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On the eve of the digital release of Sam Mendes’s Oscar-winner, here’s where to find other celebrated films about the Great War for home viewing
With more than £45m in the bank, 1917 is the year’s highest-grossing film in UK cinemas by a country mile, and as things stand, nothing’s breaking that record for the foreseeable future. If Sam Mendes’s big, punchy first world war epic was still on your to-see list when cinemas succumbed to lockdown in March, its digital release on Monday will come as a welcome quarantine care package.
You will have missed an opportunity, though. Justly rewarded at the Oscars for Roger Deakins’s propulsive, sleight-of-hand cinematography and its layered, pummelling sound design, 1917 remains involving and impressive in any format, but had more immediate sensory grandeur on the big screen. Setting aside the commotion over its smartly executed illusion of being shot in two long takes, Mendes’s film is a man-on-a-mission tale in a simple, even classical vein, thinly characterised in ways that somewhat curtail its emotional impact. The technical showmanship here isn’t mere window-dressing. It’s what makes the film distinguished and immersive in the canon of films about the first world war – which rarely gets such elaborate cinematic treatment, at least relative to the ongoing parade of pyrotechnically enhanced second world war spectaculars. Continue reading...