1917 Cert: 15, 1hr 59mins
At first glance, 1917 seems a strange film, a First World War picture that arrives three years too late for a centenary, three months too late for Remembrance Day, and where there is some considerable doubt about whether any of the extraordinary events it depicts actually happened.
And yet it has just won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, picked up another for director Sam Mendes and secured no fewer than nine Bafta nominations. That’s definitely pretty good going for a film not so much based on the stories handed down by Mendes’s novelist grandfather, Alfred, who enlisted at the age of 19, but certainly inspired by them.
Telling the story of two very ordinary lance corporals dispatched on a desperate mission behind enemy lines to prevent a massacre of British troops, it is an astonishing and, at times, quite dazzling piece of film-making.
The first ten minutes take your breath away as it follows Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay, above) in what appears to be one single, film-long shot
The first ten minutes – when it becomes clear that Mendes intends to follow Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) in what appears to be one single, film-long shot – take your breath away, as Roger Deakins’s tireless camera follows the men from a green and pleasant field behind the lines into the muddy, sandbag-lined chaos of the trenches.
Is the newly knighted Mendes ever going to shout ‘Cut’? Apparently not.
Even at this early stage, it’s impossible not to be hugely impressed by what’s on the screen – not just the ingenious camera work (look out for the moment when the camera appears to float across a flooded shell-hole) but the hundreds of yards of authentic-looking trenches that appear to have been dug, the immaculate production design, the marshalling of the extras and, of course, the almost invisible visual effects that bring the serial horrors of the battlefield – and no man’s land in particular – so vividly and realistically to life.
The general knows that the Germans’ apparent retreat is in fact a trap so sends Blake and Schofield (above) to get a message to the 2nd Devons before they get wiped out
Such is Mendes’s pulling power these days that Colin Firth is the first of several eminent actors who pop up in minor roles (Andrew Scott, Mark Strong and Benedict Cumberbatch are others), with Firth playing the general who knows that the Germans’ apparent retreat is in fact a trap.
Unless Blake and Schofield can get a message to the 2nd Devons, two battalions of men could be wiped out. Including, in something of a Saving Private Ryan-like twist, Blake’s brother.
‘Good luck,’ mutters the battle-weary lieutenant played by Scott, and Blake and Schofield are off – over the top and into the German trenches.
Such is Sam Mendes’s pulling power these days that Colin Firth is the first of several eminent actors who pop up in minor roles, with Firth playing the general
Make no mistake, this is a film that is going to win lots of awards and will certainly be among the front-runners at the Oscars. But that doesn’t make it perfect – I wasn’t particularly moved by it, which, given the emotive subject matter, is fairly extraordinary.
And part of the reason for that, I believe, is that I was constantly distracted by all the ‘film-making’ so obviously going on. For the record, there are cuts in the seamless-looking narrative; it’s just that they are cleverly hidden.
There’s a real danger that you’re so busy admiring the technical ‘craft’ that you forget to immerse yourself in the story Mendes co-wrote with the relatively inexperienced Krysty Wilson-Cairns.
Yes, there are moments of great tension, but there are also moments, amid much sprinting through ruined villages, when it comes perilously close to a point-of-view video game.
It’s brilliant film-making, certainly, but a brilliant film? You’ll definitely want to decide for yourselves.
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
Seberg (15)
Rating: 
Wearing a succession of tantalisingly short but no doubt historically authentic outfits, Kristen Stewart certainly looks the pretty part as Jean Seberg, the gamine actress for ever associated with the 1960 French nouvelle vague film Breathless, but who actually hailed from America’s Midwest.
But she never quite disappears into the role, hampered by director Benedict Andrews’s highly visual style and by a screenplay that certainly grabs our attention but eventually fails to do full justice to its shocking and very sad underlying story.
Nearing 30 and with her marriage to the French novelist Romain Gary already struggling, Seberg returns to Los Angeles in the troubled summer of 1968, meeting the black activist Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie) on the plane.
Wearing a succession of tantalisingly short but no doubt historically authentic outfits, Kristen Stewart (above) certainly looks the pretty part as Jean Seberg
They begin an affair and she pledges her financial support for his radical civil rights campaign, little knowing that the FBI is watching – and recording – her every move.
Stewart, clearly identifying with the vulnerable and much-wronged actress, gives it her best shot as Seberg, but it’s never quite enough in an uneven film that raises more questions than it answers and, at a more fundamental level, just never really convinces.
Uncut Gems (15)
Rating: 
Adam Sandler is an annoying actor at the best of times, but here he’s obviously been specially chosen to play a really annoying character: a Jewish New York jeweller aggressively trying to bluff and haggle his way out of financial trouble – in a film that has clearly set out to be really annoying too.
The sound is too loud, everyone talks across one another, and even the music is deliberately unsettling and irritating.
In some quarters this has been declared some sort of minor masterpiece. Me, I’d say it’s hard to imagine a more uncomfortable way of spending over two hours in the cinema and advise you to avoid it, shock ending and all.
The Runaways (12A)
Rating: 
Mark Addy and Tara Fitzgerald may head the cast list but what you need to know about Richard Heap’s debut feature is that Addy’s character – a former fisherman who now runs the donkey rides on Whitby beach – bows out after barely 15 minutes, while Fitzgerald is an even more token-feeling presence at the end.
In between, in a film plagued by an uneven pace and even more uneven tone, the action belongs to the three children who run away after their father’s death and improbably take two of their donkeys with them.
It’s nicely shot and has some funny lines, but plot holes abound in a film that is too underlyingly nasty to be the children’s adventure that was clearly intended.