Deborah Ross

Up in the Air 15, Nationwide 44 Inch Chest 18, Nationwide Up in the Air is gorgeous and wondrous and intelligent and elegant and freshly funny and moving and exquisitely constructed and I beseech you to get off your sofa and go see it. I am so serious about this I will not only say it all over, I will say it all over in capitals followed by nine exclamation marks: GO SEE IT!!!!!!!!! Now, what more do you want me to do? Carry you to the cinema? Don’t be silly. But I will give you four more exclamation marks, a chevron and two pound signs: !!!!^££. More than this I cannot do.

The Road 15, nationwide The Road is based on Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel and, as far as roads go, this one is long, hard, brutal, pitiless and profoundly horrible, plus there doesn’t seem to be much reward for sticking with it. It is very much like the North Circular in all these respects, unless you count finally getting to Ikea as a reward, which no one in their right mind would. ‘The horror, the horror,’ as Joseph Conrad would surely have said, if he’d found himself in Ikea on a Saturday afternoon. He might also have added: ‘And the meatballs are rubbish,’ but we’ll just never really know. But here? With this road?

Nowhere Boy 15, Nationwide from 26 December Firstly, the year in review — it was good, thanks — and now on to Nowhere Boy, the surprisingly conventional first feature-length film from visual artist Sam Taylor Wood. It is perfectly accomplished, and pleasing enough, but it’s not going to blow your socks off, even though the combination of Ms Taylor Wood and such a compelling story would give you every reason to think it might. That said, having your socks blown off is rather overrated. Or, as one man told me, ‘My socks blew off in 1976 and I’ve yet to find them. They were nice socks, too.’ So there is something to be said for not having your socks blown off, I suppose. The story?

Where the Wild Things Are PG, Nationwide Here is what you most need to know about this film: it isn’t a patch on the book. Usually, I wouldn’t put it like that. Indeed, as I have said before, and wouldn’t need to say again if only I could trust you had paid attention the first time, a film should stand or fall on its own merits, regardless of the source material, but I can’t seem to let it go with this one. Perhaps it’s because I’m just too close to this particular book. I grew up on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which was first published in 1963, as did my own son, who insisted I read it to him nightly for about a year. I didn’t mind.

Me and Orson Welles 12A, Nationwide For a film about drama, Me and Orson Welles — Orson Welles and I? Do we care? — is obstinately undramatic. I kept trying to will it into some kind of life, any kind of life. Come on. You can do it. Think of the children! But it would not be roused. It just plodded on, drearily and leadenly, for the full 114 minutes, like I had nothing better to do, which I didn’t, but that’s not the point. Based on true events, it follows the 22-year-old Welles as he mounts his ground-breaking New York 1937 production of Julius Caesar, but as a film about a famous play it has none of the pizzazz, wit, or invention of, say, a Shakespeare in Love. That, though, did have a script souped up by Tom Stoppard. Tom Stoppard.

Paranormal Activity 15, Nationwide Paranormal Activity is the horror film which was made for $30,000 and has since gone on to earn $240 million at the box office globally. This is astonishing, just as the size of horror audiences always astonishes me. Who are these people who enjoy being scared to death, and consider it a good night out? I don’t. Indeed, as I said to the critic who initially sat next to me at the screening, ‘I should warn you, I’m not very good at this sort of thing and I may well jump into your lap.’ At this point, he promptly got up and moved. I was, yes, minded to call out after him, ‘And you are no great shakes yourself...Robert!’, but, of course, did not have the courage. This is how fearful I am.

Couples Retreat 15, Nationwide Couples Retreat and, if you have an ounce of sense, so too will you. Retreat from this movie, and retreat as fast as your little legs will carry you. I didn’t actually intend to see this film this week. I intended to see Terry Gilliam’s Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but events conspired against me, or it was the Gods, who haven’t liked me ever since I put a red T-shirt into a wash with my one good white shirt and then shook my fist at them. (It was quite a fist; it was my only serious white shirt.) I rather expected Couples Retreat to be bad, just from having seen the poster — ‘it may be paradise, but it’s no vacation’ — but this bad?

Zombieland 15, Nationwide Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee 15, Key Cities I can’t say I care much for zombies — that is, film zombies; I’ve never met a real one — but the horror-comedy Zombieland is quite fun and does feature such a delicious cameo from Bill Murray it almost makes up for all the overlong scenes in which the zombies groan and stagger and spew black bile and haemorrhage blood and generally do what zombies do. I don’t think I even get zombies. OK, they’re the living dead, but what do they have against the living living? What have the living living ever done to them? Why do they always want to barricade them in a single room? Why do they want to eat human flesh?

The Invention of Lying 12A, Nationwide The Invention of Lying is Ricky Gervais’s first film as a Hollywood writer and director — well, co-writer and co-director, with newcomer Matthew Robinson — and it is a disappointment. Probably, it won’t be the biggest or most tragic disappointment of your life. If you’ve always dreamed of becoming a champion ice dancer, say, and you then go and lose a leg in an industrial accident, I imagine that will be a bigger and more tragic disappointment, but this is a disappointment all the same. I just wanted to put it into some kind of context.

The Soloist 12A, Nationwide The Soloist is ‘based on a true story’ and the book by LA Times columnist Steve Lopez entitled: The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music, which is exactly the sort of thing I’d race past in Waterstones. (Well, dawdle past, but while picking up my speed a bit; I’m not really a racer.) I didn’t have high hopes for the film either. With a book title like that, why would I? Oh boy, I even thought, it’s going to be one of those uplifting friendship movies accompanied by emancipating, emotionally soaring music and you know what? I would have been totally, 100 per cent spot-on (as usual!) if only I hadn’t been so entirely wrong.

Julie & Julia 12A, Nationwide Fish Tank 15, Nationwide If you love food, as I do — I even get excited about the meal trolley on planes, and count the number of aisles before it is going to get to me — and if you love Meryl Streep, as anyone in their right mind should, then you are probably already thinking you are going to totally love Julie & Julia, and while you are right, you are only half right. Look, it’s a nice movie and it’s a gentle movie and it’s an old-fashioned movie, and it gives the recipe for beurre blanc, which is never a bad thing, but it suffers just as The Devil Wears Prada suffered: when Ms Streep isn’t on screen, it dies a death and drags horribly.