Based upon the immensely popular children's book and stage production, and directed by the world's most successful living filmmaker, War Horse couldn't arrive with a greater weight of expectation.

It doesn't disappoint.

Michael Morpurgo's story of the unbreakable bond between a farm boy and his thoroughbred horse during the First World War has the combination of harsh reality and sentimentality that is manna for Steven Spielberg.

Whereas the younger director might have sweetened it too much, today his judgement is pitch perfect. What he describes as his first "British movie" is a marvellous, moving epic.

It starts in Devon, before the war, with an auction. Farmer Ted Narracourt (Peter Mullan) needs a workhorse but, in a moment of wild contrariness, breaks the bank to buy a thoroughbred.

Wife Rosie (Emily Watson) despairs, but son Albert (Jeremy Irvine) embraces the "miraculous horse", Joey. But then war comes, and the charming pastoral gives way to darker times.

Morpurgo's innovative decision to use the horse's perspective and thoughts would be too outlandish for a film.

That said, when Albert and Joey are separated, it is the horse that we follow; and through the animal's experiences – changing hands between the English cavalry, the German artillery and French civilians – we are taken on a very unusual odyssey through the Great War.

War stories are a major presence on Spielberg's CV – he won his two directing Oscars for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan – so the impressive nature of the battlefield set pieces is hardly surprising. But he also rises to the challenge of the atypical material, offering poignancy without schmaltz, and ramming home an affecting anti-war message.

The brutality, cruel luck and bewildering hardship of wartime – felt by both man and beast – is as striking here as it was in those earlier films.

War Horse also features a camaraderie that reminds one of the Second World War series Spielberg produced for television, Band Of Brothers.

Joey's terrified gallop through No Man's Land is followed by perhaps the film's best scene, a Brit and a German in calm and amusing harmony, as they free the horse from the barbed wire that has ensnared it.

Spielberg's collaborators bring much to the table, notably composer John Williams and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. But it's definitely a Spielberg film. And the final, gorgeous sequence in Devon, reminiscent of John Ford's wonderful depictions of man within the landscape, underline his place in the canon of great Hollywood filmmakers.

Steve McQueen follows his extraordinary debut, Hunger, with another harrowing but riveting drama. Shame is certainly not for the faint-hearted.

Michael Fassbender, below, plays Brandon, a successful New York businessman, and a loner gripped by sex addiction. His desolate existence is taken up with prostitutes, internet porn and anonymous one-night stands.

It's a routine that is thrown into disarray by the arrival of his sister (Carey Mulligan), a club singer whose chaotic and needy presence will either nudge Brandon towards normality or push him further into his depraved abyss.

McQueen's direction has a truly mesmerising quality, whether he's mirroring Brandon's frozen emotions in the glass and steel minimalism of his Midtown milieu, or suggesting his inner torment through hellish sex sorties Downtown.

It's also impossible to take your eyes off Fassbender, and not just when he shows a commendable lack of inhibition in the film's raunchier scenes.

For her part, Mulligan's rendition of My Way, full of simmering hurt, offers a brief, magical moment when these lonely lives can touch on the sublime.