Based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the frontrunner at this year’s Oscars with a hefty 13 nominations. Were it not for Slumdog Millionaire, David Fincher’s visually arresting, realist fable would probably sweep the board in a similar fashion to The English Patient.

However, this technically dazzling, 166-minute epic still stands a good chance of cluttering the mantelpiece with golden statuettes. Claudio Miranda’s gorgeous cinematography shows off the majestic production design to the full, complemented by slick computer-generated effects and Alexandre Desplat’s heartstring-plucking score.

Yet there is something slightly awry in this fantastical tale of a man who grows younger not older with each passing day Perhaps it’s the unshakeable feeling that we’re being emotionally manipulated, or the pacing, which seems to drag in places with Fincher’s directorial flourishes.

The film opens in a New Orleans hospital room where Caroline (Julia Ormond) watches as her elderly mother Daisy (Cate Blanchett) clings to life. To pass the time, Caroline reads from an extraordinary journal.

“My name is Benjamin Button and I was born under unusual circumstances,” confides the eponymous hero as we are transported back to 1918, when an expectant father (Jason Flemyng) races home to witness the birth of his son. Mr Button recoils in horror at the baby swaddled in a blanket: the mewling infant looks like an old man, with ossified bones and wrinkled skin, and will apparently die within hours.

He abandons the child in the dead of night and African-American retirement home nurse Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) takes pity on the abandoned babe and raises him as her own. As Benjamin (Brad Pitt) grows older, he looks ever more youthful.

When he is eventually strong and old enough to leave the retirement home, Benjamin seeks his fortune aboard a tugboat captained by a hard-drinking Irishman (Jared Harris) and finds romance with a beautiful ballet dancer called Daisy (Blanchett), who will pirouette her way into his heart.

The film recalls Forrest Gump, possessing the same scope and ambition as it juxtaposes an ordinary man’s extraordinary escapades against a backdrop of 20th-century American history. Fincher’s brio carries the picture through some longueurs. He orchestrates stunning set pieces including an explosive encounter with a Second World War U-boat and a dazzling sequence about the cruelty of fate and coincidence.

Digital trickery superimposes Pitt’s face on to the bodies of other actors until he is able to embrace the lead role entirely.

He perfectly captures his character’s inner turmoil; the fear of forging emotional bonds with Daisy or the people he cares about because “while everybody else was ageing, I was getting younger, all alone”.

In this age of CCTV cameras, the Internet and the paparazzi, no sordid secret or lapse in judgement remains concealed forever. So, what happens when you believe something to be true, even though you have no tangible evidence to back up your suspicions? How far would you go in your pursuit of the absolute proof?

“What do you do when you’re not sure? That’s the topic of my sermon today,” explains caring priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), at the beginning of Doubt. Themes of certainty and suspicion underpin writer/director John Patrick Shanley’s film, adapted from his own Tony award-winning stage play of the same name, set in a 1960s Catholic school.

In this hermetically sealed world of religion and rules, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) rules with an iron fist. Trouble erupts when painfully naive Sister James (Amy Adams) confides to her ferocious superior that the holy man has “taken an interest” in one of the boys, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II).

Inviting Father Flynn into her office with Sister James as a witness (for the sake of propriety), Aloysius confronts the man of God, determined to bully him into a confession of guilt. Instead, he pleads innocence. The situation spirals out of control when Sister Aloysius contacts Donald’s mother (Viola Davis) to apprise her of the supposed facts.

Like Frost/Nixon, the film version of Doubt lacks the immediacy and some of the palpable tension of the stage version but Shanley’s adaptation of his own source material is still a riveting game of cat and mouse.