Sicario

Was bouncing between a 4 and a half and a 5 at first but upon further contemplation, this movie is a masterpiece. I wouldn’t change anything about it. The script is genuinely so good. Emily Blunt’s character represents the audience, seeing the line being blurred between right and wrong and slowly coming to terms with it. At the start of the film we see her have a conversation with her partner after the initial bust where they ask each other, “We did everything by the book, right?” thinking that as long as they did it should be alright. But by the end she signs a form that says that Alejandro and Matt did everything by the book, when she knows they didn’t. As Alejandro says to her when they first meet, “Nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything that we do, but in the end you will understand.” It’s all the little things that make this movie so incredible and intelligent, like Matt just wearing flip flops to government meetings and sleeping literally anywhere, showing just how comfortable this guy is with all the messed up stuff happening all around them. On top of all that, Villeneuve is such a masterful director, putting all of those details into such a tightly packaged film that doesn’t miss a single beat and is incredibly tense. The entire sequence in the tunnel to Alejandro infiltrating the “jefe’s” home is literally so perfect. The editing is so fantastic and adds to the steady flow of the story. The film is also visually stunning, using colors to give the entire film a brown, dirty feel and just being beautiful to look at. I can really find no flaws in the film.