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Based on an Albert Camus story, Loin des Hommes is more or less a two-hander for a duo of the most magnetic actors in current cinema. In 1950s Algeria, a teacher in a remote village (Viggo Mortensen) is entrusted with accompanying a man (Reda Kateb) to a nearby town to face trial for killing his cousin. Making their way through harsh terrain, they become unlikely allies as they tangle with the prisoner's vengeful family, Algerian guerrillas and the French army alike. David Oelhoffen's taut drama is part-thriller, part-war film, but above all, perhaps, a North African existential western, with Guillaume Deffontaines's terrific landscape photography imbuing the drama with a bleak beauty. The two stars are intensely imposing in a taciturn way and the score, by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, puts an additional seal of quality on a film of sardonic intelligence and no-frills toughness.

Danish engineer Captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortenson) is stationed with the Argentine army in a remote corner of Patagonia. When his 15-year-old daughter Ingeborg elopes with a young soldier, the angry and distraught Dinesen begins an epic journey across a harsh, threatening landscape in the hope of tracking the couple down. For his fourth feature, maverick director Lisandro Alonso turns to a difficult period in Argentine history, the brutal 1882 campaign to eradicate the indigenous population from Patagonia. His painterly existential western, framed in a vintage 4:3 ratio, is a fable about filmmaking, colonialism, the formation of nation and a brilliant chronicle of Dinesen's descent into a single-minded obsession as fierce and foreboding as that of Apocalypse Now's deranged Kurtz. Mortensen excels as the quixotic Dinesen, who undertakes the arduous journey through mythical landscapes, where his idea of utopia remains forever out of reach.