Cinema

Puss in Boots was the surprise hit character — the standout sidekick — of the second Shrek movie, and went on to tickle us in Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After. Sleek, foolish, vain and blessed with the all-butter voice of Antonio Banderas, he was the roving ginger tom whom audiences wished to take home and make a pet of. His easy charm and roguish asides have earned the well-heeled moggy what every sidekick wants but few deserve: his own ‘origin story’. Puss in Boots is a full-length, computer-animated feature film which describes the making of the mouser. Several fairy tales are put through the scriptwriters’ mouli and served up where once upon a time and long ago a story might have been written.

Justice is a plodding and uninteresting revenge thriller starring Nicolas Cage and January Jones, and as I don’t have much else to say about it I’m going to fill the rest of the space by telling you about my dinner with Meryl Streep, who stars as Margaret Thatcher in the forthcoming The Iron Lady. This is all true, mad as it seems. And as I outstayed my welcome, as I always do — you can rely on it — I even caught Ms Streep washing up. ‘Meryl Streep washing up!’ I exclaimed. ‘Next, it’ll be Tom Cruise putting the bins out.’ She smiled graciously as she rinsed out a mug. God, she’s lovely.

To see or not to see, that is the question, just as it is always the question with us — I believe our relationship may be caught in what is generally referred to as a ‘rut’ — but I shall answer all the same and my answer is this: Anonymous is a ‘not see’ and I would urge you to not see it at your earliest possible convenience. Shame, as it had looked such a prospect. It’s a big, fat costume drama set during the Elizabethan era which asks what some scholars have been asking for the past century or so: did Shakespeare actually write the works credited to him? It has a tremendous cast, and stars, among others, Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance and David Thewlis.

Tyrannosaur is very much in the British working-class miserablist tradition in the sense that it is full of masculine fury and the women who take the brunt of it, and if this does not sound an attractive proposition, it’s because it isn’t, and never is, but, as far as these unattractive propositions go, this is powerfully affecting. I would also add that if, in the upcoming months, the actress Olivia Colman does not win every award going for her performance as a nice Christian lady with something to hide, I will be surprised, stunned, amazed, astonished and incredulous. I will also be dumbfounded, and flabbergasted, and will eat my hat, but not my thesaurus which, over the years, has proved handy, convenient and opportune.

Ho-hum. Another week, another batch of secret agents, and while I have nothing against secret agents personally — they are generally willing to die for their country, which is nice, although probably quite tiring — The Debt never equals the sum of its parts. It has a blinding cast (Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciarán Hinds) and there are some good things to be said for it but it never fully compels or meshes as the emotionally driven, multilayered, grown-up thriller it yearns to be. Plus, it is certainly in the running for my annual, much uncoveted Most Preposterous Third Act Award.

The basic problem with I Don’t Know How She Does It is that we are meant to sympathise with a rich woman who has an absolutely amazing life and great hair and is nannied to the hilt and I Don’t Know How To Do That. How do you do that? Can you take classes? If so, where? Actually, it’s a shame, and disappointing, and I sort of can’t help taking it personally. I had my son in 1992, when I was working on a national newspaper — stick with me; this anecdote almost has a point — and when I told the managing editor I would be requiring maternity leave, he sighed disappointedly and said, ‘I do wish you girls would keep your legs together.

There is panic in the extraterrestrial markets. The Ursa Minor indexes are tanking, and slime-based lifeforms throughout the galaxy are dumping the Outer Space equivalent of Italian bonds and piling into something a bit safer — gold. But gold is running out, so aliens looking to diversify their portfolios with the universe’s most valuable metal are left with only one option: steal it from some backwater of a planet like, well, Earth. OK, I’m speculating here. But imagine this scenario playing out 150 years ago, and you pretty much have the backstory of Cowboys & Aliens — in which an intergalactic mining vessel thuds down somewhere in the New Mexico Territory with the intention of gittin’ it some bullion.

Apes have always made lousy movie stars. They never have front-page affairs with other celebrity animals; there’s no Most Emotional Grunt category at the Academy Awards; and teenage girls don’t lie in bed at night, dreaming of one day meeting the Right Orangutan. That’s why, if you going to make a summer blockbuster named Rise of the Planet of the Apes, with a primate in the starring role, you’d better cast a pretty damn good human foil: an actor of such prodigious handsomeness and talent, the audience will forget it has paid good money to spend two hours in the company of hominoids.

Project Nim is a story about man and chimp in which chimp comes out of it well, man does not and, I’m warning you, it’s fascinating, but not pretty. The starting point is an Oklahoma lab in 1973 when Nim, a male baby chimp, is taken from his mother at a fortnight old and sent to be raised by a human family as part of an experiment to discover if another species can learn to communicate with us. We follow Nim all the way, from the moment he is wrenched from his mother’s arms, through Seventies’ academia — a peculiarly hilarious time; Nim is fond of the odd spliff — and right to the end, by which time his helpless innocence has been fully exploited and science has lost interest.

Horrid Henry (3D, like we care) is the first big-screen adaptation of Francesca Simon’s bestselling children’s books, and if you would like to save yourself a trip to the cinema you can recreate the experience at home by tuning into some super-noisy, busy, brightly coloured Saturday-morning kids’ TV programme while simultaneously bashing your head between a pair of cymbals and wishing you were dead. This film is an agony from beginning to end. The plot is a chaotic mishmash of several others via a number of nonsensical detours, plus all the characters, without exception, are appallingly drawn. There is not a scintilla of truth in any of them. Not a sniff.