Deborah Ross

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 television channel HBO, as Hollywood declared it ‘too gay’. I will now deal with both: 1. Yes. It is fabulous. No other word for it, unless that word is ‘glorious’. 2. True and, if I had the time, I would go to Hollywood and knock their heads together.

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 with the tropes a little. There’s a mother and daughter twist. There are no pointy teeth, just pointy thumbnails. But that thing vampires do, after they’ve sucked human blood and then look up, with blood-smeared lips and chin? That’s here, plentifully, and it always makes me wonder why vampires have such bad table manners. Weren’t they taught any, while growing up?

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 I don’t understand why anyone imagined it a good idea to rename it with something quite so nebulous, although I’m guessing there were fears the American market would be too shallow and dumb to get it otherwise, which is always a worry. (Hark at me! When I read recently, ‘Sharon suffers stroke’ I gave no thought to the former Israeli PM and thought instead: ‘Who’d have predicted she’d outlive Ozzy?

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 know what? You can tell them all to go hang. This is fantastically enjoyable, and a blast. It is wild and rampant and thrilling. It’s the best film I’ve seen since the last best film I saw, whatever and whenever that was. So tell them to go hang plus, if you are in the mood, you may wish to add: ‘But has it stayed true to Fitzgerald’s vision of a Kanye West soundtrack?

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 may not be quite so wholehearted now I’ve been sold a pup. I thought this was going to be a ‘fun, screwball comedy’. I thought it was Almodóvar returning to his ‘wild comedy roots’. But it’s thin, banal, boring, unwitty and, if satirical, then poorly satirical, and poorly satire is no good to anyone. It won’t even put the kettle on. (Put the kettle on. ‘No. I’m poorly.

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 at, should you wish to shake a stick at retro kitsch, and there are exceptional performances from Anna Friel and Imogen Poots, but it somehow lacks emotional heart, or any kind of poignancy. It’s entertaining, but glib and unaffecting, and so astonishingly uncritical it makes posing for porn mags or getting your kit off in some seedy Soho dive seem like the most fulfilling and joyful thing a woman can ever do, which I would dispute. A whole morning in John Lewis, that’s when a woman is happiest.

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 a wig because she’s lost all her own hair to chemotherapy, has just discovered her husband is playing away from home with pretty young Thilde from accounts. Films are always full of middle-aged men playing away from home with pretty young Thildes from accounts, but have you ever wandered into a company’s accounts department?

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 by Derek Cianfrance who made Blue Valentine, a remarkably raw and claustrophobic film about a marriage going down the tubes, also starring Ryan Gosling, but with Michelle Williams, and although this is a more familiar genre, it is still blissfully gripping. Certainly, I was gripped, blissfully, which was nice, as I haven’t been held in such a way for a long, long time, although I couldn’t tell you why. I’m up for a blissful grip at any time, just so you know.

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) and is interspersed with bouts of horrible, ill-judged violence. In one instance, for example, a man gets shot in the penis. This need not be a dealbreaker necessarily but at some point, possibly before we’ve even had the first child, and to prevent such nonsense going any further, I will have to sit him down and say: ‘Danny, love, this shooting at penises has to stop. We’re going to be parents. Why not gardening? Or golf?

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 the dark truths of human behaviour and the consequences of accepting authority without question that I don’t think I will ever get it out of my mind. It’s not an easy watch, which is kind of the point, and I’m not even sure what genre it is. Psychological horror? Thriller? But it will haunt and resonate. I saw it a week ago with my husband and we are still discussing it, which, for a pair who ran out of things to say to each other years ago, is quite something.

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 minutes, whether those minutes are precious or not. My time isn’t particularly precious, but it may be different for you. Here you are. 1. Although it has a top, top cast (James McAvoy, Mark Strong, Andrea Riseborough, David Morrissey) it only goes to prove the following old saying: the best cast in the world cannot save a poor script/story, try as they might. The fact I’ve just made up this old saying doesn’t make it any less true, for now or all time. 2.

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, settles for what I most feared it would settle for: sentimentality. A pity, as the set-up is brilliant, and the questions it throws up — are you still you, once your mind starts to fail?; who is going to look after all our old?  — so worth asking, but it never properly gets to grips with any of them.

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 to take three hours, you can’t get somewhere, at least? Is that too much to ask?) Its problem isn’t lack of ambition. This cost $100 million, had three directors and stars multiple A-listers in multiple roles in multiple storylines.

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 film about his psyche, or am I a film about one of his films, or am I an inside-Hollywood comedy, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins lumbering about in a fat suit and perving at blondes? If it had asked itself, it might have settled on the one, and retained its focus, and told us something. But it didn’t, so it doesn’t, and it tells us nothing. It’s not awful. It’s just not much of anything; the kind of film you will walk away from with a ‘so what?’ and a shrug. ‘So what?

Just as Les Mis was soaringly monotonous, Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (3D) is soaringly pointless. No point to it whatsoever. I looked. I looked everywhere for a point, even under my cinema seat. (That’s how desperate I was.) But I came up empty-handed. It’s 90 minutes of sheer, total, utter pointlessness, as written and directed by Andrew Adamson (who directed the first two Shreks and the first two Chronicles of Narnia) and produced by James Cameron, who has made some good films, and Titanic. God knows what they were thinking of when they embarked on this. And boredom doesn’t even come near it. I experienced the sort of boredom that is also a seething rage spread thin. What am I doing here? When’s it going to end? Why did anyone imagine this was even a film?

I cannot tell you about all the things Steven Spielberg can and cannot do. I cannot tell you, for example, if he can make decent goblets from Quality Street wrappers or funny teeth from orange peel, as I can, but what I am able to say is this: he knows how to tell a story; where to start it, where to finish it, what to do with all those fiddly bits in the middle. And although Lincoln is a film that pays fantastically close attention to politics — not a negative per se, but unless you are on top of your American history you may occasionally find yourself scratching your head — its narrative swoop largely takes the legislative detail in its stride, plus the star is Daniel Day-Lewis, which is always a thing. He is not so much an actor, more a shape shifter.

Here is a Quentin Tarantino film that, like all Quentin Tarantino films, is a typical Quentin Tarantino film, in the style of Quentin Tarantino, in that he takes a familiar trope, nods at it, toys with it, pokes it about, swills it round his mouth, then blows the whole thing up. I wonder if he was like this as a little boy. I wonder if his mother ever said to him, ‘Quentin. I love you. You’re my son. But if you keep stringing the other kids along so exploitatively and then blowing everything up in their poor faces they aren’t going to want to play with you. I don’t know where you get it from. Now, go tidy your room, dear, before I slice off your ear and shoot out your stomach so blood splatters out the front, out the back and up the wall. Run along.

Les Misérables is one of the longest-running, most popular stage musicals in history, having been seen by 60 million people in 42 countries — sit on that, Cats! — and although I can’t comment on the live show, as I’ve never seen it, I can tell you this film, which comes in at around 140 hours, boils down to a lot of fuss and singing (of the jaw-straining variety) about a very minor parole offence. I’m telling you, if I’d ever Dreamed a Dream, whether In Time Gone By or In My Local Starbucks, that so many jaws would strain so much for so little, I’d feel completely satisfied, but otherwise? I’m not so sure. Directed by Tom Hooper, with a stellar, A-list cast — sit on that, all other casts!