Deborah Ross

The Grand Budapest Hotel is the latest Wes Anderson film and it is beautiful to look at, scrumptious, luscious, such a delicious confection I would have marched up to the screen and licked it if only, at the screening I attended, Mark Kermode had not been occupying the seat in front, and it would have meant scrambling over him, and maybe ruining his hair. (A quiff like that doesn’t hairdress itself, you know.) So I stayed put, feasting with my eyes — on the film, not the quiff — so it was sensually satisfying, but emotionally satisfying? Not so much, alas. Divine pastries, divine clothes, divine period trappings, but, as with most of Anderson’s films, I was never moved or understood what mattered, if any of it mattered.

The Book Thief is based on Markus Zusak’s novel of the same name which, although written for young adults, appears beloved by many, judging from the readers’ reviews on the internet, and the frequent declarations of ‘it’s the best book I’ve ever read!’, and there is our first worrying clue, right there. Over the years, of which there have been more than enough — I am quite ready to shuffle off now — I have come to learn that when anyone declares a book ‘the best book I have ever read!’ it tends to be the only book they have ever read.

Jim Jarmusch is the noted American ‘cult director’, and if you were to judge him solely on the basis of Only Lovers Left Alive you’d be minded to think the cult can keep him.  It’s a take on the vampire genre, which is fair enough, as who hasn’t had a go, but this is so lethargically meditative and so packed with pompous in-crowd references and such a monotonous yawn that if, by some miracle, you make it to the end, I should warn you there is every chance you will find yourself the Only One Left Awake. Poor you. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton star as Adam and Eve, which may mean they were the first people on the planet, or it may not mean that at all.

Although you’ll have heard that Dallas Buyers Club is fantastic and Matthew McConaughey gives the performance of his career, I know you won’t believe it unless you hear it directly from me so here you are: it is fantastic and Matthew McConaughey gives the performance of his career. In fact, it may be the best performance of anyone’s career. It’ll blow your tiny minds. It blew my tiny mind. ‘That blew my tiny mind,’ I even said afterwards, so it has to be true. Dallas Buyers Club is based on the real story of Ron Woodroof, a difficult hero. Ron, when we first encounter him, is attending a rodeo and having rushed, seedy sex with two women in one of the holding pens.

Alex Gibney’s The Armstrong Lies is fascinating as far as it goes but it may not go as far as you would like, and may not ask the questions you would like. It’s a documentary portrait of the American cyclist Lance Armstrong: seven-time winner of the Tour de France, worldwide symbol of physical courage (having survived testicular cancer in his twenties), founder of the Livestrong Foundation, which has raised millions for cancer sufferers, and something else. It’ll come to me in a minute. Talk among yourselves. Oh, yes. Cheat. Also, liar. He lived a cheating lie, all day, every day, throughout his sporting career. He lived a cheating lie even as he is pulling on his socks or taking the rubbish out. But Gibney never gets to the heart of him.

If you and your family are bored — if, for example, it’s one of those dull Sunday afternoons that seem to drag on for ever and it feels as if it’s never going to be time for The Antiques Road Show — you could gather together and play your own version of the family drama August: Osage County. Firstly, you will need to pretend it is hot, as this is August, in Osage County, Oklahoma, where it is not just hot, but Cat on a Hot Tin Roof hot, and so you will all have to repeatedly fan yourselves and say: ‘It’s so hot’ or ‘the heat!

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street will set the cat among the pigeons as a number of films do. 12 Years A Slave set the cat among the pigeons with some critics claiming it was ‘torture porn’ and other people taking to the blah-blah-blah and jabber-jabber-jabber of the Twittersphere to say they had no intention of seeing anything ‘so harrowing’. (Luckily for them, I plan to open shortly a specialised cinema, The Comfort-Zone Cinema, possibly on the Finchley Road, which will never show anything upsetting, and Hello, Dolly! every other Tuesday.) This time out, the blah-blah jabber-jabber will, I imagine, take the following form: does Wolf exult in the excesses it intended to satirise? Does it get off on its own virulent misogyny rather than indict it?

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave goes directly to the heart of American slavery without any shilly-shallying — unlike The Butler, say, or even Django Unchained — and is what I call a ‘Brace Yourself’ film, as you must brace yourself for horror after horror, injustice after injustice, shackles, muzzles, whippings, rapes, hangings. You will be harrowed to within an inch of your life, as perhaps is only right, given the subject matter, but you will not wish to flee your seat. You will recoil. You will flinch. You will say to yourself, ‘Oh no, not again.’ But the story will seize you with such a visceral power you will be rooted to the spot. I know I was and I’m not easy to root. Mind everywhere, usually.

The biopic Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom is a timely tribute, and an earnest and respectful and well-meaning one, but it does seem like a very, very long walk indeed. It’s a slog, a plod, a trudge uphill, and of all the things you may have wished to say to Nelson Mandela, given the opportunity, what you will find yourself saying here is: ‘Put your bloody skates on, man. We have homes to go to, and other fish to fry!’ This is not, I’m assuming, what you thought you’d ever most wish to say to Mandela, given the opportunity, but the fact is: you will never have wanted anyone to put their skates on quite so much in your entire life.

Powder Room is a small British film all about women and starring only women — boo-hoo, men; my heart bleeds for you all — yet it is almost entirely set in a nightclub, so whether you enjoy this film may depend on how willing you are to spend 90 minutes in such a club along with all that thumping music and the flashing lights and the scrabbling to get to the bar. As a rule, this is how I’d feel about such a prospect: I’d rather shoot myself in the head. However, I accept this doesn’t hold true for everyone and, from what I’ve learned over the years, I suspect it doesn’t hold true for most Spectator readers, who are out clubbing until all hours most nights of the week.

Saving Mr Banks tells ‘the untold true story’ of the making of the Disney classic Mary Poppins via the stand-offs between Walt and the book’s author, P.L. Travers, and it is not a taxing film. You always know where it’s going and, with its rather melodramatic flashbacks, there is no ambiguity as to where it is coming from, but neither matters as much as they should as there is just so much joy to be had otherwise. It stars both Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson (you spoil us, ambassador!

The Butler tells the story of an African–American butler at the White House who served eight American presidents over three decades and it plays as a ‘greatest hits’ of the civil rights movement, along with whatever else they decided to throw in, like Vietnam, apartheid, and Lyndon B. Johnson on the can. (Actually, Lyndon B. Johnson on the can was rather the highlight.) It is heavy-handed, predictable, bland and so contrived in its sentimentality I sniggered at what should have been the moments of emotional impact. However, all was not lost, as I did have a nice little doze, which, as it was a morning screening, set me up quite nicely for the rest of the day. So there was that, but only that, alas.

Seduced and Abandoned is both a satire on film-making and a love letter to film-making and a joy. A documentary made by the director and writer James Toback, in cahoots with his friend the actor Alec Baldwin, it follows the two as they work their way round the Cannes Film Festival, trying to raise financial backing for a film inspired by Last Tango in Paris. They schmooze. They lunch. They cajole. They beg. And in the process meet, among others, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci and Ryan Gosling as well as the billionaire shipping heir and journalist Taki, who writes the High life column in this magazine, and whom they try to tap up for $20 million. Taki plays himself, but you know what? He’s so great, he may have a future in it.

The Selfish Giant is a British social-realism film in the tradition of all such films from Kes onwards, so it never feels particularly fresh, but it does feel real and true, is superbly performed, and it does pack quite an emotional punch. I had to gather myself afterwards, and I’m still gathering myself, and may be gathering myself for some time to come. So it’s good at what it does, even though what it does has been done before. At least I think that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m never really that sure. This is the second feature from Clio Barnard, whose first, The Arbor, was a portrait  of the Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar, inventively told by fusing lip-synching with  first-hand testimonies.

The main thing you should know about Captain Phillips is that it really puts you through the wringer. It’s based on the true 2009 story of the hijacking of a US container ship by Somali pirates, and the Navy Seal rescue mission that ensued — pirates, a word of advice: if you are going to kidnap Tom Hanks, America is simply not going to let you get away with it — and my heart was in my mouth throughout. It is nail-bitingly exciting, even if you know the outcome, and I think I can safely say it’s a better film than the one I thought I was going to see. Or, to put it another way, when I initially saw ‘Captain Phillips’ was about to open my first thought was: ‘Gosh. I wonder who is playing Princess Anne.

Just how interesting you find The Fifth Estate may entirely depend on how interested you are in the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, in the first instance. This does not do what Senna did, for example, or what The Social Network did, and grip you in the places you didn’t know you could be gripped with a subject matter you’d no idea could be gripping. It’s not like that and I’ll tell you for why, in bullet points, because I’m just in a bullet-y mood today, and if you don’t use your bullet points — we are all allocated a certain amount at birth — they will start to atrophy and rot.

People are generally saying Filth fully fulfils the promise of its title and is not for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach or lily of liver and, alas, I am all three, in spades. (My liver is, in fact, so lily-ish it may be a wonder of medical science.) Rape. Anal Sex. Violence. Drink. Drugs. Masturbation. Vomiting down yourself. There’s a part of me that would like to say that’s the average Saturday night in our house, but the truth is we generally watch The X Factor and record Strictly. So I endured this film, from behind my hands, rather than enjoyed it, but in the enduring, was there some reward, as can sometimes happen? We can work that out as we go along. No advantage in rushing such things.

Blue Jasmine is the latest film from Woody Allen who, at various stages of his career, has been declared on-form, off-form, sliding-from-form, returning-to-form and, for all I know, as I don’t follow these matters closely, wearing form like a carnival hat with tinkling bells, but there is no need to bother with any of that. All you need know is Blue Jasmine is brilliant. It’s brilliantly written, directed and observed; it’s brilliantly watchable, if not mesmerising; and brilliantly performed, particularly by Cate Blanchett, who will knock your socks off, and may knock them off so explosively there is every chance you will never retrieve them again. (They might be knocked off all the way to kingdom come, for example.