Sicario: This Film Earned Everything
Sicario — Taylor Sheridan's 2015 screenplay, Denis Villeneuve's direction, Roger Deakins behind the camera — arrived and simply dismantled everything around it.
There is a particular kind of thriller that doesn't announce itself. No franchise machinery, no sequel bait, no trailer designed to trend. *Sicario* — Taylor Sheridan's 2015 screenplay, Denis Villeneuve's direction, Roger Deakins behind the camera — arrived and simply dismantled everything around it. A decade later, it's resurfacing on HBO Max and finding audiences who weren't ready for it the first time, and a second wave who are discovering that readiness was never really the point. The film doesn't wait for you.
Emily Blunt plays a character who believes she is the protagonist of her own story. *Sicario* spends two hours methodically, elegantly, and without sentimentality proving that she is not. It is one of the crueler structural decisions in modern American cinema, and it works because Sheridan wrote it without apology. Before *Yellowstone*, before *1883*, before the entire Taylor Sheridan content industrial complex, there was this — a single, precise screenplay that understood that moral clarity is the first casualty of any war on anything. The film aged the way good things age: it got heavier.
Speaking of heavy — the conversation around Venice this cycle is one of absence. The prestige films that were rumoured for the Lido aren't going. Awards strategists are routing around the festival the way drivers route around an accident, and the reasons are the kind Hollywood never says out loud: the Oscars calendar has shifted, the streamers have their own windows, and Venice increasingly serves a different purpose than it once did. What that purpose is, exactly, nobody has agreed on yet. That uncertainty is more interesting than any single film announcement.
And then James Gray said something at Locarno that I have been thinking about since: that actors dictate the style of films. Not directors. Not cinematographers. Not the script. The actors. He said it as a statement of fact, not complaint, which is the most interesting version of the claim. Meanwhile, Robert Richardson — who has shot *JFK*, *Kill Bill*, *The Aviator* — said AI in cinematography is inevitable and might need its own Oscar category. These two men, in the same week, describing the same art form and arriving at completely different conclusions about who or what is actually making it. One of them is right. I have a feeling it might be both of them.
The verdict this week is *Sicario*. Watch it alone. Other people breathe too loud during the border crossing sequence.
*— Dua Mifsud*
