“As long as you can still grab a breath, you fight. You breathe. Keep breathing.”

Directed by: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson

Synopsis: After a vicious bear attack, Hugh Glass is left for dead by his supposed friends. Staring mortality in the face, against insurmountable odds Glass fights for his life, his son, and for revenge.

The question on everyone’s lips: is it Leo’s year at the Oscars? The answer: yes, it quite probably is. DiCaprio stars as Hugh Glass in The Revenant, a cold, brutal and oh-so-beautiful tale of revenge. Right from the opening battle between Native Americans and Hugh Glass’s band of trappers, which sees the camera sweeping amongst the battlefield as though in a game of Pass the Parcel, the film is a visual treat. Much focus has been placed on DiCaprio, but the real hero here is cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, deservedly up for a third consecutive win at the Academy Awards. He will be hard to beat.

It’s a visceral experience from open to close, one which is surely best experienced on the biggest screen, with the biggest speakers possible, and as such it gets its claws in deep. It’s cinema in its purest form – spectacle. But it’s also fairly slight, plot-wise. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that it’s a 2 hour film, stretched gratuitously to 2 and a half hours long. But when the extra half hour is filled with the stunning extended landscape shots Lubezki is serving up, you can hardly complain.

Rating (out of 5):

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All hail the return of mini reviews! Back in the day (i.e. about a year ago), in an attempt to bring more views on more movies to you lovely people, I began posting mini reviews here on Flicks and Pieces. Bitesize, spoiler free reviews of films new and old. The only slight issue was that I’m quite partial to a bit of a ramble, it turns out. My mini reviews became….not so mini! In fact, they were basically just the same length as my usual, more in depth looks at any given movie. And so, giving the format the respect it deserved, I swiftly clonked it over the head with a shovel and squirrelled it away.

But much like The Revenant’s Hugh Glass, mini reviews are back from the brink. This time however, they’re going to stay mini. The aim is for concise, maximum of 250 words in length reviews, cutting to the chase to give you the lowdown. If nothing else, it’ll be an exercise in self-editing. A skill I’ve clearly not yet mastered. In fact, this “little” update is now as long as the review itself…

Please do let me know what you think in the comments, and as always, thank you for reading!