Reviews of Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant will pop at 1 pm Pacific. I know I’m repeating myself but it took me two viewings to really get it — to fully submit and absorb that solemn and immersive symphonic effect without the mitigating difficulty of dealing with the bear-claw, ice-water brutality of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s ordeal. And sometimes this sort of thing happens. You have to be receptive to changes and expansions. Some films are a journey, and they aren’t one-stop-shopping. Have you ever encountered someone you found difficult or prickly at first but whom you came to really like once you got to know them? Some movies are like that. I only know that The Revenant became rapture last night during my second viewing. It may be that the vast majority of ticket-buyers will get The Revenant after a single viewing and that’ll be that, and that I’m a weirdo for needing two viewings. But I know there have been more than a few films in the past that I didn’t get the first time but totally got after the second or third viewing, Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton being one. We all understand that movies of this sort (i.e., not conventionally “entertaining” at first but delivering something more profound and lasting in the long run) are the ones that people fondly remember months, years and decades later. This is one such occasion.