1917

The artistry of Sam Mendes’s 1917, a staggeringly realistic depiction of wartime devastation, doesn’t just push the envelope of cinematography with its nearly hour-long continuous tracking shot (a marvelous visual accomplishment) but also with the intelligence of its narrative. Two young WWI British soldiers — Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) — are dispatched on a veritable suicide mission to deliver a general's command to stand-down to a hawkish colonel about to send 1,600 men into a German trap. Among the men is Blake’s older brother, which gives the younger much incentive to complete the mission, casting his mission as a coldly cynical order from the general but in keeping with the madness of war. Chapman and MacKay are tireless troupers in Mendes’ experiment to depict the two soldiers narrowly escaping one potentially fatal encounter after another, with the bodies of dead soldiers draped along barbed-wire fences and lining the sides of trenches and craters. It’s a horrifying landscape of misery, and the two men, not entirely up to their mission, trudge along through mud and viscera toward heaven knows what. It is a triumphant testament to modern movie-making and the human spirit.