Deborah Ross is the chief film critic of The Spectator
Les Misérables is one of the longest-running, most popular stage musicals in history, having been seen by 60 million people in 42 countries — sit on that, Cats! — and although I can’t comment on the live show, as I’ve never seen it, I can tell you this film, which comes in at around 140
The trouble with this adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Booker prize-winning Midnight’s Children, aside from the fact it is a mess and a muddle, is that it goes on and on and on and on. And on. And on. And then, just when you think it has to be over, it goes on some more. If
Wow! Just: wow! Life of Pi may be the most ravishingly beautiful film I have ever seen. It’s stunning. It’s gorgeous. Its visual inventiveness made me want to weep for joy. It is magical realism made magical and realistic. The palette of colours is extraordinary. You will feel you are in the sea and above
Michael Haneke’s Amour is about love as we near the end of life and is so painful it isn’t a film to ‘like’ or ‘enjoy’ but is one you do have to see. It’s amazing. It is, effectively, two hours and seven minutes of watching someone die, but it is riveting, and I’m still jangling
Mother’s Milk is an adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s novel of the same name and is about an English family who are about to lose their beloved holiday house in Provence. (Diddums, I’m minded to say, but only because I’ve never had a holiday house in Provence to lose, and am quite bitter about that.)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is his first film since There Will Be Blood and although it stars Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who give two of the most blistering performances you will see for an unspecified time period — usually, the form is to say ‘this year’, but how do I know? I’m
Skyfall is the latest James Bond film, as directed by Sam Mendes, which I felt I should make clear, as there is always so little pre-publicity around these releases. (You’d think the marketing people would splatter the poster on every bus and ensure every newspaper runs through every Bond Girl yet again, wouldn’t you? Pathetic.)
I don’t know quite what I was thinking when I went to see this film as it is full of everything I personally hate. Low-life gangsters. Drugs. Violence. Liberal use of ‘pussy’ and the c-word, which I loathe so much I cannot say it myself. My son, when he was little, once overheard it somewhere
The perks of being a wallflower are few and far between, in my experience, and I’m not even convinced you can be a wallflower if you are as ravishing as, say, Emma Watson, who modelled for Burberry whenever her Harry Potter schedule would allow, which isn’t the way it usually works for wallflowers, but what
Holy Motors is so mad, deranged, lunatic, bonkers, cuckoo and away with the fairies that, if you were on a bus, and saw it boarding, you’d pray it didn’t sit next to you, although, knowing your luck, it probably would. That said, maybe you shouldn’t be quite so prissy and stand-offish. This film is a
I don’t care much for fashion — ask anyone; I’ve even lately surrendered to the fleece — and don’t care for fashion magazines at all. They have nothing to say to my life. They’ve never even featured ‘top ten fleeces of the season’, as far as I know. But this isn’t to say I don’t
Hope Springs is a comedy drama about a long-term marriage that has effectively stalled, and is one of those films that is only as good as its stars. Luckily, in this instance, the stars are Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones. Meryl, we know about. I once had dinner with Meryl, and have talked of
Joe Wright’s adaptation of Anna Karenina is so bold and audacious its bold audacity becomes the story, rather than the actual story itself. This is both a strength — it is always visually dazzling, inventive and surprising — and a weakness, as it is so goddamn distracting. The entire action, more or less, is set
It’s a brave soul who buys a cinema ticket at this time of year, when all the studios try to bury their rubbish, and it’s a brave soul who buys a ticket to The Watch. This is a comedy starring Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade as four suburban men who take
OK, let’s get this over with quickly so we can all hurry back to watching the Olympics. I’m obsessed by the Olympics (Go, Mo, go!; Yes, Jess, yes!) and all our gold medals. It’s like we can’t stop being showered with them. In fact, I went to the corner shop just now and came back
The greatest compliment I can pay Seth MacFarlane’s Ted is that although this is essentially one of those slacker, stoner comedies, and such comedies aren’t really my thing — too old, too tired, only once had a joint and it made me feel sick then my knees went all funny — this did make me
In the late 1960s, a Mexican-American singer-songwriter is signed to a record label after two Motown producers see him performing in a seedy Detroit dive called The Sewer. He delivers two albums, which receive rave reviews (he is compared to Bob Dylan; some say he is better than Bob Dylan), but nobody buys them, so
Two films this week, one about oldies who play table tennis at an international level and another that is a love story funded by an Oxfordshire village, whose inhabitants feature as bit-part characters and extras. And I’ll be upfront about it: one is rather good whereas, although I’d have liked to like the other, and
For those of you who scan speedily to the bottom of reviews to see if a film is worth seeing — don’t worry; I always do it myself — I thought I would do you a favour and put the last paragraph first, as follows: Is Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike worth seeing? Yes. But also
The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t so amazing, actually, and is a reboot of a remake, or a remake of a reboot, or a remake rebooted, and remade, rebootingly. It’s hard to keep up with these franchises when they swish back and forth all the time, determined to squeeze every last penny out of cinemagoers who should
