The Revenant is an experience I’ve never had before. It’s totally its own beast. This is not a movie for sissies. A female friend sitting to my right frequently hid her eyes. It’s beautiful, fierce, immersive, delirious. Submerged in ice, arctic air, brutality and a kind of artful oppression. An ordeal of blood, agony, survival, snow, ice water, wounds and steaming horse guts. Great cinema is not always easy to absorb because it often challenges. It can sometimes feel hard or difficult, gnarly, awesome, almost too much…but it almost always sticks with you. I’m presuming The Revenant will do this. F.X. Feeney and I were talking after tonight’s screening of The Revenant, and he thinks it’s going to gather steam and percolate and sink into more and more systems as the years pass by. He compared it to Michael Mann‘s Heat in this respect; I was thinking it might eventually acquire the kind of rep that The Shining has now. Oh, and I fell completely in love with Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s simple, majesterial score.