The Light Between Oceans

 

The overarching review notes are to buy shares in Kleenex as sales are set to soar when audiences watch this emotional melodrama adapted from the workings of Australian author ML Stedman. The Guardian even went as far as to say there may need to be a new Richter scale designed to measure the “mass audience lip trembles”. Directed by Derek Cianfrance (he made his directorial debut with Blue Valentine), he was also responsible for match-making the two leads by reportedly insisting Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender live together for the entire duration of the film’s shooting schedule (read: six weeks).

Fassbender will sport his best Australian accent as he plays an (Aussie) ex-serviceman named Tom in 1919 who becomes a lighthouse keeper on a remote island. Vikander joins him as his young wife Isabel but who encounters a deep depression after she experiences a miscarriage. One day, a lone baby in a stray rowboat washes up on shore. When Tom suggests he and Isabel report the child, she convinces him otherwise and the pair raise the little girl as their own. But when her biological and grieving mother (Rachel Weisz) comes into the picture, Isabel and Tom are faced with an agonising decision. Hugely watchable is the consensus. 

Hacksaw Ridge

 

While one Variety journalist was finding it hard to get past director Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic tirade (and who could blame him?), Gibson’s first self-directed film in ten years received a ten-minute standing ovation in Venice. Hacksaw Ridge centres around a man named Desmond Doss (played by Andrew Garfield) who won the Congressional Medal of Honour in World War II for saving 75 men. A pacifist who carried no gun, audiences are warned of the gruesome and bloody battle scene which takes place at an assault in Okinawa and where Doss rescues the lucky ones. “Gibson is a man looking for redemption, and in this redemptive vision he may just have found it,” writes The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver.

Nocturnal Animals

 

Designer and director Tom Ford stuns critics and audiences alike with his thrilling second film feature since A Single Man in 2009. The films tells the story of an art gallery owner named Susan (Amy Adams) who later discovers an unpublished novel from her first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) and begins to read and dramatise the novel. Her imagination is real and wild and so the film suddenly has two plotlines running concurrently – Susan’s and Susan’s envisaged story of the story she’s reading. It’s being described as “absorbing” and will be a strong contender for awards season.