The 50 best films of 2019 in the US: No 4 – 1917
Sam Mendes escapes from the Bond franchise and heads to war in an astonishing, seat-edge thriller that sees him at the height of his powers
When it was revealed that Sam Mendes’s mysterious first world war drama 1917 would actually be a one-shot thriller (with the key caveat that certain edits would be made) there were concerned murmurs. After being trapped for the majority of a decade in committee-led Bond franchise hell, what did the stage director turned Oscar-winning film-maker have to prove? Might his return to prestige cinema end up like so many other one-shot experiments: an audacious but ultimately empty technical exercise?
But mere moments into its last-minute unveiling, just six days after Mendes finished editing, 1917 revealed itself to be far from simple gimmickry. The director’s flashy return to the real world is a work of astonishing magnitude, an immersive, thrilling, emotionally involving experience and, in my opinion, his greatest film to date.