THE REVENANT (15, 156 mins)

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

4 stars

It starts like a Malick film, The Revenant, shimmering among rivers and trees and the ethereal beauty of nature. But suddenly that peace is disrupted as a group of American frontiersmen come under sustained attack from indigenous people the Ree.

Arrows pierce the air - and body parts - in a stunning and fluidly filmed assault as this group of fur trappers are forced to leave their pelts behind and flee down river on their raft. It’s based on real events that took place in the 1820s, and partly on a novel by Michael Punke inspired by those events.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Hugh Glass, a scout guiding the trappers, who need a plan to get back to the fort. Glass knows the territory, but before they can make too much progress he’s mauled by a bear in a jaw-dropping sequence so realistic and convincing that for all we know director Alejandro Iñárritu threw DiCaprio into a forest with an actual bear and just let them get on with it.

He also faces a nemesis in the shape of Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who believes Glass to be beyond help. For a decent fee though, he’s willing to try to get him to the nearest outpost, but instead betrays him and leaves him for dead.

Glass can barely stand, is half ripped apart by bear wounds, and being pursued by the Ree in the dead of winter. His odds seem impossible, but he heeds the advice we see him giving to his young son at the start of the film, which might grant him the strength to cross the many dangerous miles to get back and face Fitzgerald: keep breathing.

It may have a prestige director and look like an arthouse western, but The Revenant is an arthouse western with a $130m budget to turn it into a barrelling action movie. As a simple enough tale, it doesn’t really need to be as long as it is, but while you couldn't exactly accuse it of rattling along, nor does it feel the weight of its 156 minute runtime at any point.

Following on from his Oscar-winning Birdman, it’s another virtuoso piece of directorial expression from Iñárritu. Every so often he wheels out a genuinely miraculous action sequence, the kind of thing that's really never been attempted before in the genre.

We've seen it in maybe The Raid, long takes of exquisitely, precisely choreographed fights and chases with the added benefit of undetectable special effects. It’s a showcase for what you can really use today’s computer effects capabilities for beyond just superheroes and space battles.

It’s a miracle of cinematography too, with no artificial light used and impossible camerawork as the point of view goes seamlessly from ground level to horseback and back again. Director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki is gunning for his third Oscar in a row after Gravity and Birdman.

DiCaprio has been waiting over 20 years to get his hands on an Oscar and while this isn’t necessarily his greatest ever performance, it’s the one that’s going to win it for him next month.

He barely speaks, partly because he’s on his own for much of the time, and partly because he’s had his throat slashed by a bear, but his reward will come for what he has to put himself through, and the determination and suffering and physicality with which he does it.

When moments of lyrical mysticism threaten to go a bit Malick again (though they're largely confined to dream sequences that do a handy job of filling us in on Glass's backstory), it's time to get brutal once more. Caked in mud and blood, DiCaprio is savaged by Iñárritu for two and a half hours, as he chows down on bison entrails and indulges in homemade surgery that would make Rambo wince.

It’s a single-purpose narrative, but those Malick parallels aren’t accidental, and on a deeper level it's about the power and majesty of nature, how this untameable frontier offers no mercy for those looking to exploit it. The Ree too have been wronged, searching for an abducted member of their tribe, which adds a not-overplayed note of colonial culpability much like Mel Gibson’s similarly savage Apocalypto.

This is visceral, exciting and compelling filmmaking, a breathtaking survival adventure that might only have one note to hit. But wow, what a note.

See it if you liked: Apocalypto, Last of the Mohicans, The New World

CREED (12A, 133 mins)

Director: Ryan Coogler

3 stars

We join this fairly successful spin-off of the Rocky movies by encountering a troubled teen in a juvenile detention centre who learns that legendary boxer Apollo Creed was his father, who died before he was born (that’s Rocky IV to us).

The boy’s name is Adonis and as a man (played by Michael B. Jordan) he quits his job to fight full time, going to Philadelphia where he meets up with a certain former Italian Stallion and asks him to train him.

For all that the film is called Creed, it’s hard not to view this as a Rocky movie, and 40 years after his first appearance it’s wonderful to have the champ back.

This is probably Sylvester Stallone’s finest ever performance, with director Ryan Coogler coaxing a composed and stately turn from him that’s never really seemed possible before.

However, such is the shadow that Rocky casts over the ring, the city, the film, that whenever he’s off screen the drama becomes much less compelling.

Unlike the middle Rocky movies there’s no need to create a cartoon villain, and here the foe is the man in the mirror; Adonis struggling against his father’s legacy and Rocky against the ghosts of his past and wondering what he has left to live for.

These make for some decent thematic morsels to chew on, but as a boxing movie in its own right, Creed is passable if hardly innovative. Luckily it has a hook like no other, and as Rocky VII it’s a delight.

See it if you liked: Rocky, Rocky IV, Rocky Balboa

ROOM (15, 118 mins)

Director: Lenny Abrahamson

4 stars

There’s something slightly unfortunate about the marketing approach for Room, which focuses heavily on things that happen in its second half.

In fairness that’s where most of its original ideas and deepest character examinations reside, but still, for the fullest experience it might be best to go in knowing only the basic set-up, in which a young mum and her son spend their entire existence inside one small room.

Ma (Brie Larson) and five year old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) eat, sleep and wash in the room, and it’s all Jack has ever known. Emma Donoghue adapts from her own novel, and it’s a pin-sharp screenplay that belies the fact it was ever a book to begin with; it feels perfectly formed as a movie, feeding us just the right amount of information required as the reality of the situation begins to dawn on us.

There isn’t a false note hit during these scenes by director Lenny Abrahamson, nor in the more or less perfect performances of Tremblay and soon-to-be Oscar winner Larson, and at times the results can be almost overwhelmingly emotional.

That second half digs into altogether different places, and while it doesn’t quite reach the sometimes heart-stopping heights of the first, Room is still something quite special.

See it if you liked: Gone Girl, Michael, Prisoners