Sam Mendes Archives - MovieManifesto

1917: Hold the Line. Hold the Shot.

January 17, 2020March 4, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews

George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman in Sam Mendes' "1917"

Two years ago, after 13 nominations without a victory, Roger Deakins—one of the greatest cinematographers who’s ever lived—won his first Oscar, for his magnificent work on Blade Runner 2049. I mention this not because I care about the Academy Awards (I don’t… except when I do), but because 1917, Sam Mendes’ bold and brawny and periodically breathtaking new film, seems to have been engineered specifically to secure Deakins an Oscar. Its technical premise—it purports to capture its grueling events in a single take—is not wholly novel; a recent example includes Birdman (which won Emmanuel Lubezki the second of his three straight trophies), while the conceit stretches back to Hitchcock and beyond. But in marrying the single-shot concept (or gimmick, depending on your disposition) to the epic gravity of the war picture, 1917 practically screams to be recognized for its grandeur. Some movies envelop you with the invisible pull of their craft; this one pulverizes you with the sheer force of its technique.

The single-take maneuver, though undeniably impressive, is not without its hazards. The risk of wielding the camera with such fluid dynamism is that it will distract viewers. It’s a danger of distancing; the more conscious you are of the stylistic prowess on display, the farther away from the screen you tend to feel, which in turn prevents you from melting into the immaculately constructed environments. But while my brain never quite stopped registering the presence of Deakins’ camera in 1917, that subconscious awareness did little to sabotage my appreciation of his work. There’s an elegance to his lensing, a grace that somehow magnetizes you, forcing you to grapple with the lovely brutality of his images. That distinctly cinematic paradox—the tension between horror and wonder, between ghastliness and gorgeousness, between death and life—is what animates 1917, and what makes it such a fascinating sit. Like most war movies, it traffics heavily in blood, viscera, terror, and despair. And it depicts this ugliness with what can only be called beauty. Read More

Spectre: Secret Agent Man, Haunted by His Past

November 11, 2015June 28, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews

Daniel Craig returns as James Bond, Agent 007, in "Spectre"

James Bond may be a spy, but he’s also a known quantity. Britain’s most daring and debonair secret agent has been gliding cavalierly across movie screens for the past half-century, consistently dazzling us with his savvy and his pluck, even as we have grown accustomed to his nonchalant displays of implausible superheroism. The sheer volume of the Bond canon—23 films, some inevitably better than others, but all adhering more or less to the same basic template—makes the prospect of a new film featuring Agent 007 both challenging and liberating. It is difficult by now to impress us, we who have watched Bond consistently outfight and outwit his foes, whether via car or plane or parachute. But familiarity can breed opportunity as well as contempt, and recent Bond pictures have illustrated the franchise’s capacity for growth, even as they have dutifully paid homage to their forebears.

Spectre, the fourth James Bond movie to star Daniel Craig (and the second directed by Sam Mendes, following his superb Skyfall), is both the most traditional and the most ambitious of his quartet. It conforms to the established formula with jovial style, bombarding us with outlandish action sequences, beautiful women, luxury cars, and exotic locations. But it also attempts to serve as a conclusion of sorts, a culmination of the franchise rebooting cultivated by the first three Craig-led pictures. The aspiration may be admirable, but the results are decidedly less so. As a classic Bond movie, Spectre is perfectly adequate, a collection of reasonably impressive moments that do little to distinguish themselves from prior entries. But as a piece of serialized storytelling, it is startlingly misguided, a poorly judged attempt to retcon the previous films into the building blocks of a larger scheme. Spectre raises itself up as the Big Bad, but it really just brings the Craig era to its low point. Read More