Cinema

I’m not sure that everything wrong with the world can be blamed on Twilight — but most of it can. Ever since those oh-so-dreamy vampire stories first set hearts a-fluttering and cash registers a-ringing, Hollywood has been looking out for other fantasy yarns to strip down and hawk to 13-year-old girls. And now it has alighted on fairy tales. Last year we had a film of Red Riding Hood (from the director of Twilight). This year we have Snow White and the Huntsman (with one of the stars of Twilight). And there are also adaptations of Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty on the way (and if they don’t overlap with Twilight somehow, what’s the point?). Then there is this: Mirror Mirror, another version of the Snow White tale.

We Bought a Zoo — in which a family buys a zoo — does what it says on the tin and if you like this sort of film you will like this and if you don’t you won’t, and you have to ask yourself why you buy The Spectator every week? It’s for analysis like this which, I think you will find, is unavailable elsewhere. But do I like this sort of film? Actually, I rather do. There are no surprises. It is comfortingly straight up and down. It is heartwarming, to the extent you can buy it. There are animals: lions, tigers, a grizzly bear, and a funny little monkey. I found it a perfectly agreeable way to spend the two hours I would otherwise waste and you may feel similarly if this is the sort of film you like, but probably not if you don’t.

Bel Ami is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel of the same name about a young man who sleeps himself to the top of Parisian society — I once slept myself to the top of Parisian society, but by the time I got there I was far too exhausted to properly enjoy it — and while it is lush and handsomely mounted and features copious sex scenes it lacks what it would absolutely have to have were it to work: erotic sizzle.

The first and perhaps only thing to really say about Hunky Dory is that it is anything but. It is not hunky dory at all. Instead, it is half-baked and tiresome. I’d had rather high hopes for it. It’s a ‘let’s-put-on-a-show!’ film set in a Welsh comprehensive during the long hot summer of 1976 — the summer I turned 16, as it happens — so I expected at least some of it to resonate, but its characters are so unfinished and improbabilities so plentiful and narrative so unoriginal it’s like an extended episode of Fame, only worse.

The Muppet Show was my favourite TV programme when I was growing up, but this film, the first in over a decade? Not so much, even though it is fun in parts. I liked it terrifically at the beginning, and loved seeing Kermit again, and Miss Piggy, with her ‘pork chop’ (‘Hi-yah!’) and Gonzo and Fozzie Bear and Animal, because they are all such distinct personalities, and have such presence, and when I heard the theme tune for the first time in years — ‘It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights, it’s time to meet the Muppets on The Muppet Show tonight...’ — I felt I might actually burst with happiness, although luckily I didn’t.

Carnage is Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s hit stage play The God of Carnage, in which two sets of parents get together to discuss an altercation between their 11-year-old sons in the hope that they can figure it out sensibly, and all hell breaks loose. I have my reservations. I’m not convinced the play was exactly begging to be filmed, particularly as Polanski doesn’t open it up and keeps it, more or less, to one suffocating room and hallway, and I’m not convinced it’s particularly deep or insightful, but there is some enjoyment to be had from watching four actors at the top of their game get to where they do get to, even though it’s not much of any place.

The Descendants is a comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family — is there any other kind of family? I’ve yet to meet one — made by Alexander Payne, who also made About Schmidt and Sideways, but whereas I warmed to those films, I could not warm to this. I liked it. I enjoyed it. I did not resent the time I’d spent watching it, although that may just be because I seriously have nothing better to do. (I spent much of this morning removing the fluff from my keyboard with a pin, for example.) It’s already been heaped with praise and two Oscar nominations (for best picture and George Clooney’s performance) but it left me cold. I suppose at some level I just could not buy it or its basic premise that someone married to Clooney might have an affair.

W.E. is Madonna’s second outing as a film director, and this tells ‘the greatest royal love story of the 20th century’ via two women separated by more than half a century: Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and a modern-day New Yorker, Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a society wife who becomes obsessed with Mrs Simpson when her possessions come up for auction at Sotheby’s. These days, it is common practice to ridicule and deride Madonna — just who does she think she is? And so on — but I am not of this camp, believe this film has much to teach us, and the top ten lessons are as follows. 1.

The latest film by the Turner Prize-winning artist and now acclaimed film-maker Steve McQueen is an electrifying snapshot of the life of Brandon, a sex addict, played by Michael Fassbender. Shame (released this week) is McQueen’s second feature and follows his 2008 debut Hunger, about the Irish Republican hunger-striker Bobby Sands, which also stars Fassbender. McQueen, 42, is west London-born and Amsterdam-based.