kubrick league. Will he be able to do it again and again, like the master? Only time will tell – but, at 46, it’s on his side.