In 2001, I saw Alejandro González Iñárritu’s fevered, splintered debut Amores Perros and thought he could become the most exciting film-maker in the world. Fifteen years on, the industry seems to support that view; his films, however, have grown steadily less rewarding. The Revenant (Fox, 15) is a panting, lavishly muscled frontiersman spectacle that recently won him a second consecutive best director Oscar and it’s easy to see why: the expense, expertise and technical athleticism of its construction are showcased in its every head-turning sequence shot, its every Malick-aping tableau of sunlit natural ecstasy. Likewise, it’s not hard to understand how Leonardo DiCaprio won his long-deferred Oscar for playing Hugh Glass, a noble, 19th-century fur-trapper bloodily scorned. Every grunt, wince and defiant, hobbled lurch of his performance is made with maximum effort and urgency.

Neither Iñárritu nor DiCaprio is knowingly under-souled, so to speak. Yet the film they’ve made, beneath its big-sky sprawl and raw-timber beauty, has little soul to speak of. It’s a small, single-minded tale of revenge between two equally ill-sketched masculine archetypes, bulked up with bearskins and blown up to soaring widescreen proportions. I cared not a whit for Glass’s quest, motivated by a father-son bond the threadbare script maps out in the most blankly unconditional terms; I found myself rooting for Tom Hardy’s gargling, bramble-bearded villain, who at least boasts enough loopy affectations to warm him up, by default. Neither am I convinced that Iñárritu cares much about his hero’s Passion-esque agony, though he has a prodigious eye for making it look as exquisite as possible.

Concussion (Sony, 12) finds Will Smith straining nearly as hard as DiCaprio for awards glory: there’s the Nigerian accent, thick and wobbly as tapioca, the veins popping on his forehead, the impassioned invocations to on-screen foes to “tell the troof!” Oscar voters might have rewarded his commitment had they remained awake through this deadeningly earnest sports-medicine drama, starring Smith as the real-life Dr Bennet Omalu, who fought America’s National Football League to advance awareness of concussion-induced brain degeneration in players. It’s a doubtless worthy cause that writer-director Peter Landesman can’t begin to enliven as narrative.

There’s more ripped-from-the-headlines anguish in The 33 (Warner, 12), an entirely uncynical but also oddly unaffecting dramatisation of the 2010 Chilean mining disaster that left 33 men stranded 700 metres below ground for 69 days. Mexican director Patricia Riggen’s film works up sufficient claustrophobic panic to hold the attention even as the outcome is fresh in our memories. Yet, with its patchworked international cast (Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche) and swooping orchestral score (the last, alas, by the late James Horner), it rings only intermittently true. Last of the new releases is Go With Me (Metrodome, 15), an entirely heat-free backwoods revenge tale that gives us Anthony Hopkins in lumberjack gear, enlisted by Julia Stiles to protect her from Ray Liotta in his customary mode of menace. They go with each other; we go nowhere.

You’d be better off going with any of the week’s re-releases, beginning with – in keeping with the week’s theme of arduous physical ordeals – Ealing Studios’ stern but strangely rousing Scott of the Antarctic (Studiocanal, U). This straight-ahead 1948 reading of the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition gets human backbone from actor John Mills, but it’s Jack Cardiff’s cinematography and Vaughan Williams’s score that justify the restoration. A new Blu-ray of Shane (Eureka, PG) handsomely polishes up a Hollywood western that needs less of a profile boost: the blend of stoicism and sentiment in George Stevens’s 63-year-old film still cuts deep.

Finally, it’s a good week for fans of Barbara Stanwyck curios, which really should be everyone. The flintiest, most sleekly modern leading lady of cinema’s golden age struts her stuff to off-kilter effect in the happily if rather randomly reissued The Lady Gambles (Simply Media, 12), a compellingly downbeat Old Hollywood take on lowlife compulsion. And, coincidentally, Netflix just added the 1950 Stanwyck vehicle No Man of Her Own to its still paltry collection of pre-1960 titles: a B-level noir melodrama given A-level grit by Stanwyck and a hard little screenplay by Sally Benson and Catherine Turney. It’s an unusual melding of florid “woman’s picture” trappings with harsher genre chiaroscuro – I’m glad Netflix has retrieved it, however haphazard their curation process.