Deborah Ross

Don’t care about Harry Potter. Don’t care about the children who love him. Don’t care about the middle-aged weirdos who read the books on the Tube. (Some muggles are too dumb for shame, even.) Don’t care about J.K. Rowling, although I will ask this about her: why does she always look so miserable? If you were worth £600 million would you look so miserable? Maybe she just pretends to look miserable, so we don’t feel more envious than we already are. Perhaps once she closes her front door behind her she dances down the hall exclaiming, ‘I’m so rich it’s unbelievable; I’m so rich it’s unbelievable’, before snacking on ground-diamond toasties and bathing in champagne.

Edmond 18, Key Cities Edmond Burke (William H. Macy) is middle-aged, middle-American, dully employed, dully married. One evening, on his way home from work, a quasi-mystical whim leads him to consult a fortune-teller who tells him, ‘You are not where you belong.’ The consequences of this are felt later that evening when he says to his wife, ‘I’m going.’ ‘For cigarettes?’ she queries. ‘For ever,’ he replies. He flees. He flees first to a bar where he cries, plaintively, ‘I want to feel like a man.’ Then it’s to Palm Beach where he buys a condo, starts a vegetable garden, plays boules, does yoga, lives happily ever after.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, now they’ve gone and ruined Shrek, and I hate them for it. Indeed, may those responsible be damned to the eternal fires of hell. Failing that, may they at least wake up one day with their feet on the wrong way round and an elbow for an ear. How dare they? How could they? I so loved Shrek: noisome, lousy, foul-breathed Shrek. Shrek of the bottom-fumes so noxious they could wilt flowers. Not too far removed from your average bloke, then, but wasn’t Shrek kind of lovable, too? And cute and funny? And didn't you love Donkey? ‘Parfait, parfait, everybody loves parfait.’ That’s Donkey from the first movie and it still makes me laugh even though I couldn’t tell you why or what parfait is exactly.

Water opens with a beautiful little Indian girl sitting on the back of a cart joyously chewing on sugar cane. She has luscious hair, pinchable cheeks, dark eyes, a nose-ring and tinkling silver anklets. (So cute; Madonna would kill for her.) A middle-aged man is on the cart, too, lying on his back and groaning. He is her husband and he dies. We don’t know how long she has been married for, or even if she’s had time to register that she is actually married, but now she is a widow and, as her father tells her, she must now lead a widow’s life. ‘For how long?’ she asks. She is eight years old. She has no idea that she is about to be cast off into the most excruciating, lifelong limbo.

I Want Candy is a British sex comedy, which should already sound alarm bells, but I will plough on heroically, as is my nature. It’s about two lads from Leatherhead — wannabe producer Joe (Tom Riley) and earnest auteur Baggy (Tom Burke) — who are still at film school yet are desperate to break into the big time. Frustrated by their arty film teacher (Mackenzie Crook) they head to London to sell their script, Love Storm. Eventually, they encounter a porn producer (Eddie Marsan) who says, OK, I’ll give you the money so long as you up the hard-core element and get porn queen Candy Fiveways (Carmen Electra) for the starring role, which, amazingly, they duly do. They then proceed to film Love Storm in Joe’s suburban house while his mum and dad are at work. Funny?

The Illusionist is one of those films that gains points for trying to be clever and different and ingenious but then promptly loses them all for being not clever or different or ingenious enough. It’s frustrating, really, because you can feel the good film trying to get out — ‘let me out, let me out!’ — but a banal script, some woeful miscasting and a rather desperate plot ‘twist’ simply won’t let it. I put the ‘twist’ in quotation marks because you’ll figure it out way before the characters, and will spend at least an hour of this film wishing they’d figure it out so we can all call it a day and get home for whatever it is we like to do at home. Personally, I like to nap and eat cheese.

As far as I can tell, Christopher Guest’s latest film, For Your Consideration, pretty much bombed in America, which must be a recommendation, surely. Listen, I’m only kidding. I have nothing against America. Sometimes, I even think it’s quite the nicest country anyone ever stole and, as for Americans, utterly, utterly charming. Quite fat and quite stupid and always waddling off to amusement parks — I’m not busy today; I know, I’ll ask someone to strap me upside-down and spin me around until I puke — but aside from that, utterly, utterly charming.

Notes on a Scandal is a fairly nasty book and this is a fairly nasty film — very Patricia Highsmithian is the nearest I can get to it — but this does not mean you should deny yourselves the very great pleasure of it. In fact, don’t, unless you aren’t keen on seeing Dame Judi Dench at the top of her game, in which case I only have this to say to you: you are mad and not worth tuppence and go see something  with Jennifer Aniston in it, why don’t you? Possibly, there are roles Dame Judi couldn’t pull off convincingly — a bedside table, perhaps, or a piece of cheese — but, with material like this, she’ll knock your socks off so long as they aren’t still in Sheffield.

This Bosnian film about the devastating emotional consequences of war has all the things you might expect from a Bosnian film about the devastating emotional consequences of war: suffering; pain; Soviet-style concrete estates with stinking stairwells; drab little apartments; dreary knitwear; hard-faced people tramping wearily though the slush and the snow; more suffering; more pain, more slush, more snow. But if this sounds like bad news let me tell you the good: there isn’t a single tap-dancing penguin in it. And here is the even better news: this is a gem of a movie. Or at least I think it is a gem of a movie. I’m a little worried now that I only think this because I am so fed up with what mainstream Hollywood is currently offering.