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About three-quarters of the way through this 156 minute film, the already grievously injured Hugh Glass ( Leonardo diCaprio ) is on a horse which tumbles off a ravine, landing him in a tree. Glass has gone through endless torments, and this is a story of his survival against the environment and people of the non-specific American West in the non-specific 1820s. Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárito won Best Director last year at the Oscars for Birdman (Or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (the film also won Best Picture and Best Screenplay). This film opens here with many nominations for this years Academy Awards. The film was by all accounts a gruelling one to make so maybe it’s somehow fair that the audience should suffer through Glass’s journey, which is not merely survival against the natural environment, but contains a good deal of spiritual survival amongst Native Americans who are horribly mistreated by Glass’s colleagues, trappers who sell bear pelts. And of course bears are unequivo...

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a flawless story of seasonal redemption: there are many versions but you may as well start with the book. This film stars Dan Stevens as the author, coming off a three-book series of flops and an American tour which he didn’t enjoy. Dickens lives happily with his family. He goes around town meeting people—including W. M. Thackeray ( Miles Jupp ), and a great many people say things which are remarkably famous quotes from the book that he is about to write. It’s a lot like Shakespeare In Love , and a little like Miss Potter , the film about Beatrix Potter that didn’t mention her scientific work at all. Dickens spent his childhood in a Blacking Factory, and his father in Debtors Prison. Here, John (played by Jonathan Pryce ) is the character who is redeemed by Dickens and accepted into the family, and it is through redeeming the father than Dickens is able to write. Soon his rooms are filled with his own characters and he argues with them—even playing a mod...

Netflix’s commitment to relentless Christmassy movies has brought us this odd combination of a political drama, and some sort of mashup of Good Morning Vietnam and Top Gun… at Christmas. It’s the story of Erica ( Kat Graham ), who’s young and ambitious to get a job in Washington politics. And since she works for the workaholic Congresswoman Bradford ( Virginia Madsen ), this is probably going to happen. Anyway Erica wants to escape from a difficult family circumstance, and when she’s sent to Guam by Bradford, the opportunity to skip Christmas is right in front of her. What’s in Guam? A Military base which is being considered for closure. There are savings to be made, especially since there seems to be a Christmas “drop”—a humanitarian operation delivering much-needed supplies to isolated islanders. Erica is immediately confronted with Andrew Jantz ( Alexander Ludwig )—very much the cocky Air Force Guy… But wait! Jantz has brought light to his operation by posing on a website in his fl...

David Fincher’s Hollywood story is the most Oscar-baiting movie. His subject, based on a script by his father, is the writing of the celebrated Citizen Kane by the ‘washed up’ and defiantly left-wing writer Herman J Mankiewicz . This isn’t the first time a Director has gone to black and white in order to win an Academy Award, but it’s almost certain that Stephen Spielberg wasn’t being tricksy—even though he was accused of that a lot for inserting colour into his film to highlight a point. And it’s weird that watching Mank, this retro movie-fest, that the mind goes to Schindler’s List , which only came to mind because it was recently pointed out that this film is very light and flighty in its depiction of life in Germany before the reality of what’s happening it made evident to the protagonist. And of course the style of the period was very much created by those who left Europe to set up in Hollywood even if they were of the left. So the film is full of dark shadows and angled be...