What Sicario Is
Sheridan spent two decades as a working actor before deciding, in his forties, that he would rather write. Sicario was the result: an FBI agent (Emily Blunt) is seconded to a task force whose rules she is not allowed to know, run by men (Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro) who have already decided what the mission is.
Denis Villeneuve directed, Roger Deakins shot it, Jóhann Jóhannsson scored it, and the film became the calling card that made every subsequent Sheridan project possible. Its structural trick — the audience is as deliberately underinformed as the protagonist — is one he has reused ever since.
Sheridan also wrote the 2018 sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, directed by Stefano Sollima, which drops Blunt's character and follows Brolin and del Toro into a considerably bleaker operation.
Together with Hell or High Water and Wind River, Sicario forms what is usually called his "frontier trilogy" — three films about the modern American border, none of which are westerns and all of which are about land, jurisdiction and who is allowed to enforce which law.
