1917

As a genre piece, I think it's really interesting -- well made and immersive. But as a kind of emotional movie that really pulled me in, I don't know if it did that.

It's an immersive, visceral and meticulously crafted film that has the emotional stakes to match.

The film dazzles at each step, one encounter and adventure after another shot like a set piece, complete in itself with MacKay's stoic presence adding to the pathos and poignancy.

The film is thrilling, moving on effectively from one shocking set piece to another, studding the narrative too with starry cameos.

It's a tense, unnerving ride that accomplishes its goal of translating the first-person experience of war better than any war movies that have come before it. It's a level up.

Technical brio, however, cannot redeem all that is callow and crass in Mendes's movie: the dialogue is pure placeholder stuffing, the approach a clumsy collision of the Assassin's Creed video games and Elem Klimov's Come and See...

Mendes’ film — based in part on an account told to Mendes by his paternal grandfather, Alfred Mendes — provides a haunting glimpse at humanity’s seemingly incurable recklessness.

By concentrating so closely on the innermost experiences of just one or two men, he [Mendes] gives the film a fierceness and pathos it would have lacked if its perspective had been broader.

1917 is one of those films that leaves you in complete stunned silence as you watch it. Mendes never allows his audience to rest, instead he takes them on the journey with his two heroes using camera angles we haven’t seen since The Children Of Men.

In 1917, Sam Mendes expressed several reflections regarding the war. First, he outlines how the First World War completely changed the conception of battle, generating the beginning of modern warfare.