Hacksaw Ridge

After falling out of favour with Hollywood thanks to a notorious drunk-driving incident in 2006, Mel Gibson returned with this olive branch: a love letter to America, albeit one made so far outside the Hollywood system it was actually shot in Australia. And yet it did the trick. A blatantly unsubtle but nevertheless true story of humility and redemption, Hacksaw Ridge earned Gibson six Oscar nominations, including one for best director. Andrew Garfield stars as US Army medic Desmond T Doss, a conscientious objector who joins the army but refuses to fight, enduring the scorn of his fellow soldiers before shocking them all with an astonishing feat of bravery during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The build-up is mawkish and sentimental at times, but in the battlefield it literally explodes into action offering a timely reminder of the horrors of war and a lesson that doing the right thing is never impossible, even against the most catastrophic odds.