Deborah Ross

Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog could also be called The Power of Benedict Cumberbatch, as he’s so spectacular. He plays a ruggedly masculine cowboy with an inner life that isn’t written, but that we somehow still see. It is also clearly Campion’s best film since The Piano or my own favourite, An Angel at My Table (as for Bright Star, we said we’d never talk of it again — why did you even bring it up? We all have our off days). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRDPo0CHrko If Cumberbatch doesn’t win every award going, I’ll eat my hat, but probably not his ten-gallon one The film is based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage that was praised to the skies when published but sold very few copies, unfathomably.

Go see Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, which stars Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, and the next day you will wonder: did I go to the cinema last night or did I have a cheese dream? Did she really clear the room of staff by saying she wished to masturbate, or was it the cheddar and crackers I foolishly had before bed? This is a total cheese dream of a film —did she really just eat a pearl? — but also it’s a riveting one as well as a thrillingly entertaining one. Plus it all somehow feels true even if it isn’t. Broken woman, unfeeling family. That seems about right. This is a total cheese dream of a film – did she really just eat a pearl?

Passing is Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of the Nella Larsen novella (1929) about two biracial women, one of whom chooses to pass for white, and one who does not, and the effect they have on each other, and it’s superbly done. It’s tightly made, exquisite to look at, strangely tense, wholly riveting and it’s also, let’s be honest, just the right length for a film (90 minutes). Hall — who wrote the screenplay and directs, and is otherwise an actress — is the daughter of theatre director Peter Hall and opera singer Maria Ewing and you could say she has skin in the game. When she was growing up, she has said, she would sometimes look at her mother and wonder: are you a black woman?

The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but also he has always yearned to make a film about the New Yorker, the magazine with subscribers all round the world, some of whom actually get round to reading it before binning it, and some of whom don’t. (She says, guiltily.) So The French Dispatch is, he has said, the ‘smooching’ of these two ideas, and it is, alas, a ‘smooch’ of a film. That is, not one thing or the other. I would further add it’s as if all the cast had been instructed to act wackily and off-kilter throughout because we won’t get tired of that. But I promise you we quickly do.

Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is set in the 14th century and is a tale of rivalry and rape told from three points of view, when two would probably have been sufficient. The best is saved to last, perhaps unforgivably. It’s the woman’s story, starring Jodie Comer who is sensational, so do hang on in there for that. However, I can’t guarantee that you won’t have severe battle-scene fatigue by then.

This week, an excellent film (Moving On) and a film that isn’t at all, but is entirely worth it as it’s one of the super bad ones that don’t come along too often. It’s the kind that, if it were any better, it would actually be a terrible pity. (See also: Cats.) It’s Diana: The Musical and it’s two hours of ‘whaaaaaat?’ and pinching yourself that this is really happening. (After two hours I was black and blue, with the pinching.) I don’t know what the best lyric is but ‘Harry, my ginger-haired son, you’ll always be second to none’ has to be up there. (Also: ‘It’s the Thrilla in Manila but with Diana and Camilla’ has to be in the game. The top spot is highly contested.

It’s a hard heart that doesn’t warm to the musical drama Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I don’t have a hard heart, and I was warmed, but I also have an impatient heart and my patience was sometimes tested. There’s a point in this film where you might, for example, be asking yourself: do we really need yet another song about empowerment set in the school canteen? Or: can we not have another a pep talk about being true to yourself? On reflection, I would say my heart was only around 42 per cent warmed, at a guess. The starting point for the whole Jamie phenomenon was a BBC3 documentary about a working-class 16-year-old from Sheffield, Jamie Campbell, who aspired to be a drag queen and wanted to go to his school prom in a dress.

Herself is an intensely powerful film about domestic violence that isn’t Nil By Mouth or The Killer Inside Me or any of the other films that have you begging: ‘Oh, sweet Jesus, please make this stop.’ Actually, it starts like that, but then becomes something else — something that never loses sight of why we’re here but is also an uplifting tale about a woman who wants to rebuild her life by building a home. And now I’ve made it sound like some cheesy, feelgood monstrosity. Trust me, it isn’t. Herself is produced by Sharon Horgan and directed by Phyllida Lloyd (The Iron Lady, the Mamma Mia! franchise) because women make films from top to bottom these days. Get over it. (Below-the-line commenters: I said this just to bait you.

Leos Carax is the director whose films have always been wilfully odd. Ron and Russell Mael (the brothers from the band Sparks) have also always been wilfully odd. Annette is a collaboration between the three and is therefore wilfully odd in spades. Starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, it is a fantastical, fever-dreamish, sung-through rock opera and I bet you won’t see a more wilfully odd film this year. As regular readers will know, I am generally fond of any film that busts all known Hollywood formats. Yet while I tried with every fibre of my being to like Annette I did not entirely succeed. The original idea came from the Mael brothers who are currently enjoying a moment, having been the subject of a recent Edgar Wright documentary.

The Courier is a Cold War spy thriller and the prospect of a Cold War spy thriller always makes my heart sink. There will be agents. There will be double agents and triple agents and maybe even quadruple agents. Is he working for our side while pretending to work for the Soviets as someone pretending to be working for us? After any Le Carré adaptation, for example, I also need debriefing in a wood-panelled room filled with cigarette smoke and there is still no saying I’ll emerge any the wiser. But The Courier isn’t like that. This is a damn good, explosively tense story that focuses on the friendship that develops between two men on opposite sides. And it is plainly wonderful.

The biggest challenge in reviewing M. Night Shyamalan’s Old lies in describing its central idea without making the film sound considerably cleverer and more interesting than it is, but I’ll give it my best shot. Just remember: if I fail, and Old does sound clever or interesting at any point, it totally isn’t. This is directed and written by Shyamalan who is one of the most consistently inconsistent of film makers (Sixth Sense, good; The Village, so-so; Last Airbender, let’s never talk of it again). The central idea has it that a group of holidaymakers are trapped on a tropical, secluded beach where ageing is accelerated and, as they discover, every 30 minutes there amounts to a year.

Off the Rails is one of those gentle ensemble comedies that we do so well (Calendar Girls, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, etc.), except when we don’t, and it all falls rather flat, and feels like the B-side of a Richard Curtis film. This comes in, alas, at the flatter, B-side end of the spectrum, even if its heart is in the right place and all the other things you say when a film doesn’t deserve a kicking. But you can’t really say it’s any good. Plot-wise the deal is: to comply with the dying wish of their best friend, Liz (Sally Phillips), Kate (Jenny Seagrove) and Cassie (Kelly Preston) must take her 18-year-old daughter, Maddie (Elizabeth Dormer-Phillips), on the interrailing trip around Europe that they never quite finished when they were young.

Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer boredom, I was tempted back by the fact that this one stars a lady (Scarlett Johansson) and another lady (Florence Pugh) and even a third lady (Rachel Weisz) and is directed by a lady (Cate Shortland). Could be wonderful, I thought, except it isn’t. More women is its only decent idea. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. Otherwise, it’s all formulaic bish-bosh, smash-crash action scenes broken up by lame jokes and lame philosophising along the lines of: ‘Your pain only makes you stronger.’ Not if you’re dying in hospital and they’ve run out of morphine, I was minded to shout at the screen.

Tove is a biopic of the Finnish artist Tove Jansson who, most famously, created the Moomins, that gentle family of hippo-like trolls with the soft, velvety bellies which I remember reading about as a child when I was laid up with chicken pox. (The collector’s editions published by Sort of Books have restored the original artwork, are dazzling, and will take you right back, minus all that Calamine.) Biopics of artists are often more miss than hit. I’m still recovering from that Jackson Pollock one where he completes his first action painting and is told: ‘You’ve done it, Jackson! You’ve cracked it wide open!

Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round has been heaped with awards: an Oscar, a Bafta, it swept the European Film Awards. And it has received rave reviews everywhere. I must now work out, I suppose, why I found it such a hard, boring, unrewarding, annoying slog. I did have a stern talk with myself, and even watched it again, but with the same result. I suppose your enjoyment may depend on how much time you might wish to spend with drunk middle-aged men who imagine they are being interesting. Or have you been trapped at parties by too many of them down the years? You may ask yourself: why should I be at all interested in these annoyingly stupid men?

At the time Supernova went into production one headline read: ‘What did we do to deserve a love story starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci?’ Something right, I suppose. This is an intense, intimate, spare film about love, grief and dementia, and the two leads, who play a gay couple, are superb. There is now the argument that gay roles should be played solely by gay actors but, my heavens, you can’t deny this pair look irresistibly adorable tucked up in bed together. Like Eric and Ernie, but with a sexier vibe. Tucci, Firth, a lovely dog and top-class jumpers? We must have done something stupendously right Tucci and Firth play Tusker and Sam, a couple who have been together for 20 years and possess excellent knitwear.

In The Heights is an adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit stage musical — the one he wrote before Hamilton — and it is all-singing, all-dancing, and a ‘feelgood summer movie’, as they say. True, the storytelling is quite basic — anyone frowning over a calculator is sure to have money worries — and by the end of two and a half hours you may well be praying for less singing, and less dancing, I beg you. But what the hell. It’s colourful, it’s fun. It has an unstoppable energy. It has some tremendous set-pieces. And it’s blissfully straightforward.

The Father is an immensely powerful film about dementia starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, who was asleep in his bed in Wales when his Best Actor Oscar was announced, so we’ll never know if his outfit would have been a hit or a miss. Shall we give him the benefit of the doubt and say ‘hit’? Either way, he is absolutely remarkable here. I read the screenplay, available online, out of curiosity, and what he brings to the words on the page is beyond and beyond and beyond. Hopkins has played King Lear (twice) but this is his real King Lear. What Hopkins brings to the words on the page is beyond and beyond and beyond Adapting it from his own play (with help from Christopher Hampton), Florian Zeller has also directed the film.

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow stars John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, and a Jersey cow listed in the credits as ‘Evie’, who has a dewy face and big soft eyes. As Reichardt has confessed: ‘She is very beautiful and was cast purely on her looks.’ Evie is, thankfully, as convincing as she is beautiful, and this is a convincing and beautiful film. It is touching, tender, original, entrancing, definitely the best cow film of the year. Plus it’s also a quietly masterful thriller where a clafoutis (blueberry) will have you on the edge of your seat.

The cinemas finally reopened this week and what better way to celebrate than with Peter Rabbit 2? You’ll probably be thinking that there are plenty of better ways to celebrate than with Peter Rabbit 2, particularly if you saw the first Peter Rabbit, which was a travesty (I think. I slept through most of it). However, while this sequel has none of the smarts of, say, Toy Story or Paddington, the franchise is getting there. It’s certainly an improvement on the original (I stayed awake, mostly) and who knows, by Peter Rabbit 798, which seems inevitable, it may have actually nailed it. The film is directed by Will Gluck, who co-wrote the screenplay with Patrick Burleigh.