12 Jan 2016

Video: The Revenant review

From Widescreen, 9:00 am on 12 January 2016

Alejandro González Iñárritu's unflinching story of survival and revenge on the frontier is one the most brilliant - and challenging - achievements of the cinematic century so far.

 

More on The Revenant

James Croot, for Fairfax, gives the film a good review, while Sarah Watt in the Sunday Star-Times gives it five stars

Dom Corry, for Summer Noelle on RNZ, talks about The Revenant (as well as the comedy Sisters):

 

Iñárritu in the New York Times discusses the difficult shoot across three continents.

Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki spoke to Kiko Martinez at Tribeca Film about the shoot and the technical choices they made.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at The AV Club compares The Revenant and another long Western released around the same time, The Hateful Eight, and finds some interesting parallels (and differences):

But what’s genuinely interesting about this twosome is how they’re really nothing alike. They are going into the same mythic American past, and passing by a lot of the same markers, but for very different reasons. And that’s the way it is with Westerns, which tend to be more similar than not, the side effect being that whatever makes a given movie special or unique gets highlighted. Westerns deal in individualism and community, lone figures and landscapes. They stage acts of principle against backdrops of rock and desert. Movies don’t have to be about anything, but it’s better when they are, and in a best-case scenario, Westerns are about how the people making them feel about the fundamentals of justice, moral sense, and the whole business of how people relate to and tolerate each other.

 

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