Deborah Ross

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, which stars Michael Keaton as a one-time superhero movie star (just like Keaton himself), is audacious technically, and so meta it may well blow your mind, but it is also weird, maddening, wearing and exhausting. It is so frantically fast-paced it feels as if you are on a theme-park ride that

1. Mr Turner Mike Leigh’s infinitely superior biopic starring a sublime, if grunty, Timothy Spall. 2. 12 Years A Slave Harrowing – you’ll be harrowed to within an inch of your life – but it’s unflinching look at American slavery will stay powerfully with you unlike, for example, Django Unchained or The Butler 3. Boyhood Richard

Kon-Tiki is a dramatisation of Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,300-mile, 101-day journey across the Pacific by balsa-wood raft, which took place in 1947, and was a remarkable achievement, unlike this film, which so isn’t. True, it does what it says on the tin. There’s an ocean, and it’s traversed. There is jeopardy, most notably in the form

‘Please look after this bear,’ reads the famous label hanging round Paddington’s neck, and this film does that, admirably, handsomely, endearingly, lovingly and not at all sexily. Such a furore, when the film was awarded a PG instead of a U certificate for ‘sexual references’ — oh no! What have they done to the bear?

The Homesman, which stars Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones and is set in the Nebraska territory in the 1850s, is being sold as ‘a feminist Western’, which is a bit rich. This is not a bad film. It’s modestly entertaining, in its way. And it does portray the harshness of life for the early

The Imitation Game is a biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who broke the German’s Enigma code during the war, created the blueprint for the modern computer and was then hounded to death by the authorities for being gay, the bastards. It’s a fascinating story, as well as one of those

Christopher Nolan’s futuristic epic Interstellar isn’t a clever film, or even a dumb film with a clever film trying to get out. Instead, and no matter what the hype may say, this is a dumb film with an even dumber film trying to get out. Even the tag line, which is also the basic premise,

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/apollomagazine/Apollo_final.mp3″ title=”Tom Marks, editor of Apollo magazine, talks to Mike Leigh”] Listen [/audioplayer]Mr Turner may be the gruntiest film of the year, possibly the gruntiest film ever. ‘Grunt, grunt, grunt,’ goes Mr Turner (Timothy Spall) as he sketches, paints, gropes his housekeeper, woos a Margate landlady, winds up John Constable something rotten. But what

Fury is a second world war drama that plays with us viscerally and unsparingly — I think I saw a head being blown off; I think I saw a sliced-off face, flopping about — but is still just another second world war drama. That is, Americans good, Nazis bad, and a man doesn’t become a

Take tissues to The Best of Me, I’d read, as it’s such a weepie, so I took tissues, being a weeper at weepies — I still dab my eyes whenever I even think about War Horse — but it was rubbish advice. You don’t need tissues for this film. Instead, you need to line up

Effie Gray, which has been written by Emma Thompson and recounts the doomed marriage of Victorian art critic John Ruskin to his teenage bride (he refused to consummate it), has a blissful cast. It stars Dakota Fanning, Ms Thompson herself, plus Julie Walters, David Suchet, Greg Wise, James Fox, Derek Jacobi and Robbie Coltrane. So

Gone Girl is David Fincher’s adaptation of the bestselling thriller by Gillian Flynn, a relentless page-turner which I’ve heard people say they read ‘even though it’s not that good’ — you were hooked; get over it; don’t be snotty — and which I read, even though it’s not that good. The twists and turns are

What We Did On Our Holiday is written and directed by Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, the pair who created the hit BBC sitcom Outnumbered, and this is like an extended episode of Outnumbered minus anything that made it good in the first instance. This is Outnumbered: The Movie (But Crap). Hard to explain, considering

Before I Go To Sleep is Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of S.J. Watson’s bestselling thriller of 2011, but whereas the book was smart, gripping, ingeniously plotted and had psychological depth — who are we, when we can’t remember who we are? — this is a disappointment on so many levels. It’s not as if it’s even

Night Moves is a film by Kelly Reichardt, who also made the heart-wrenching Wendy and Lucy (2008), which may be one of my favourite films of all time. (If you don’t know it, go look it up; I’m old now, so no longer have the energy to educate you in these matters.) Her films, she

Wakolda is not a sunny film for a sunny day, just so you’re aware, but as there is so little else around — August is a hopeless month for films; August is a dumping ground for the sub-par — you are going to have to take that on the chin, bear it as best you

Your enjoyment of Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo may entirely depend on how much visual whimsy you can take, what your threshold might be, whether you can go with it or whether it wears you out and brings you to your knees. There’s animated food and little mice that zip around in cars and eels wriggling

The trouble with Believe is that, unless you are ten years old or under, which I’m assuming you are not, you won’t believe. Not for a second. Not for a minute. Not a word of it. This doesn’t see itself as a children’s film and isn’t being marketed as a children’s film, which means I

Finding Vivian Maier is a documentary about the American nanny who led a wholly secretive life as a photographer and who, posthumously, has been described as ‘one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century’. It’s a good story, which is well told here, and told breezily (83 minutes), which we like. But I’m not