Penn becomes master

With Into the Wild, his fourth feature as director, Sean Penn joins the ranks of the masters. A brave, beautiful and totally satisfying adaptation of the cult book by Jon Krakauer, it tells the (largely) true story of Christopher McCandless, who dropped spectacularly out after graduating college in 1990.

Donating all his money to Oxfam and cutting up his social security card, McCandless rechristened himself Alexander Supertramp, vanishing into the wilds of the South-West and, eventually, Alaska.

It is one of those peculiarly American odysseys, with echoes of Huck Finn, Woody Guthrie, Kerouac and Easy Rider, in which the true heart of America is found still beating among its drifters and outcasts. But the film, like the book, also speaks to a younger generation, for whom the word "career" is more threat than aspiration.

Penn's eye for landscape is unashamedly poetic, and he draws a powerfully nuanced performance from Emile Hirsch as Chris/Alex.

It's a long (148 minutes) but totally confident film, pulling off challenge after challenge - a hippy colony in the desert; a hilltop epiphany with veteran Hal Holbrook as a retired soldier who becomes a surrogate father; and above all, the extraordinary, shattering finale in Alaska.

Quite simply one of the year's great films.

Into the Wild