If proof were needed that war exists in some quarters as an excuse for beautiful images, along comes this screen account of Vera Brittain's celebrated 1933 memoir Testament of Youth to offer up prettified pain in abundance alongside some fine performances that do what they can to break through the prevailing gloss. First-time feature director James Kent's film can be seen as the converse to something like, say, the awful Unbroken, which rubs our noses almost fetishistically in suffering and torture.

Among the many pleasures of Whiplash, the low-budget indie film that is now up for five Oscar nominations (Best Picture included) and by rights deserved more, is a final sequence so breathlessly exciting that if this were a stage show, the ending would induce an instant ovation.

The Brits are back in the Oscar race big-time, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, and Rosamund Pike among the first-time Academy Award hopefuls who will be duking it out in the leading categories.

First there’s an “Allahu Akbar”, then an American tank’s rumble and clank. It’s an ominous and wearying start, the sound of Islam and invasion intermingled in the Iraq War, a violent conflict that today simply expands. When director Clint Eastwood lets us see, too, we’re by the treads of the tank, then within seconds we’re on a rooftop with Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who spots a woman in a hijab with her child. They have a grenade, and he lines them in his crosshairs. Cut.

Stream-of-consciousness is a tough thing to pull off in the movies. Voice-over narration has now fallen so far out of favour that no internal monologue survives the journey from page to screen even remotely intact, and having your lead character slavishly deliver chunks of a novel seldom recreates the odd magic of reading those same words in one’s own head.

It is 30 years since Shoah. In the filmography of the Holocaust Claude Lanzmann's document is the towering monolith. At nine-and-a-half hours, it consists of no archive footage at all, just interviews with witnesses unburdening themselves of memories. Of all those conversations, there was one in particular which Lanzmann held back. After the three and a half hours of The Last of the Unjust, it is clear why.

Woods and forests were given a fresh impetus as a psychic terrain for the cinema by Lothlórien, Fangorn, and the other sylvan spaces so ethereally or threateningly rendered in The Lord of the Rings films and, to a lesser extent, by the Mirkwood of the second Hobbit movie. All distorted black boles, labyrinths of tangled branches, knobbly roots, and conically sun-strafed clearings, they were movie woods to rival the great Gothic forest of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) and the magical Athenian wood Warner Bros.

Steve Carell makes the move from the light comedy of the American workplace to the dark side of that country as delusional blue-blood John Eleuthère du Pont in a transformative and creepy performance that borders on the grotesque.

Foxcatcher is based on a shocking true story set in the wrestling world. Though some of the events occurred in the 1990s and over a longer time period, director Bennett Miller sets his film towards the end of the 1980s. Miller’s previous feature, Moneyball, was also set in the sports world but instead of focusing on the players he chose to look at the maths behind the game. In a similar way he subverts the long arduous road-to-glory sports story by exploring the inner lives of Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler, Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum, pictured below right), his brother and coach, Dave (Mark Ruffalo), and the aforementioned mercurial man who supported their training sessions in the grounds of his grand home in preparation for the Seoul 1988 Olympic Games.

Miller’s precise, cold and detached composition alongside Greig Fraser’s expert cinematography, echo the isolation, paranoia and clinical view of du Pont’s ever-watchful eye and deteriorating mind-set. A sinister atmosphere is established from the outset and the dread is palpable.

Carell mimics the meticulous pronunciation of a politician delivering a meaningless speech, his pregnant pauses bristling against the nape of your neck like a slithering snake. A particularly memorable scene which sees du Pont offering Schultz cocaine while travelling in his private helicopter is hypnotic. Du Pont gleefully exhales a list of the things he collects, furthering the sense of pride in ownership that has been instilled in him by his mother (the excellent Vanessa Redgrave) and it's terrifying. Miller makes it clear from the start that no good will come from the teaming up of these proud patriots, but here he turns du Pont into something quite monstrous.

If du Pont plays the politician it's Mark Schultz who takes on the role of keen supporter. At first he is put under the spell of great promises, then he engages in amicable relations before finally he begins to notice the cracks in the veneer as the perennial smile fades from the face of his patron. Tatum refuses to play Schultz as a knucklehead. He was, in fact, greatly aided by the real-life wrestler and it shows not only in his stance and mannerisms but the way in which he reaches into the psyche of a professional athlete.

Miller’s powerful and surefooted psychological drama possesses an intensity and haunting elegance which demands you bear witness to chilling and bleak sights.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Foxcatcher