Deborah Ross

The International 15, Nationwide The Class 15, Key Cities The International is a big-budget action-espionage thriller starring Clive Owen as an Interpol agent determined to bring down a nasty bank called IBBC. Aside from doing the usual evil things banks do — like, I assume, having only one person behind the counter during the busiest times — it also runs brisk sidelines in arms trafficking, murder, supporting terrorism and promoting conflicts so as to profit from the debt it creates. (And you wonder why there is only ever one person behind the counter!) The bank’s ultimate aim is to make us all slaves to debt, which is a worry. I am a slave to debt already and, I’m telling you, it’s no joke.

Gran Torino 15, Nationwide Gran Torino is a Clint Eastwood film — what, he’s still alive? — and it’s about a grouchy old fella who is hard-core racist but then gets involved with the Asian family next door and, would you believe it, discovers they are quite decent, really. This is probably not a very good film. It is clunky, corny, overblown and so obvious it even features one of those early-on coughs you know isn’t going to pan out as good news. One day, I would like to see a non-meaningful cough in a film; would like to hear a doctor say, ‘The tests are back and it’s nothing, a tickle...’ It’s a 
small dream of mine. (I was always told to dream big, but never had the time or the energy.) Now, where were we? Oh, yes.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona 12A, Nationwide In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s latest film, a character asks in an opening, theme-setting scene: ‘Why is love so hard to define?’ which is daft, really, because as anyone who knows anything about cinema knows and has known since 1970: love means never having to say you’re sorry. What, did Ali MacGraw die for nothing? But here is Woody, and here is all his existential despair and, actually, it’s OK. This is a slight film, a minor Allen film, a bit of a footnote, but it’s warm and engaging and isn’t Matchpoint, Scoop or Cassandra’s Dream, which has to be a mercy.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 12A, Nationwide The most curious thing about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is that it could receive 13 Oscar nominations when it is such tedious schmaltz, and not just any tedious schmaltz. This is the worst kind of tedious schmaltz; the kind that doesn’t even have the decency or good manners to go on for only 90 minutes or so. This tedious schmaltz is 165 minutes. This tedious schmaltz should have been taken outside and given a good talking to within the first five minutes. (Just pack it in, will you?) The story, here, is all to do with time not behaving as it’s supposed to and I’m telling you, an hour in you are going to think time has actually stopped. I know I did.

Revolutionary Road 15, Nationwide Revolutionary Road is Sam Mendes’s adaptation of the celebrated 1961 novel by Richard Yates and it may be too faithful to the book — big chunks of dialogue have been directly lifted — although, on the other hand, if it were less faithful then everyone would say it isn’t faithful enough, which proves what I would have said all along if I hadn’t just thought of it: literary novels are buggers to film. But here it is, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet starring as Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple in 1950s America who, when they first marry, believe they are special and destined to be, as she puts it, ‘wonderful in the world’, but, seven years and two children in, where are they?

Frost/Nixon 15, Nationwide Frost/Nixon is a properly terrific, dramatised account of the television interview between David Frost and disgraced former American President Richard Nixon which, broadcast in the summer of 1977, achieved the largest audience ever for a news programme in the history of American TV with 45 million viewers. As I don’t remember much about it — I was 16 at the time and therefore much too busy shoplifting in Chelsea Girl (or Snob or Biba; I wasn’t that fussed) — I can’t comment on the historical accuracy, but can say it feels powerfully authentic and, even if it isn’t, who cares? It’s a tight and absorbing trip to the cinema, end of. Directed by Ron Howard — who’d have thought it?

The Wrestler 15, Nationwide The Wrestler is Mickey Rourke’s big comeback movie in which he plays Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, a professional wrestler of the kind so popular in the Eighties when they all had names like ‘The Ram’ or ‘Rock’ or ‘Bad Blood’ or ‘The Hulk’ or ‘Ayatollah’ and fought under the WWF banner, which is the World Wrestling Federation rather than the World Wildlife Fund. (It’s best not to get them mixed up: you don’t want to give money for pandas only to find that, instead, it’s gone to grown men with bad hair beating the shit out of each other and who aren’t cute at all.

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?