Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, Domhnall Gleeson

Alejandro González Iñárritu

Say this for director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu: he does not make things easy for the audience. He staged the full length of “Birdman” to look like one long, glorious take, and challenged the audience to decipher which bits were fantasy and which were reality. “Babel” put us face-to-face with a sexually confused and oft-naked Japanese teenaged girl. “21 Grams” forced the world to imagine receiving the news that your entire family has been killed in a car accident, and then discovering that your new lover has your deceased husband’s heart inside of him. With “The Revenant,” he ups the squirm factor tenfold, but is careful to balance the film’s savagery – and make no mistake, this is one savage movie – with the most beautiful cinematography you’ll see all year. “Wow, that was one of the bloodiest things I’ve ever…ooh look, pretty mountains!” They’re palate cleansers, so you’re not tasting blood in your mouth for the entire film. Smart, and essential.

It is the 1820s, and a group of New World settlers and hired-gun Englishmen are on a fur-trapping expedition in God’s country. The group is besieged by a Native American tribe hell-bent on retrieving a young woman taken from them by one of the light-skinned invaders. (At this point in time, it was either the English or the French.) Captain Andrew Henry (Domhall Gleeson) looks to master tracker Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) to lead the way, but there is doubt among the surviving group, chief among them professional soldier John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), whether Glass can be trusted after miraculously escaping an impossible situation unscathed. Hugh also has a teenaged son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), whose late mother is of the Pawnee tribe. That doesn’t sit well with some of the white people.

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Tom Hardy, Emily Browning, Chazz Palminteri, David Thewlis

Brian Helgeland

After penning the adaptation of “L.A. Confidental,” one of the finest films of the 1990s, and directing the exceedingly cool, nasty little throwback “Payback,” writer/director Brian Helgeland marks his return to the crime genre with “Legend.” Though he spent some time in director jail following 2003’s “The Order,” Helgeland made a comeback with “42,” the Jackie Robinson story. Taking advantage of the clout that biopic afforded him, Helgeland has once again made a stylish and occasionally tough, albeit bloated, crime film.

“Legend” follows real-life gangsters Ronald and Reggie Kray (both played by Tom Hardy) during their reign in the 1960s. The identical twins couldn’t be more different. Ronald is a mad dog who wants to rule all of London, and he’s arguably a paranoid schizophrenic too, while Reggie’s aspirations are more modest. The calm and cool gangster simply wants to run a few clubs, stay out of trouble, and live a violence-free life with his girlfriend, Frances (Emily Browning). The two brothers clash repeatedly, both emotionally and physically, but at the end of the day, they’re brothers, and no matter how far Ronald goes, Reggie stands by his side.

“Legend” is a somewhat unconventional crime movie; it’s familiar, but structurally dedicated more to character than plot. Helgeland’s script doesn’t build towards some big heist or turf war, but rather an internal blowup and personal loss, and the film takes its time getting there. Ultimately, “Legend” has a simplistic moral about a complicated relationship, so the 131-minute running time is excessive. Reggie’s dilemma – having to stick by his brother – is illustrated again and again. At times, there’s more repetition than narrative momentum.

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Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Zoe Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley

George Miller

George Miller may be 70 years old, but that hasn’t stopped him from outclassing filmmakers half his age by making one of the craziest, ballsiest and most badass action movies in ages. “Mad Max: Fury Road” has been decades in the making, and that passion shows in the final product. Though Mel Gibson was originally considered to reprise the titular role when Miller first hatched the idea back in 1998, after production was stalled by a series of financial and political difficulties (not to mention Gibson’s own well-publicized personal issues), “Fury Road” slipped into development hell for many years until Miller eventually got to make his movie. With the entire film famously storyboarded before a script was even written, “Fury Road” is about as nontraditional as a big-budget studio movie gets, surviving on its sheer originality, audacity and no-holds-barred attitude.

Set in the year 2060 and loosely following the events of the first three installments, “Fury Road” finds former cop Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) just barely surviving in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. When he’s captured by tyrannical leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and forced to serve as a human blood bank for his diseased male minions, known as the War Boys, Max’s fate appears to be sealed. But after one of Joe’s war rig drivers, the bionic-armed Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), suddenly goes off course during a routine fuel run, Joe’s massive army chases after her – including sickly War Boy, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), who’s so desperate not to miss out on the action that he straps Max to the hood of his car, connected only by a chain and IV tube, so he can continue to heal. It turns out that Furiosa is trying to rescue a group of female captives that Joe plans to use to repopulate the world in his image, and when Max eventually crosses paths with them following a miraculous escape, he reluctantly agrees to help get them to safety.

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Tom Hardy, James Gandolfini, Noomi Rapace, Matthias Schoenaerts

Michaël R. Roskam

Though it comes with the undesirable label of being James Gandolfini’s final screen appearance, “The Drop” has all the makings of a dark horse awards contender. Adapted by esteemed crime writer Dennis Lehane from his short story “Animal Rescue,” the movie doesn’t have the same cynicism as past adaptions of the author’s work (“Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone”), but it’s a grimy little crime drama that harkens back to the great Sidney Lumet films of the 1970s. This is a movie that places mood and character above all else, and while that might not be everyone’s cup of tea, Michaël R. Roskam’s “The Drop” is a well-paced and expertly acted film that serves as a fitting end to one actor’s career and the exciting emergence of another.

Tom Hardy stars as Bob Saginowski, a quiet, well-meaning bartender at the Brooklyn watering hole previously owned by his cousin Marv (Gandolfini), who still runs the day-to-day operations. But while Marv is the face of the business (his name even adorns the outside of the building), it really belongs to a group of Chechen mobsters that use it as one of the city’s many drop bars, a place chosen at random to hold all of the day’s illegal bookmaking money. When the bar is robbed by some amateur thieves, the two cousins are put in charge of finding those responsible, leading Marv (who helped plan the whole thing) to resort to desperate measures. Meanwhile, Bob finds a wounded pit bull in a trash can and decides to adopt it, but when the previous owner (Matthias Schoenaerts) resurfaces looking for trouble, he must decide how far he’s willing to go to protect the mutt and the woman (Noomi Rapace) helping him care for it.

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This week’s Hidden Netflix Gem: “Bronson” (2008)

“My name’s Charles Bronson, and all my life I’ve wanted to be famous.” That’s the opening line of Nicholas Winding Refn’s fictionalized biopic “Bronson,” starring Tom Hardy as the titular character, a man who the press often refers to as the “most violent prisoner in Britain.” You may be familiar with Winding Refn’s best known work, 2011’s “Drive,” starring Ryan Gosling, and recognize Hardy as the guy who played identity thief Eames in “Inception” and most recently appeared as Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.” While those two pictures might be better films, I don’t think Hardy as ever put in a better performance than he did in “Bronson.”

Charles Bronson is not as well known stateside as he is across the pond. In the UK, the man is something of a national celebrity, both famous and infamous for spending the majority of his adult life in solitary confinement (28 of his 34 years in prison). Bronson was first incarcerated in 1974, at age 22, after being handed a seven-year sentence for armed robbery (of just  £26.18) from a suburban English post office. That seven years quickly became 14 as a result of his starting various fights and hostage situations involving guards and fellow prisoners. Bronson was released in 1988, but spent just 69 days on the outside (during which he began a “career” as a bare-knuckle boxer) before being arrested again. He’s been in prison ever since and his antics haven’t ceased.

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