Hostiles | What to Watch

This slow-burning, powerfully acted and visually stunning Western stars Christian Bale as a hard-bitten US cavalry officer

This slow-burning, powerfully acted and visually stunning Western stars Christian Bale as a hard-bitten US cavalry officer.

He’s reluctantly escorting a dying Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) and his family from 1892 New Mexico to their tribe's Montana homeland.

Along the way, the captain and his group pick up Rosamund Pike's traumatised frontierswoman, left broken by grief after the massacre by Comanche of her entire family, and a condemned murderer (Ben Foster) on his way to execution.

The trek throws up further crises and dangers along the way, but the heart of the drama is the internal journey taken by Bale's laconic character, a haunted man slowly learning to put the violence and hatreds of the past behind him.

Like the outward journey he takes, the movie is sometimes a slog, sometimes ferociously violent – and often starkly beautiful.