Deborah Ross

Wadjda is the first feature-length film to come out of Saudi Arabia, and was shot by the country’s first female director, and although people will talk about how it breaks boundaries and how pioneering it is, that’s not what you most need to know. What you most need to know is that it’s fascinating, involving,

Pacific Rim is a giant monsters v. giant robots film and although written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, who made Pan’s Labyrinth, which was sublime, it’s still just a giant monsters v. giant robots film, and now we have dealt with that, we can move on to The Moo Man. The Moo Man is

Sofia Coppola’s latest film is not an action adventure, or a supernatural horror, or a stoner comedy, just so you know. Instead, it’s about the emptiness of the celebrity lifestyle just as her Lost in Translation was about the emptiness of the celebrity lifestyle, and Somewhere, and Marie Antoinette, in its way. Write about what

Hummingbird is a British thriller starring Jason Statham which may be all you need to know to keep away and if it is, can’t say I blame you. Statham is the actor who rose to fame as one of Guy Ritchie’s entourage and now plays bad-ass, hard-boiled action heroes of the kind who can take

I Am Nasrine is one of those small, low-budget films showing somewhere awkward on a day and time that probably aren’t ideal but you can’t expect everything in life to be handed to you on a plate, and it’s worth the effort, if you can stir yourself sufficiently. (Can you? Most people I asked said

Behind the Candelabra is Stephen Soderbergh’s film about Liberace, starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, and already you will have heard two things which, naturally, you will need me to confirm so you can move on with your life. These two things are: 1. It is fabulous. 2. The film was ultimately funded by the

Neil Jordan’s Byzantium may well be stylish and moody — so moody, in fact, I wanted to send it to its bedroom with the instruction it could only come down again when less sulky — and Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan may well be fine actresses, but yet another vampire film? Really? True, it plays

Something in the Air is a French film set in Paris in 1971, three years after the uprisings of June 1968; a time when civil unrest was still ongoing but starting to tail off. In France, this film is titled Après Mai, which makes a lot more sense, as it speaks of an aftermath, and

OK, old sports, Baz Luhrmann’s version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, as produced by Jay-Z, and with Kanye West on the soundtrack, has already riled the purists, who are grumbling and railing and basically queuing up to say it sucks, it’s a travesty, nothing like the book, doesn’t even come close, but you

I was so excited about I’m So Excited but now I am just so disappointed. I love Pedro Almodóvar, usually. I would be his bitch any day, I’d have said, and although I’d probably still be his bitch, because you can’t hold one film against a person when they’ve made so many terrific ones, I

The Look of Love is the biopic of Paul Raymond and although it wants to be a tragedy — I could feel it straining at the leash to go in that direction — it never quite pulls it off, so to speak. Visually, it’s fantastic, with more retro kitsch than you can shake a stick

Love Is All You Need is a romantic comedy that isn’t romantic or comic or much of anything. It stars Pierce Brosnan as Philip, a widowed, all-work-no-play Englishman working in Denmark whose son is about to get married in Italy. Meanwhile, across town, the mother of the bride, Ida (Trine Dyrholm), a hairdresser who wears

The Place Beyond the Pines stars both Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper — you spoil us, ambassador! — and is a generational feud film about fathers and sons and legacy. Can anyone be born clean? How do past events reverberate? How might one act of violence play out, years later? It is written and directed

Obviously, we all love Danny Boyle and want to have his babies — I’d like at least two of his babies — but his latest film, Trance, is a horrid mess. A psychological take on the art-heist film, it is miscast, iffily acted, confusing, implausible (to the extent I never fully understood what was happening)

Compliance is a small film that says big things rather than one of those big films  that say very little, if anything. It’s written and directed by no one you have ever heard of, and stars no one you have ever heard of (I know!; be brave!) yet takes such a rivetingly clear-eyed look at

Welcome to the Punch is a British crime action thriller and here is why you may wish to see it: it is set in a night-time London so magnificently lit even I wanted to visit, and I live there. And now, ten reasons you can skip it, get on with your life and save 99

Robot & Frank is about a robot, and Frank, and I’d like to say it is as charmingly irresistible as you might suppose from the cute posters all around town, but hand on heart?  I cannot. It’s OK, I guess, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough, and, in the end,

Cloud Atlas is part-sci-fi, part-thriller, part-romance, part-comedy, part-action flick, part-this, part-that and it all adds up to? A whole lot of not very much. Based on David Mitchell’s novel, this strains, laboriously, to capture that novel’s scope and complexity, but gets nowhere near, and takes three hours to get nowhere near. (If you are going

Hitchcock is one of those films which would have been much better off if it had taken a moment to sit down and decide on its own sensibility. Before a camera had even rolled, it should have pulled up a chair and asked itself: am I a film about Hitchcock’s marriage, or am I a