Deborah Ross

Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a deliciously sly, twisty, darkly comedic take on the art world starring Ian McKellen who has never been better on film. (Let’s not mention 2023’s The Critic ever again.) The trouble with McKellen is that for some people  (i.e., me) it’s hard not to always see Ian McKellen, but that’s not the case here. Soderbergh is a big name (the Ocean’s trilogy, the Magic Mike trilogy, plus Traffic, Erin Brockovich and many more) but with this two-hander he’s gone small, pitting McKellen against Michaela Coel. She has the quieter role but more than holds her own. (I could look at the remarkable planes of her face all day.

A three-hour Japanese epic about a classical performance art (kabuki) isn’t the easiest sell, I’ll grant you, but I’ll give it my best. Kokuho is multi-award winning. It is the highest grossing live-action film in Japan ever. It is sumptuously filmed. It is masterfully sweeping. The kabuki itself is stunning, so much so that you may one day wish to visit the kabuki theatre in Tokyo, although be warned: the shortest production is four hours. Some last all day. Looked at this way, you are getting off lightly here. I felt entirely immersed in a world I had known little about Directed by Lee Sang-il, and adapted from Shuichi Yoshida’s two-part novel, the film is a drama spanning 50 years.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is one of those films which, if chanced upon when flicking television channels, I will always stick with for a bit. It has zing. It has bite. It has memorable lines that I can remember without having to look them up. (‘Are we going to a hideous skirt convention?’) But mostly it has Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, the wonderfully toxic editor-in-chief of Runway fashion magazine. She is still terrific. But while the landscape has moved on, the characters have remained the same and halfway through I started to drift. Another blow is that it’s become more sentimental and less satirical. In other words – and I hate to be the one to say it – it’s not as good as the original. Where are we, 20 years on?

Rose of Nevada is the third film in Mark Jenkin’s Cornish trilogy and if you have seen the first two (Bait, Enys Men) you will have booked your cinema ticket already. Rooted in characters shaped by the histories and tensions of Cornwall’s fishing folk, Jenkin’s film-making is uniquely tactile, textured and sensory. It has been said you can’t watch one of his features without feeling the rust on your hands and the salt in your hair. I would even add that it may be a while before you find your land-legs again.

Glenrothan is Brian Cox’s directorial debut and I wish there were a nicer way of putting it but, Brian: please, please, don’t give up the day job. The screenplay, meanwhile, is by David Ashton, whose only previous film credit seems to be Freddie as F.R.O.7  (1992), a James Bond spoof starring a six foot animated frog voiced by Ben Kingsley. (‘Toadally awful’ is the first comment on IMDb.) The only thing that might actually make you laugh is the foreshadowing The film stars Cox and Alex Cumming as estranged brothers Sandy and Donal and here’s what you need to know about the pair: 40 years ago Donal left Sandy and the family business (a whisky distillery in Glenrothan) for America and hasn’t been in touch since.

François Ozon’s The Stranger is an adaptation of Albert Camus’ 1942 novel about a clerk who – spoiler alert* – senselessly murders an Arab in broad daylight on a hot Algerian beach. Why did he do it? ‘It was because of the sun’ is all he can suggest. Existential ennui: that’s what’s at play here, which isn’t generally a great draw at the cinema. It would come way down on most people’s lists. But miraculously, Ozon has managed to make a film about boredom without making a boring film. If nothing else, the radiant black and white aesthetic will grab you from the off and then never let go. Visually, it’s divine. The novel – which was published as The Outsider in this country – opens with the line: ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.

The Drama is the latest from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli whose films (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) always cause a stir, and this is no exception. It stars Hollywood big-hitters Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a happily engaged couple whose forthcoming wedding may not go ahead after one discovers a disturbing truth about the other. What is this disturbing truth? It would be a spoiler to tell you – even though the details are splashed all over the internet and have already created a backlash. (Don’t look it up. Or do. I’m not your boss.) It is intended to shock but it may not be as shocking as it thinks it is – or even very convincing.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners won four Oscars and was nominated for 16 and I’d yet to see it. Sometimes the labels associated with a film can be off-putting and, for me, ‘horror’ and ‘vampires’ have the same effect as, say, ‘experimental’ or ‘like a poem’ or ‘directed by Michael Bay’. It’s now landed on the streamers and it seemed like an omission that needed correcting, so I spent around ten hours with it. It’s only 135 minutes but should you hit pause every time it gets scary that’s how it might roll. Please don’t sell me a vampire film when it’s a zombie one, even if I don’t like either The film is a genre-mashing beast, told with gusto from the off – and you get nearly an hour of pause-free time, even if you know what’s coming down the track.

Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia is about an ageing Italian president who is coming to the end of his seven-year term, and must reflect on decisions made, decisions yet to be made and the moral complexities of life. Unusually for Sorrentino, who has a liking for the showy – Hand of God, The Great Beauty, Il Divo and, for television, The New Pope – this is sober, melancholic and elegiac, and possibly the better for it. Plus, it stars Toni Servillo, which is always a win. I’ve just checked his back-catalogue and can confirm: always, always, always a win.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is the film that fans of the television show have long been waiting for, so I must watch what I say. The story follows a group of exceptionally violent Birmingham gangsters operating between the wars and if you see it at the cinema you’ll hear a message before the opening credits. It’s Cillian Murphy imploring audiences not to give away any spoilers and ruin it for everyone else ‘by order of the Peaky Blinders!’. There will be no spoilers here today. I have no wish to get my face slashed. There will be no spoilers here today.

Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, which won the Jury prize at Cannes, explores the lives of four generations of women growing up in the same rural farmhouse in Germany over the course of a century. It’s non-chronological, impressionistic, profoundly art-house and even though I am a fervent fan of linear storytelling – what can I tell you? I just love a beginning, middle and end – this is compelling and mesmerises even when it confounds. I think it’s saying that the past inhabits us all, which isn’t stunningly original, but the film itself is.

EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert is a concert documentary that grew out of the 65 boxes of unseen Las Vegas performances discovered by Baz Luhrmann while researching his 2022 biopic Elvis. As I have little interest in ‘the King’ I approached with a heavy heart. But now? I’m abundantly interested. In fact, I’ve shifted from indifference to thinking that if I could see one musical artist live at their peak it would have to be him. He’s that electrifying. A warning, however: it’s a 12A. ‘Elvis picks up a bra thrown on to the stage during a concert performance and puts it on his head,’ notes the BBFC. I wish I’d had the chance to throw a bra that he’d put on his head. Hopefully, it would have been one of my nicer ones that day. They are of varying quality.

Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent, which is about an academic on the run during Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship, won two Golden Globes, and has been nominated for four Oscars, and it’s truly special even if it is languorous and sprawling. It is one of those long films (two hours and 40 minutes) populated by so many characters you may well find yourself praying: ‘Please let me keep track of who’s who.’ Do hang on in there. It will all come right and be so worth it. The house is run by Dona Sebastiana, who may now be my favourite film character ever The film is set in 1977 which, an intertitle tells us, with some understatement, was a period of ‘great mischief’. It has an opening scene that will likely become iconic as it’s so brilliantly tense.

Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ had purists losing their minds from the get-go.  They lost their minds at the casting – Margot Robbie is too old for Cathy; Jacob Elordi is too white for Heathcliff – and then lost their minds at the trailer, which is all heaving bosoms and kinky vibes set to Charli XCX beats. But Fennell has made it clear that it is her vision of Emily Brontë’s novel, hence the quotation marks around the title, and that she wants it to feel as she felt when she first read the book at 14 years old. I was willing to cut her considerable slack but did her 14-year-old self, I had to wonder, make it to the end? Who, in their right mind, would sell it as a Valentine’s date film if they had? I may be on #TeamPurist here.

The documentary Melania, which follows the first lady in the 20 days leading up to her husband’s 2025 presidential inauguration, has already been savaged by critics. It is ‘shallow’ and ‘a shameless infomercial’ and ‘designer taxidermy’, and according to Variety, ‘if they showed this on a plane people would still walk out’. It is, it’s true, a film that could have been authored by Hello! magazine, but isn’t there some value in seeing how someone wants to be seen? There’s also no shame in being in it for the rich lifestyle porn – on that count it delivers handsomely. I was hanging on to every detail, from what will be served at the inauguration dinner (golden eggs and caviar) to the width of the ribbon on her hat. (Should it be narrowed? Will it be?

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague dramatises the (chaotic) making of Breathless (1960), Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic. It’s a film about a film, told mostly in the manner of that film, with the same kind of liveliness. Godard is as impossible to comprehend by the end as he was at the beginning  It isn’t necessary to watch Breathless first by the way, although why not? It’s widely available on streaming platforms and, while it remains one of the most influential movies of all time, it’s just 90 minutes long. Christopher Nolan take note. You too, James Cameron. (His latest Avatar is three hours and 20 minutes, for heaven’s sake.) Linklater certainly recreates the look, feel and sound.

H is for Hawk is an adaptation of the bestselling memoir by Helen Macdonald who, following the sudden death of her beloved father, channels her grief through the training of a goshawk, Mabel. The film stars Claire Foy, who is superb, as is the nature photography, but is it right, keeping a wild animal captive, and depriving it of its natural behaviours because it helps you in some way? What’s in it for this gorgeous bird, I kept wondering. The cruelty is never addressed. This is solely about human need. We’re not even told who plays Mabel, so I can’t say what she has been in before or whether she has won any awards. (I would hope so; she is magnificent.

Rental Family stars Brendan Fraser as an out-of-work American actor living in Tokyo. He accepts employment with an agency that gets performers to play roles in real people’s lives. You may need a friend, for example, or a mourner should you fear your funeral will be sparse. (Tell me about it.) Fraser won an Oscar for a dark performance in The Whale but in this he’s back as a lovable, good-hearted everyman. (Is there anyone who does that better, aside from Tom Hanks?) Fraser plays Phillip, who arrived in Tokyo seven years before to star in a toothpaste commercial and has never left. Presumably, there is nothing, and no one, calling him home. He lives alone in a tiny, dimly lit apartment. His displacement and isolation are firmly established visually.

Hamnet is an imagined account of William Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, their unspeakable grief at the death of their son (the titular Hamnet) and how this may have inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet. It stars Paul Mescal and an extraordinary Jessie Buckley, who will likely win every award going, yet be warned: it does do everything it can to make you cry. You can hold out and hold out and refuse to be emotionally manipulated, as you’re better than that, but when Max Richter’s ‘On The Nature of Daylight’ kicks in at the end you will give up the fight. Take a hanky if you do not wish to deploy your sleeve.