Unbroken (2014)

Directed by Angelina Jolie, this is a long and slow true story of American Olympic runner Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell). 

Zamperini survives two plane crashes, several weeks floating on a raft and two Japanese POW camps – and yet the film detailing these events somehow ends up plodding and dull. 

O'Connell is OK, but he has few lines and little actual character. Even less well drawn is Sgt. Mutsuhiro "The Bird" Watanabe (Miyavi), who is sadistic in a way that’s never really explained – despite the seemingly endless scenes of torture. 

A good story, badly told, it's further proof that actors don't usually make for great directors.

Brooklyn (2015)

Romantic drama adapted from a novel by Colm Tóibín. 

Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) lives in a small town in southeast Ireland until a priest (Jim Broadbent) arranges for her to travel to New York and begin a new life. There, she falls in love and begins to thrive  – until family matters bring her back to Enniscorthy in County Wexford, where she’s faced with various ethical and personal conflicts.

It’s a sweet and touching story. Ronan is highly engaging in the lead role. Julie Walters is superb as the owner of a Brooklyn boarding house. 

Ireland looks too sunny and dry to be entirely convincing. Possibly those were the scenes filmed in Canada. 

Simple, lucid storytelling makes it powerful and affecting. I was put off by learning that Nick Hornby was involved in the screenplay, but thankfully he doesn’t manage to mess it up.

Anna Karenina (2012)

When I first saw this lavish Joe Wright/Tom Stoppard adaptation of the Tolstoy novel, at the cinema in 2012, I wasn’t sure what to make of it at all. The radical decision to stage many of the scenes in a theatre set means that you never know quite what to believe – is the action really taking place or is it a stylised manifestation of a character’s feelings? On second viewing, I began to see it as a masterpiece that deliberately pulls apart the “reality” it constructs – perhaps to suggest that everything we do is a sort of fiction. It has a lot of fun with this – for example, switching from footage of a real train to a toy train and seeming to delight in the fact that it’s obviously a miniature model. In another scene, a letter is torn up and thrown into the air. The pieces keep falling because they have become snowflakes. Sometimes a door or window on the stage opens to another place entirely. There’s a sort of Escher logic to it, and you wonder how on Earth they planned it all so cleverly.  

The danger is that such a stylised approach might limit the film’s emotional impact, but if anything it works the other way, elevating simple scenes into works of art that magnify the characters’ situations. It would presumably have been so much easier to make the film as a standard costumer, but instead it operates on a higher level. 

Keira Knightley is appealing and convincing in the title role. Jude Law looks nothing like himself as her rigidly controlling husband. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the dangerous, icily charming Count Vronsky, who Anna has a devastating affair with. The love story is expertly told. There’s a parallel tale of what happens when passion and freedom conflict with social conformity. Should you follow your heart or do what’s expected of you by your peers and your class? For Anna, of course, neither option works out well.

The Revenant (2015)

Unrelentingly grim and bloody tale of North American frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) trying to survive against all the odds. It’s 1823, and desperate, isolated communities of trappers and hunters battle it out in the frozen wilds. Everything horrible you can imagine happening to Glass happens to him. He witnesses his wife’s murder. He’s attacked and badly maimed by a bear. He’s nearly smothered to death by a crazed colleague. He’s buried alive. He witnesses his son’s murder. He’s swept away in river rapids. He’s shot at. He falls off a cliff into a tree. And he has to sleep inside his dead horse (after pulling out the innards). Plus, he’s intent on exacting his revenge – whatever the cost.

It’s not exactly cheerful. But the film has a primal intensity that keeps you hooked. The scenery is stunning. And DiCaprio is watchable, even beneath the beard, blood, filth and fur. Ultimately, though, it’s too harrowing and brutal to constitute entertainment. It’s unclear what you’re meant to take away from it. I was left feeling troubled and disturbed.