Deborah Ross

Slumdog Millionaire 15, Nationwide From the wonderful things I’d already heard about Danny Boyle’s latest film Slumdog Millionaire I was fully poised to fall madly in love with it, and perhaps even run off with it although I would not have its babies — I’m through with having babies; I had one once, a boy, and 16 years later I still can’t shrug him off — but it never really came to that. It’s probably all my fault, as these things so often are, but I could not love Slumdog. I liked it as a friend but the chemistry just wasn’t there. I don’t know what it was. I’ll try to work it out as I go along and maybe I’ll get there and maybe I won’t.

The Reader 15, Nationwide (2 January) The Reader is based on the novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink which, in turn, is one of those books that’s been read by about a zillion people in a billion countries proving that, sometimes, a great many people can be entirely wrong in all the languages you can think of. Only kidding. I haven’t actually read it. However, I did once try to read Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist, another of those books that’s been read by about a zillion people in a billion countries, and it was such twaddle it totally put me off books of this kind. Perhaps The Reader is a great book and perhaps I have made a big mistake but, judging by this film, I’m kind of thinking: nope, not missed anything here.

Dean Spanley U, Nationwide  Dean Spanley is a family film and a sweet film and a kindly film with the most delicious cast (Peter O’Toole, Jeremy Northam, Sam Neill, Judy Parfitt) but it is also a slow film — the first hour is almost unbearably uneventful — which could do with a bit of a rocket up its backside, not that I am volunteering to do it. Hell’s bells, it’s nearly Christmas! I don’t have time for rockets and backsides! As it is, I’m waking nightly at 4 a.m. thinking, ‘Brandy butter; what’s all that about, then?’ Rockets and backsides! You do it, if it means so much to you, but do leave alone the final half an hour, which is engrossing and delightful and stars a smashing Welsh spaniel with fabulous, flappy ears.

Changeling 15, Nationwide Changeling, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, is a most melodramatic melodrama starring Angelina Jolie and her totally amazing, bee-stung lips. (I was stung by a bee once, but on the eyelid; it didn’t look so great.) Anyway, based on a true story, it’s set in Los Angeles in 1928 and is about a single mother, Christine Collins (Jolie) whose nine-year-old son, Walter, goes missing and when returned by the police five months later, turns out not to be him at all. The police insist the boy is Walter, and insist Christine accepts him as Walter, but Christine knows he is not, just as any mother knows who is and who isn’t her son — not that the son will always want to know her.

Body of Lies 15, Nationwide Body of Lies is the latest film from producer/director Ridley Scott and it is an espionage thriller set mostly in the Middle East — Iraq, Jordan and Syria — featuring espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter-espionage and, if you can keep up, which I didn’t, there is probably a considerable amount of counter-counter-counter-espionage in there too. In short, it is unlikely that you’ll come out of the cinema saying, ‘Well, that was a little light on the espionage, wasn’t it, dear?’ It’s one of those films where, part of the way through, you even start to think, do I actually care enough to follow all this? Is it even possible to follow this? (It is vexingly complex.

The Baader Meinhof Complex 18, Key Cities The Baader Meinhof Complex is, well, just horrible really. Horrible, horrible, horrible and for those of you who are slow out there — and I know who you are; don’t think I don’t — it is horrible; just horrible. It is brutal, relentless, nihilistic, violent, terrifying, relentless, psychopathic, and yet — and this is quite a big ‘and yet’, so do try to concentrate, even those of you who find it a struggle — it is so powerful, so explosively febrile, it compels you to watch and keep watching. It’s like being caught in a current taking you way out to sea. You want to get back to the safety of the shore, and you may even thrash about for a bit (‘help, help!

W 15, Nationwide W, which should be pronounced ‘dubya’, the Texan way, as in George ‘Dubya’ Bush — but never as in, for example, Dubya. H. Smith — is Oliver Stone’s dramatised portrait of the 43rd American President and it’s pretty much neither here nor there; neither sympathetic enough to be one thing nor, alas, deadly enough to be the other. I don’t know what held Stone back, why he beats around the Bush, why he didn’t just grab an iron bar and thrash the living daylights out of whatever is in there. What is in there? If there is something, this film doesn’t tell us, and if there isn’t, if Bush is just a hollow shell of nothingness, how did he manage to become top dog of the world’s top nation?

Quantum of Solace 12A, Nationwide Quantum of Solace is the latest James Bond movie, which I thought I would make clear from the start. These films arrive with such little pre-publicity and hoo-ha they can often slip by quite unnoticed. (As one regular cinema goer told me, ‘I’d have at least liked the chance to win his watch.’ And as another said, ‘I’d like to dress like him, so why doesn’t anyone ever write about the clothes?’) Anyway, what’s it like? Well, although it’s not the most crushing disappointment of all time — finding you have won the lottery but lost the ticket is probably more crushing, I imagine — it is still a crushing disappointment.

Ghost Town 12A, Nationwide Ghost Town stars Ricky Gervais in his first leading Hollywood role, and how much you like this film will probably depend on how much you like Gervais — what? You expected him to turn in a Daniel Day-Lewis-type performance? — and how much Gervais you can take at one sitting; the two not being the same at all. I like Gervais but now realise there is only so much I can take at the one sitting. Bubbles likes Gervais but says there is only so much he can take at the one sitting. Meanwhile, Bubbles’s fiancée, Goldie, says, ‘I haven’t been exposed to a lot of Gervais so really cannot comment.’ Further, it’s just such a relentlessly mainstream rom-com, so without bite, it’s as if The Office never happened.

Burn After Reading 15, Nationwide Burn After Reading, a ‘comedy thriller’, is the latest Coen brothers movie, their first after No Country for Old Men, and it is a very, very hard film to like. I wanted to like it, I tried to like it, I strained to like it with all the fibres of my being bar two — they’ve gone off on a mini-break to the Cotswolds — but I could not, and I think I know why. It’s just not any good. It’s arch, inelegant, lazy, unaffecting and has George Clooney doing that thing he does which involves a great deal of face-pulling coupled with many looks of saucer-eyed surprise. This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t sleep with George if asked, because I still so would, but I might feel obliged to give him a pep talk post-coitally.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People 15, Nationwide How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is based on Toby Young’s best-selling memoir of the same name and, already, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: what, a film based on Toby’s book? Well, he kept that very quiet, the sly old devil. Who’d have thought it? I even suspect that although, in the end, Toby did attend the recent glitzy, red carpet première in London — you saw him lined up with all the other celebrities in the following day’s papers, surely — he probably wasn’t that keen, probably protested with something along the lines of: ‘It’s just not my thing. Can’t I stay in and watch telly instead? You go. Who’s interested in me anyway?

Pineapple Express 15, Nationwide  Pineapple Express is a ‘stoner’ comedy from the seemingly inexhaustible, super-producer Judd Apatow and, in its defence, probably wasn’t made with a middle-aged housewife such as myself in mind. As it is, I’ve only ever done pot once and did not like it (my knees went). Apatow was, of course, also behind the huge hits Superbad and Knocked Up, neither of which I have seen — too busy lining drawers with lavender paper; that sort of thing — although I did recently rent Knocked Up on DVD for my teenage son when my ten-year-old niece happened to be staying. Alas, I’m afraid I had no idea how unsuitable it was until, midway through the film, my niece sought me out to ask: ‘Deb, what’s an orgasm?

The Duchess 12A, Nationwide The Duchess is probably no more than a most handsomely mounted costume drama which is no bad thing if you happen to like handsomely mounted costume dramas, and I do, I do, I do! Lavishly directed by Saul Dibb, whose previous work (the gritty London film Bullet Boy; the TV drama series The Line of Beauty) I liked a great deal, it has stupendous frocks, ravishing hats and more stately homes than you could shake a stick at, not that I’d advise shaking a stick at a stately home. These days, security will have you off the property before you can even buy a tea-towel in the shop, and then what will you have to show for your day out? It also has its Colin Firth moment — is this now obligatory?

Ben X 15, Key cities August is a hopeless month for movies — it’s when the big studios dump their worst films on us, pretty much — and so there is very little worth seeing, let alone reviewing. I did think about seeing the new Will Ferrell comedy, Step Brothers, but after catching the tail end of a trailer I thought: ‘Actually, I’d rather dash my head against a door jamb.’ And I did think about seeing the new Vin Diesel film, Babylon A.D., but then I caught the tail end of that trailer and thought, ‘Actually, I’d rather dash my head against a door jamb and then stuff my nostrils with a well known brand of soft cheese like, say, Boursin.

Elegy 15, London and Key Cities Elegy is about an ageing professor (Ben Kingsley) and a beautiful young woman (Penelope Cruz), and it is based on the Philip Roth novel The Dying Animal, which, in turn, takes its title from Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in which the poet describes his soul as ‘sick with desire/and fastened to a dying animal’. Elegy. Ageing. Roth. Dying. Sick. And yet this movie is such fun! Hats off to the director, Isabel Coixet, for infusing it with candy colours and setting it to a kitsch yet funky Seventies pop soundtrack. OK, only teasing. This is gloomy. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I felt so gloomed. It is a very brown sort of film and there is a great deal of piano tinkling.

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging 12A, Nationwide Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is a teen movie as may be rather obvious from the title — come on, it was hardly going to explore the terrible reality of Bosnia’s post-war traumas; get a grip — and we are all for teen movies, aren’t we? A teen movie may at least get a teen out of the house. The boys are OK. They sleep most of the day and then go on the internet. But the girls! They can’t go anywhere if their hair isn’t right and it’s no good saying, ‘It looks perfectly all right to me,’ because then it’s, ‘What do you know about hair?