Deborah Ross is the chief film critic of The Spectator
First, the latest digital film release: The Assistant, starring Julia Garner in a slowly, slowly, catchy, catchy tale that won’t grab you from the off — I kept thinking: is anything actually going to happen? — but you must stick with it, you must. This is a film of quiet, cumulative power, which has much
As all other publications are offering guides saying what to watch from home during this pandemic — ‘the 50 best movies to stream right now’; ‘20 hidden gems available on Netflix’; ‘movie masterpieces for quarantine’ — an equally valuable service would, surely, be telling you what not to watch, under any circumstances, no matter how
The film you want to see this week that you mightn’t have seen if you weren’t stuck at home is And Then We Danced, a gay love story set in Tbilisi, Georgia, and it is truly wonderful and gorgeous. Every cloud and all that. However, in my area the demand on broadband is so high
To tell you the truth about The Truth, even though it stars Catherine Deneuve at her most Catherine Deneuve-ish (i.e. campily grand) and I was so looking forward it — it’s the first non-Japanese production from Hirokazu Kore-eda, who made the very lovely Shoplifters — it is now quite hard to concentrate on anything in
Misbehaviour is a film about the 1970 Miss World contest that was disrupted by ‘bloody women’s libbers’ — that’s what my dad always called them, anyhow — throwing flour bombs and shouting ‘we’re not cattle!’ as Bob Hope fled the stage in a panic and our televisions temporarily blacked out.Marvellous, I think now, although at
Military Wives is a British comedy drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan. It is based on the true story of the service spouses who formed a choir (and were the subject of a BBC documentary series in 2011) and it’s wholly in the style of Calendar Girls, The Full Monty, Brassed off, Kinky
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set on a remote, windswept Brittany island in the late 18th century. It’s about two women falling in love and it’s rapturous, scorching, ravishing and will lock your eyes to the screen. I’ve seen it three times and on each occasion my eyes were locked to
Greed is Michael Winterbottom’s satire on the obscenely rich and, in particular, a billionaire, asset-stripping retail tycoon whose resemblance to any living person is purely intentional. (Hello, Sir Philip Green.) Plenty to work with, you would think. Low-hanging fruit and all that. But as the characters are so feebly sketched and the ‘jokes’ — ‘jokes’
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Bafta for best foreign film and is up for six Oscars and it is an involving drama. And satire. And thriller. And comedy. And allegory. And it is fabulous and enthralling on all those counts. It works on every level which is, perhaps, fitting for a film about levels and
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Bafta for best foreign film and is up for six Oscars and it is an involving drama. And satire. And thriller. And comedy. And allegory. And it is fabulous and enthralling on all those counts. It works on every level which is, perhaps, fitting for a film about levels and
The Lighthouse stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson (and a very nasty seagull) in a gothic thriller set off the coast of Maine in 1890, and it’s terrific. Mad, but terrific. It is gripping, intense, extraordinarily written — someone is accused of smelling like ‘curdled foreskin’ at one point — and is about two fellas
Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is a romp told at a lick, and while it’s fun and likeable with fantastic casting — Hugh Laurie as Mr Dick is especially sublime — it is not particularly immersive or memorable. It’s 600 pages squashed into just under two hours so it’s bound to feel
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a historical drama based on the true story of Franz Jäggerstätter, an Austrian who refused to fight for the Nazis in the second world war and was later beatified by the Catholic church. It isn’t peak Malick as it’s linear rather than associative — let’s not pretend we aren’t
Sam Mendes’s 1917 is the first world war drama that this week won the Golden Globe for best film and also best director and there is no arguing with that, ha ha. In fact there has been plenty of arguing with that. Some critics say that it feels like a videogame. ‘Turns one of the
There have already been several film adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved 1868 novel Little Women, and why not? After all, who ever gets tired of Jo burning off Meg’s hair? But the latest, from Greta Gerwig, is so clever and spirited and vigorous and engaging it knocks all the others into a cocked hat.
Ordinary Love stars Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson as a long-married couple whose lives are disrupted when she is diagnosed with breast cancer. Not very Christmassy, you might think, but it’s not a ‘cancer story’, as has been said in some quarters, it’s a love story, told profoundly and beautifully and honestly rather than cloyingly
The Two Popes stars Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce — that’s two reasons to buy a ticket, right there — as Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis I, and it is wildly entertaining, so now you have a third reason too. True, it does, as others have noted, shy away from directly tackling
Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is a drama about the breakdown of a marriage and it is, at times, devastatingly painful. ‘Divorce,’ says a lawyer at one point, ‘is like a death without a body.’ It’s certainly not the most fun you’ll ever have at the cinema — although it is witty and there are some
The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic — a mobster-a-thon, you could say — starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and a light sprinkling of Harvey Keitel (he’s only in a couple of scenes). It’s based on the true, late-life confession of Mafia hitman Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and, while gangster flicks can
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is the sequel to the 2014 film Maleficent, and it will certainly come as a relief to all those who, in the interim, have been worried that Disney might let a potential franchise go unexploited. Did that keep you awake at night, as it did me? Well, now we can all