Something as ephemeral as a breath shouldn’t mark the point when a movie this relentlessly physical lost me, but Alejandro G. Iñárritu pulls it off in his loosely-fact-based story of Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), a guide for an early 19th-century fur-trapping operation who finds himself alone in the winter wilderness and mortally injured, with only a need for vengeance driving him onward. Iñárritu has plenty of skills at crafting fascinating visuals—ideal for moments like the hard-to-watch bear attack that cripples Glass—and DiCaprio’s largely wordless performance transcends the ubiquitous media focus on the physical hardships he endured. The trouble comes when the two-and-a-half-hour march through Glass’s ordeal starts to become simply exhausting—and when seeing a character’s breath condensed on the camera lens indicates what Iñárritu misunderstands about a story like The Revenant. As infatuated as he seems to be with making sure audiences appreciate the gritty realism, he also wants to make sure they know they’re watching a movie—and he can’t have it both ways. For all of his gifts as a filmmaker, he sure hopes you don’t forget that he’s there behind the camera. By Scott Renshaw