Deborah Ross

As a general rule, what to expect when you are expecting is a baby, which is always kind of miraculous, but the way everyone carries on in this film you’d think nobody had ever had one before. This is odd, particularly as the latest research has proven that having babies predates the iPod, internet and digital photography, and may even predate the Breville sandwich toaster, although this is not yet known for certain. Still, this all-star ensemble mash-up treats pregnancy as if it were the very latest news, and although it’s meant to be a comedy, did I laugh? I might never have stopped but for one small thing, which I feel obliged to mention: I never started. I sat there stony-faced like a stone, with a face.

The first thing you should know is that I love, adore and worship Sacha Baron Cohen and have this fantasy whereby we get married and set up home in Notting Hill as a power couple and when the phone rings and it’s Richard Branson I will say, ‘I’m so sorry, Dick, but we can’t come to Necker Island next week as we’ve promised to go away with Charles and Nigella. We know, boring, but we can’t cancel them again.’ Baron Cohen is, I believe, the greatest comic film-maker working today, and although The Dictator is not up there with Borat, or even his Ali G television persona, as it’s so much broader and more familiar, I would not allow this to come between us. ‘Sacha,’ I would say to him at the breakfast table, ‘pass the toast.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home is a film about Jeff, who lives at home, and that’s enough subordinate clauses for one day. (Don’t be greedy; you know how fattening they are.) It’s a comedy from the Duplass brothers, Mark and Jay, who have previously made small films that have been well received (The Puffy Chair, Cyrus), and this is their first big film although it’s a small big film, coming in at 83 minutes, which, in its small way, is quite big enough. It’s a whimsical comedy and, as far as whimsical comedies go, it is quite whimsical, and sometimes comedic, which is fair enough, but ultimately it is slight and repetitive and nothing sticks in the mind.

As last week I believe I provided the world’s first entirely interrogative film review, I thought that this week I would up the stakes and embroider this review on antimacassars, in mirror writing — this has also never been done before, as far as I know — but time, alas, proved my great enemy, so I’m afraid I have simply written it in verse instead. I hope you will forgive me. Avengers Assemble, my lovelies, is ‘the superhero event of the year’, And if this gets you all excited, you probably have nothing to fear. But if big action so big it’s humongous just isn’t really your thing, You may find, as I did, it drags, with its surfeit of CGI bling.

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, anyone who happens to be passing, I have decided to quiz myself about this week’s film, for no other reason than the idea occurred to me, and I fancied it, so here goes: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, any good? No. That it? OK, if this film teaches us anything, it teaches us how to take a perfectly fine book — Paul Torday’s novel of the same name — and transform it into a mushy, corny, ghastly mess of the most trying kind. How would you describe the viewing experience? Like swimming upstream yourself, but through treacle, and with someone heavy strapped to your back. How heavy? Someone like Eric Pickles, say. I wouldn’t like Eric Pickles strapped to my back, I don’t think.

We Bought a Zoo — in which a family buys a zoo — does what it says on the tin and if you like this sort of film you will like this and if you don’t you won’t, and you have to ask yourself why you buy The Spectator every week? It’s for analysis like this which, I think you will find, is unavailable elsewhere. But do I like this sort of film? Actually, I rather do. There are no surprises. It is comfortingly straight up and down. It is heartwarming, to the extent you can buy it. There are animals: lions, tigers, a grizzly bear, and a funny little monkey. I found it a perfectly agreeable way to spend the two hours I would otherwise waste and you may feel similarly if this is the sort of film you like, but probably not if you don’t.

Bel Ami is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel of the same name about a young man who sleeps himself to the top of Parisian society — I once slept myself to the top of Parisian society, but by the time I got there I was far too exhausted to properly enjoy it — and while it is lush and handsomely mounted and features copious sex scenes it lacks what it would absolutely have to have were it to work: erotic sizzle.

The first and perhaps only thing to really say about Hunky Dory is that it is anything but. It is not hunky dory at all. Instead, it is half-baked and tiresome. I’d had rather high hopes for it. It’s a ‘let’s-put-on-a-show!’ film set in a Welsh comprehensive during the long hot summer of 1976 — the summer I turned 16, as it happens — so I expected at least some of it to resonate, but its characters are so unfinished and improbabilities so plentiful and narrative so unoriginal it’s like an extended episode of Fame, only worse.

The Muppet Show was my favourite TV programme when I was growing up, but this film, the first in over a decade? Not so much, even though it is fun in parts. I liked it terrifically at the beginning, and loved seeing Kermit again, and Miss Piggy, with her ‘pork chop’ (‘Hi-yah!’) and Gonzo and Fozzie Bear and Animal, because they are all such distinct personalities, and have such presence, and when I heard the theme tune for the first time in years — ‘It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights, it’s time to meet the Muppets on The Muppet Show tonight...’ — I felt I might actually burst with happiness, although luckily I didn’t.

Carnage is Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s hit stage play The God of Carnage, in which two sets of parents get together to discuss an altercation between their 11-year-old sons in the hope that they can figure it out sensibly, and all hell breaks loose. I have my reservations. I’m not convinced the play was exactly begging to be filmed, particularly as Polanski doesn’t open it up and keeps it, more or less, to one suffocating room and hallway, and I’m not convinced it’s particularly deep or insightful, but there is some enjoyment to be had from watching four actors at the top of their game get to where they do get to, even though it’s not much of any place.

The Descendants is a comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family — is there any other kind of family? I’ve yet to meet one — made by Alexander Payne, who also made About Schmidt and Sideways, but whereas I warmed to those films, I could not warm to this. I liked it. I enjoyed it. I did not resent the time I’d spent watching it, although that may just be because I seriously have nothing better to do. (I spent much of this morning removing the fluff from my keyboard with a pin, for example.) It’s already been heaped with praise and two Oscar nominations (for best picture and George Clooney’s performance) but it left me cold. I suppose at some level I just could not buy it or its basic premise that someone married to Clooney might have an affair.

W.E. is Madonna’s second outing as a film director, and this tells ‘the greatest royal love story of the 20th century’ via two women separated by more than half a century: Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and a modern-day New Yorker, Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a society wife who becomes obsessed with Mrs Simpson when her possessions come up for auction at Sotheby’s. These days, it is common practice to ridicule and deride Madonna — just who does she think she is? And so on — but I am not of this camp, believe this film has much to teach us, and the top ten lessons are as follows. 1.

Steven Spielberg’s version of War Horse is like an extended Sunday afternoon episode of Black Beauty gone mad via the first world war, just so you know, and although it made me cry this is no endorsement. I rarely cry in real life but have been known to howl in the cinema, even when I’m aware something isn’t much good. It’s as if my brain and tear ducts are entirely unconnected so while, in this instance, my brain was saying this is a mediocre film, prosaic, plodding, over-sugared and with nothing like the power or imagination of the stage play, the tears still plopped. I wish there was something I could do about it. Is there a lead available to somehow connect my brain to my tear ducts? From Maplins, say? It would be good if there was.