Deborah Ross is the chief film critic of The Spectator
We Bought a Zoo — in which a family buys a zoo — does what it says on the tin and if you like this sort of film you will like this and if you don’t you won’t, and you have to ask yourself why you buy The Spectator every week? It’s for analysis like
Bel Ami is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel of the same name about a young man who sleeps himself to the top of Parisian society — I once slept myself to the top of Parisian society, but by the time I got there I was far too exhausted to properly enjoy it —
The first and perhaps only thing to really say about Hunky Dory is that it is anything but. It is not hunky dory at all. Instead, it is half-baked and tiresome. I’d had rather high hopes for it. It’s a ‘let’s-put-on-a-show!’ film set in a Welsh comprehensive during the long hot summer of 1976 —
Unless I am Extremely Dim & Incredibly Thick, which is always a possibility — you think I don’t know? I do — this Stephen Daldry adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close just doesn’t seen to have any point, and is sentimental and banal as well as very, very long
The Muppet Show was my favourite TV programme when I was growing up, but this film, the first in over a decade? Not so much, even though it is fun in parts. I liked it terrifically at the beginning, and loved seeing Kermit again, and Miss Piggy, with her ‘pork chop’ (‘Hi-yah!’) and Gonzo and
Carnage is Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s hit stage play The God of Carnage, in which two sets of parents get together to discuss an altercation between their 11-year-old sons in the hope that they can figure it out sensibly, and all hell breaks loose. I have my reservations. I’m not convinced the play
The Descendants is a comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family — is there any other kind of family? I’ve yet to meet one — made by Alexander Payne, who also made About Schmidt and Sideways, but whereas I warmed to those films, I could not warm to this. I liked it. I enjoyed it. I did
W.E. is Madonna’s second outing as a film director, and this tells ‘the greatest royal love story of the 20th century’ via two women separated by more than half a century: Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and a modern-day New Yorker, Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a society wife who becomes obsessed with Mrs Simpson when her
Steven Spielberg’s version of War Horse is like an extended Sunday afternoon episode of Black Beauty gone mad via the first world war, just so you know, and although it made me cry this is no endorsement. I rarely cry in real life but have been known to howl in the cinema, even when I’m
Firstly, my review of 2011, which I was going to do in photographs until I realised I didn’t take any, and then in animal thumbprints, but they are quite rubbish. My dog, for example, looks nothing like a dog. So I will spare you my review of last year — my giraffe is getting there,
Every so often a film comes from the left field and plays a complete blinder and The Artist is such a film. It is also glorious, delicious and an unalloyed joy and if you don’t go see it you are a bigger fool than I thought you were, which is going some. It’s a film
The Iron Lady is a better performance than it is film, although I suspect the performance will carry the day. My good friend Meryl Streep, whom I have personally witnessed making pie with her very own Meryl hands, is awesome, flawless and magnificent, etc. but the film itself is peculiarly glib and superficial and somehow
Hugo 3D is Martin Scorsese’s first child-friendly family film and the first thing to say about Martin Scorsese’s first child-friendly family film is that it is a visual wonder: rich, lush, beautiful, gorgeous. But the second thing to say is nothing else is as exciting as the look of it and if there is a
As there were no invites this week from Hollywood movie stars — I thought Nicole Kidman might ask me over for a girls’ night in, to do face packs and nails and stuff, but not a squeak — I have to get back to the business of reviewing, and so here we are with The
Justice is a plodding and uninteresting revenge thriller starring Nicolas Cage and January Jones, and as I don’t have much else to say about it I’m going to fill the rest of the space by telling you about my dinner with Meryl Streep, who stars as Margaret Thatcher in the forthcoming The Iron Lady. This
As a major admirer of all writer/director Andrea Arnold’s previous work — Wasp, Red Road, Fish Tank — I was looking forward to her version of Wuthering Heights more than I can say, and? Wow! Or, at least, mostly ‘wow!’ It is a ‘wow’ with a few reservations. It is two thirds of a ‘wow’,
Three films for you this week, amazingly, and they are all at the smaller, independent end of the spectrum because I’ve had my fill of mainstream blockbusters, at least for the minute, and probably know all I will ever need to know about evil villains who wish to take over the world. (Just take it
To see or not to see, that is the question, just as it is always the question with us — I believe our relationship may be caught in what is generally referred to as a ‘rut’ — but I shall answer all the same and my answer is this: Anonymous is a ‘not see’ and
We Need to Talk About Kevin was a horrible book and this is the horrible screen adaptation of that horrible book, and whether you will want to see it or not will, I suppose, depend on how much you are prepared to revisit that horror. At this point I’d love to say you needn’t bother,
So, The Three Musketeers, and one for all, and all for one, but I wish it were every man for himself, and they’d all decided to call it a day and go their separate ways. This is a film of no charm whatsoever and I’d advise you to steer clear, walk the other way, keep
