What makes Sicario interesting as a film about institutional complicity and moral evasion.

Roger Deakins' cinematography in Sicario is impeccable — the golden-hour aerial shots of the desert, the night-vision sequence, the overhead shot of the bridge crossing. But the cinematography is doing something beyond being beautiful: it's communicating perspective.

The film is told from Kate Macer's point of view, which means it's told from the perspective of the person least informed about what's actually happening. Kate sees pieces of a mission she hasn't been cleared to fully understand. The camera shows us what she can see and no more.

This formal choice is the film's moral argument. We're watching an intervention in the drug war from the perspective of someone who has signed up to do good and is being used to do something else. Her competence and her integrity are both being exploited by people who have already made the decision that ends justify means.

The film's last scene, in which she makes the choice she makes, is one of the most quietly devastating endings in Villeneuve's filmography. It's quiet because there's nothing left to say. The argument has been made.