A member of the richest family in America, du Pont took wrestling brothers Mark and David Schultz under his financial wing in the late 80s, with plans to lead his team, Foxcatcher, to gold-winning glory at the Seoul Olympics. With Moneyball, Miller managed to turn a story about statistics in baseball into one of the most absorbing dramas of 2011. In the case of Foxcatcher, he turns another true story – one which many will likely be familiar with before entering the theatre – into a pressure cooker of dramatic tension. Through a series of long takes, stretches of silence and an autumnal colour palette, Miller builds up a palpable atmosphere of unease. The volatile performances are consistently flawless. Carell’s performance is the attention-grabber, but Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo are equally effective as Mark and David, whose relationship is both intimate and weighed down by sibling rivalry. Tatum’s Mark, in particular, is an engagingly lonely figure: mumbling and shuffling through ordinary life and eating bowls of uncooked instant noodles and ketchup before du Pont offers to oversee his training. With his jackets embroidered with his nickname, The Gold Eagle – another title he’s bestowed on himself – du Pont prowls around the gym, observing his wrestlers while actually doing very little of use. And when he brings in older brother David to provide the real coaching, a rift grows between Mark and du Pont, and quietly festers. Miller’s unobtrusively observant lens captures the nuances and brutal impacts of the drama and the sport itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in an early scene where we see Mark and his brother training together. Their wrestling is intimate and playful, but gradually shifts into something more bitter and stinging. It’s an example of what Foxcatcher does so well: it describes the familiarity and bitterness that lies between the brothers, wordlessly and without dramatic overstatement. More like a retelling of Faust than sports drama, Foxcatcher explores what its brothers are willing to sacrifice in their grasp for success. And overseeing it all, like a manipulative Mr Miyagi, is Carell’s du Pont. At once pathetic and terrifying, he might just be the most hypnotic screen villain of recent years. Foxcatcher is out in UK cinemas on the 9th January. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.