Deborah Ross

Two films this week, one that has stood the test of time, dazzlingly — it still feels as fresh as a daisy, almost 90 years on — and another that’s so tiresome it felt almost 90 years long. First, Pandora’s Box, directed by G.W. Pabst in 1929, starring Louise Brooks and her iconic hair-do. It is always described as ‘a masterpiece of silent cinema’, which, let’s admit it, can strike fear into the heart of the average cinemagoer. It’ll be primitive, vaudevillian, barely watchable. There will be exaggerated hand-flapping and over-the-top faces.

Edie tells the story of an 84-year-old woman who wants to fulfil a girlhood ambition by climbing a Scottish mountain. It stars the wonderful Sheila Hancock who has been criminally underused cinematically down the years — ‘I wasn’t considered attractive enough,’ she recently said. As there are anyway too few films featuring older women with their own narratives, I am absolutely desperate to be generous about this. That’s the aim. It won’t always be easy, frankly, but if there is one thing this film wants you to take away it is this: you’re never too old for a challenge. At the outset, Edie is seen living under the hand of her husband.

On Chesil Beach is an adaptation of the Ian McEwen novella set in 1962 when ‘conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible’ and a young couple suffer a disastrous wedding night from which there will be no return. This is surefooted, mostly, and literary and tasteful and sad and English, and it also stars the ever-remarkable Saoirse Ronan. But it does take a giant misstep at the end — the ending is plainly horrible — plus the book’s frustrations don’t magically disappear. One crap shag and that’s it, it’s over? It worried you then and it will worry you now.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is set in the 1970s and has punk as the backdrop and an excellent cast (Nicole Kidman, Ruth Wilson, Elle Fanning). It also features what could be a decent premise (boy who treats girls as if from another planet meets actual girl from another planet). But everything it has going for it is undone by what it doesn’t have going for it, which is substantial. This could, in fact, have been titled How to Stay Awake Once You’ve Lost All Patience because, I now know, staying awake once you’ve lost all patience makes talking to girls at parties look like a walk in the park, frankly.

When I first read that Beast is a serial-killer thriller my heart sank like a stone — yet more women raped, butchered, murdered; splendid, bring it on. But it is, in fact, fascinating and brilliant, and not like any serial-killer thriller you’ve seen before. This is because a woman owns it. Psychologically and emotionally. Not because she’s the actual killer, although if she were the killer would she need to work four times as hard to achieve the same notoriety as a man? Kill eight to his two? But we mustn’t allow that to hold us up. Beast is a feature-length debut for writer/director Michael Pearce and it stars Jessie Buckley, who is phenomenal.

Two films about women this week. One, Funny Cow, is about a woman who daringly takes on men at their own game while the other, Let the Sunshine In, is dressed up in French art-house garb but basically has Juliette Binoche tirelessly running round Paris in thrall to every fella she encounters. I certainly know which I preferred. However, if you look at review aggregate sites, like Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll see Sunshine achieves the far higher score. But then most film critics are male and probably wouldn’t mind Juliette Binoche tirelessly chasing them round Paris, or anywhere else. (I have just asked a man if this is so and he has confirmed: ‘I wouldn’t mind at all. And it could be Bournemouth.

Custody is both social realism and a thriller and it’s terrific. It is smart, beautifully acted, never crass about the subject in hand (domestic abuse), and is one of those films that will have you totally gripped while you’ll also be longing for it to end, as it’s so unbearably tense. I swear my heart as good as stopped several times. It’s written and directed by Xavier Legrand, who handles both genres with supreme elegance. Or, to put it another way, it’s like a Ken Loach film that’s been hijacked by Stephen King, but seamlessly. (‘Mind if I have a go, Ken?’, ‘Be my guest, Steve’.) This is Legrand’s second film after Just Before Losing Everything (2013), which was only 30 minutes long, but earned him an Oscar nomination.

Wonderstruck is a film by Todd Haynes and you will certainly be struck by wonder, often. You will wonder at its painful slowness. You will wonder at the way it strains credulity until it snaps. You will wonder if the violins will ever give it a rest. You will wonder if it will ever end. And you will wonder at the ending, when it does finally come, as it is so stupid. So it does not short-change on the wonder front. Whatever the price of your cinema ticket, you will be getting limitless wonder in return. Haynes is usually such an immaculate, thoughtful, winning filmmaker (Carol, Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, that Karen Carpenter short told with Barbie dolls — Superstar) that you will also wonder: how could he have helmed such an unholy mess? ‘Is it for children?

The latest film from Wes Anderson is a doggy animation set in a fantasy Japan and as there was a screening in London earlier this week for owners and their dogs I took my own dog, Monty. He said he liked it. It was ‘good’, he said. I did not especially trust his opinion so investigated further. As good as, say, drinking from the toilet? ‘No,’ he said, ‘not as good as that, obvs.’ As good as this tennis ball here? ‘No’, he said, ‘because a tennis ball is always AMAZING!’ As good as cheese? ‘Nothing is as good as cheese. Fair play, you caught me out there.

Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, Unsane, is a psychological thriller about a woman who is incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital even though she claims to be perfectly sane. But is she? It was filmed fast, on an iPhone 7, and some aspects are worryingly thoughtless — its treatment of mental-health patients, for example, is remarkably Unsensitive. And it does descend into a plainly ridiculous, sub-par farce. But it is also, in parts, deliciously schlocky and it stars the wonderful Claire Foy, whom one hopes was paid decently. So shocking that she earned less than Matt Smith for The Crown, but as a positive person who likes to look on the bright side might I suggest that we celebrate the fact men are still doing so well? And throw a party or something?

This biopic of Mary Magdalene is a feminist retelling that may well be deserved but it’s so dreary and unremarkable that the fact it is well intentioned and even, perhaps, necessary can’t come through and win the day. Or even part of the day. Just the morning, say. Directed by Garth Davis (Lion), and written by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett, this is, according to the bumf, the Mary of the original gospels rather than the repentant sinner and ‘prostitute’, which is what, in truth, I always had her down as, but then I did get most of my learning from Jesus Christ Superstar.

You Were Never Really Here is a fourth feature from Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and the first thing to say is that it is exceptionally violent. I don’t say this disapprovingly but if your threshold for violence is as low as mine — I incurred a paper cut the other day and passed clean out — it will prove an 89-minute ordeal. Still, it has been described as ‘the Taxi Driver for the 21st century’, if that is of help while you’re bracing yourself for the next hammer blow. Personally, I found it of no help at all. Also, it’s untrue. The film stars a bulked-up Joaquin Phoenix as Joe, a tortured hit man, and it opens as it means to go on. That is, not prettily.

Dark River is the much-anticipated third feature from British writer/director Clio Barnard and it is one of those bleak, rural- England dramas featuring cement-coloured skies, wind, rain, mud, rusted old farm machinery and dead animals — do people who move out from the city know what they are letting themselves in for? — as well as the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse. (Should we pull them aside and have a word?) Apologies for sounding glib about such a heavy subject but this is, ultimately, so heavy-handed about that heavy subject it left me cold. I should point out, however, that other critics are available, and some are saying it is ‘powerful’ and ‘affecting’. So you pays your money and takes your pick.

Lady Bird is a semi-autobiographical film written and directed by Greta Gerwig with a plot synopsis that need not detain us as it is basically only this: girl has a mum. (Or: girl has a mum, and sometimes they row and sometimes they don’t.) But thus far it has won near universal critical praise, two Golden Globes and five Oscar nominations, thereby proving there is mileage in girls and their mums, and box office in girls and their mums, and that girls and their mums can be more than mere afterthoughts. In this respect, Lady Bird may, in fact, be quite the rare bird. It’s set in Sacramento, California, in 2002, and follows a year in the life of 17-year-old Christine McPherson, who calls herself ‘Lady Bird’ because she is, you know, At That Age.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is, indeed, devastatingly loveless, as well as devastatingly pitiless, which does not sound hopeful. Yet it is also devastatingly haunting, absorbing and transfixing. It’s a domestic drama about a missing boy that’s been widely taken as a state-of-the-nation drama about Russia today — a From Russia With No Love Whatsoever, if you like. But it may well be about the state of us all, which is the most devastating of all the devastatings. Generally, it’s just so much nicer to point the finger at others than at ourselves. (I have always found it to be much less devastating this way.) Set in the environs of Moscow, the film opens with a shot of a school and the children pouring out at the end of the day.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a lush psychosexual drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a pampered, tyrannical, pernickety 1950s couturier whose life is disrupted when he falls for a waitress who, in the most unexpected way, proves his match. It is a wonderfully fixating film in every respect, and wholly non-formulaic. And it miraculously transforms an addition to a breakfast order — ‘…and sausages’ — into one of the sexiest things ever said. Ultimately, its meaning will be open to interpretation. I saw it as the rather timely story of a man who is finally forced to cut out his misogynist heart and see women as real people, but your interpretation may differ, which is fine, even though I’m bound to be right.

Downsizing is a film with the most brilliant premise. What if, to save the planet, we were all made tiny? What if we only took up a tiny amount of space and flew in tiny planes and produced tiny amounts of rubbish? And what if we could live in the sort of mansions that would cost millions if they were regular-sized? What if, what if, what if, what if… but most crucially: what if this film had run with the premise rather than throwing it away? Could it have avoided becoming just another dumb ‘white saviour’ movie? And this, alas, is the ‘what if’ that must preoccupy us today. This is a film by Alexander Payne, otherwise known for Sideways and Nebraska and About Schmidt, so there may just be no explaining it.

Steven Spielberg’s The Post, which dramatizes the Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, doesn’t exactly push at the frontiers of storytelling. It’s told straight and in a familiar way. Here are the journalists furtively working through top-secret government papers in a smoke-choked room for the public good. (There were no empty pizza boxes in this instance, but there could have been, if you get my drift.) Here’s the government trying to stop them. Here’s the newspaper rolling off the press, and everyone clapping. And so on. But it does star Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, engaged in a kind of dance as the paper’s editor and proprietor, and you just can’t argue against Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep.

Brad’s Status is a midlife crisis film starring Ben Stiller as a nearly 50-year-old man whose status anxiety is through the roof, poor thing. My heart bleeds and all that. I’ll tell you what Brad’s status should be: face well and truly slapped. The film is written and directed by Mike White (Beatriz at Dinner; Enlightened) and in some quarters it has been renamed Mike’s White Privilege, which is fair — no one else gets a look in — but as it’s intended as a satire of white male privilege you can’t exactly blame it for being white, male and privileged. However, while some moments will resonate (who hasn’t ever felt envy, or does not hope for shitty lives behind the shiny Facebook updates?