Miss Potter (2006)

Directed by Chris Noonan, this is a biopic of Beatrix Potter focusing on the early part of the writer/illustrator’s career. 

I enjoyed it because Renée Zellweger is always so watchable, but it’s very thin on plot. And the addition of animated sequences in which Potter’s art comes to life are clunky and awkward. I found them a little patronising, too. We can see for ourselves that she regards her characters as “living” things because Zellweger’s acting makes it clear. We don’t need it spelled out in such a literal manner. 

On the plus side, Ewan McGregor is much better than usual. And there are some sweet moments detailing the couple’s romance. But ultimately Miss Potter feels like a branding exercise on behalf of the Beatrix Potter estate.

Little Voice (1998)

Drama starring Jane Horrocks as “Little Voice”, a talented singer who – following the death of her father – hides away in her room owing to her intimidating mother Mari (Brenda Blethyn). But when Mari takes up with shifty promoter Ray Say (Michael Caine), the latter sees a fortune to be made by exploiting the reclusive young vocalist. 

Horrocks and Blethyn are both excellent. Jim Broadbent is suitably seedy as club owner Mr. Boo. And Ewan McGregor is more likeable than usual as the telephone engineer Billy. It's appealing and gritty, like Brassed Off, but I found the styling of LV's father (a sort of ghost or imagined visitor) oddly naff. I can see why he was portrayed in black and white – it was how he was shown in LV's treasured photo – but as a visual treatment it looked silly.

That point aside, it's engrossing and Horrocks' vocal impersonations of Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Bassey, and so on are compelling. Likewise, it's fascinating to hear Michael Caine's desperate, deranged version of "It's Over" by Roy Orbison when he realises that his various problems have all caught up with him.

The Ghost (2010)

Political thriller directed by Roman Polanski and adapted from a novel by Robert Harris. Ewan McGregor stars as a ghostwriter employed to help an ex-prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) complete his memoirs. That’s because the previous ghostwriter died in mysterious circumstances that soon threaten McGregor as well. 

It’s extremely odd. Parts of it are unintentionally funny. McGregor has a cockney accent and at times sounds like a young Michael Caine, but beyond that isn’t given any personality at all. Brosnan also speaks oddly, and his usual natural quality is absent. The two women in the ex-PM’s life (Kim Cattrall as Olivia Williams) are both played in a hammy, overwrought fashion. Cattrall has few lines and little to do. The set is also strange: a peculiar designer house on an island just off the US mainland. The Martha's Vineyard area is meant to be attractive – sought after by a wealthy elite – but it looks like a remote, unloved stretch of the Suffolk coastline. You think the fancy "Bond villain" house is going to have a significance, but that never arrives, so the flashy location ends up being a distraction that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story.

The Ghost isn’t very exciting, either. Even the mugging and car chase scenes are lacklustre and strangely flat. Badly mocked up photos shown countless times. Important parts of the story don’t add up.

Deception (2008)

Thriller. 

Jonathan McQuarry (Ewan McGregor) is a dull, socially withdrawn accountant who befriends Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman), a charismatic lawyer. Bose introduces McQuarry to “The List”, a secret club for people who crave the excitements of “intimacy without intricacy”. But it turns out that McQuarry is being scammed, and soon finds himself a murder suspect. Meanwhile, he falls for a mysterious woman (Michelle Williams) who goes missing. 

It’s tense and keeps you guessing. There’s a distinct Hitchcock influence to the plot, especially in the way we see McQuarry learn that everything he thought he knew was just an illusion devised to trick him. 

The three leads are all strong and McGregor performs better than usual, with more presence and a more believable character. The only thing that doesn’t quite convince is his character transformation. He’s too easily turned into a different kind of person for the final part of the story, which makes the ending seem a little silly. It’s also a shame that the plot thread about the investigating detective (Lisa Gay Hamilton) isn’t better developed.

Haywire (2012)

Dreadful thriller. 

Private intelligence agent Mallory Kane (a fundamentally miscast Gina Carano) is double-crossed by the people who recruited her, and has to go on the run. 

Directed self-consciously by Steven Soderbergh, it has an excessive use of filters and intrusive “funky” music by David Holmes in place of dialogue. Plus, despite all the fighting (Carano was a mixed martial artist), most of the “action” scenes are surprisingly dull. 

It’s remarkable that big names such as Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas and Michael Fassbender got themselves involved in such a clichéd mess. The script – what there is of one – is extremely poor. The plotting is confused. The complete lack of a character for the main part is conspicuous. Carano simply doesn’t have the screen presence or acting ability to carry off the lead role. She was better as a supporting character in The Mandalorian, except that Lucasfilm sacked her after she made anti-mask, pro-Trump statements.

There’s literally not one good thing about Haywire – that title bears no relation to anything in the story – except that parts of it are unintentionally funny. The worst film I’ve seen for quite a long time.

August: Osage County (2013)

A dysfunctional family get together for the occasion of a funeral. The unhinged mother (Meryl Streep) has mouth cancer and a pill addiction. Her three daughters (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis) all have domestic problems of their own. And their attempts to draw together as a family end in bitter recrimination. 

Adapted from a play by Tracy Letts, this is a hugely OTT drama. The all-star cast also includes Sam Shepherd, an oddly miscast Ewan McGregor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Cooper and Dermot Mulroney. 

They all deliver solid performances, but the problem is that it’s so overwhelmingly overwrought that it’s almost farcical. And not in a comical way, either. The endless screaming became a chore and the refusal to allow even a glimmer of positivity was wearing indeed. It was such a bottomless pit of misery (with no contrasts or light and shade) that it couldn’t really engage as a drama. 

Streep seemed to be wearing a facial prosthetic to make her look older and sicker, and I found that offputting. 

Another flaw was that I couldn’t believe someone as vindictive, mentally unstable and chemically unbalanced as Streep’s character could have kept the family’s big secret for all those years, only to casually reveal it at the moment she did. 

A far stronger family drama is The Family Stone, which had wit and subtlety on its side.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011)

Romantic comedy-drama. 

A fisheries expert (Ewan McGregor) attempts to help a Yemeni sheikh (Amr Waked) with the expensive and improbable task of introducing salmon to the Yemen desert. He’s assisted by the sheikh’s financial adviser (Emily Blunt), whose soldier boyfriend has just gone missing in action. Romance ensues. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister’s press secretary is keen to exploit the situation for its publicity value. 

It’s an odd film. Some of the awkwardness is presumably deliberate because it’s suggested that McGregor’s character has Asperger syndrome, although that’s never really explored. Everything remains thin and surface-level. 

Blunt is her usual charming self, seemingly able to do this stuff in her sleep. McGregor exhibits more versatility than usual. The sheik is saintly and one-dimensional. And Kristin Scott Thomas’s brash, pushy character, presumably designed for comic relief, is just annoying. 

Overall, it doesn’t really work. The unlikely love story is nice enough but otherwise it’s just a bit weak all round.

Brassed Off (1996)

The Yorkshire mining community of Grimley is threatened when the mine risks closure. Gloria Mullins (Tara Fitzgerald) is sent there to assess the profitability on behalf of British Coal. She grew up in the village and rekindles her childhood romance with Andy Barrow (Ewan McGregor). She also joins the miners' brass band, led by Danny Ormondroyd (Pete Postlethwaite), who is clearly not well after his years working at the pit. Meanwhile, Danny's son Phil (Stephen Tompkinson) is having his own problems with his marriage and finances.

It's a tightly plotted kitchen-sink drama with flashes of comedy and a very strong political message. McGregor delivers one of his better performances, although – as usual – he never sparkles. Fortunately everyone else does. Postlethwaite is charismatic as the band leader who cares so passionately about music that he overlooks other priorities. Fitzgerald is great as the crispy, pretty outsider who turns out to be “management”. And Tompkinson is believable as a desperate man whose problems keep piling up.

I was never a fan of brass, but the music sounds potent and poignant. It takes on greater significance as the story winds towards its moving conclusion, with no easy resolution.

The Island (2005)

As the back of the DVD explains: “Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson lead an all-star cast as residents of an isolated, high-tech compound. But when they discover they’re actually clones, and worth more dead than alive, they stage a daring escape. Battling an unfamiliar environment and an armed team of mercenaries in hot pursuit, they’ll risk their lives and freedom to save those they left behind – and reveal the truth about The Island.”

This sci-fi thriller has similarities with 1984, The Hunger Games, Elysium and countless other dystopian stories. Its lack of originality wouldn’t have been a problem, though, if it had probed deeper into exploring the ethical issues it merely touches on. Unfortunately, it never feels very substantial. 

Ewan McGregor is as bland as ever as “Lincoln Six-Echo”. He can read his lines as well as anyone, but what else does he bring to the role? I found it bizarre to see him once again looking at a cloning facility, as he did in Star Wars Episode II. Scarlett Johansson (“Jordan Two-Delta”) isn’t given much of an opportunity to act, since most of the film involves the pair of them running around or being shot at. Sean Bean is OK as the supposedly sinister Dr. Merrick, while Steve Buscemi is likewise passable as a friend who helps the protagonists escape. 

The relationships in the film aren’t developed satisfactorily. A couple of scenes have fun with the clones’ naivety (they’ve only been educated to the level of 15-year-olds and know nothing of human society), but others allow them to be improbably worldly when the narrative demands it. As such, the plot only works if you don’t ask too many questions. 

The back of the DVD box warns: “Contains strong language, moderate violence and intense action”. It doesn’t warn about the excessive product placement. It’s intriguing that viewers needed to be warned about “intense action”, which surely is a selling point – especially since those sequences are expertly done. But maybe that’s how they justified the “12” certificate – action as a substitute for violence, or as a way of concealing it.

Visually, it’s striking – the colour has been ramped up and there’s a hyper-reality about the look of it. Yet there’s something missing. The Island hints at making wider points about social control but ends up sidestepping moral complexities to focus on exciting chase scenes instead.

Black Hawk Down (2001)

Brutal military drama by Ridley Scott that details the US involvement in the 1993 civil war in Somalia.

A UN taskforce is sent into Mogadishu to capture the leader of the militia, Mohamed Farrah Hassan Aidid. It sounds straightforward enough, but the mission goes horribly wrong when a US helicopter is shot down. Chaos ensues, and the Americans seem naive and ill-prepared. You know there isn’t going to be a simple resolution or a happy ending.

The film is extremely violent – sometimes almost unbearably so. In no way does it glamorise war (you see body parts galore), but – perhaps inevitably – it does only show it from the Americans’ perspective.

The ensemble cast has no real star or focal point. This has the benefit of making it about the team rather than any one “hero”.

Being a Ridley Scott film, it looks stunning and the soldiers’ relentless, harrowing experience of being under constant attack is detailed brilliantly.

Emma (1996)

Disappointing version of the Jane Austen novel starring Gwyneth Paltrow as the meddling girl who manipulates the affairs of those around her. The incidental music is intrusive, and dialogue that sparkles on the page somehow fails to come alive. At times there is a tired Sunday-evening-TV-drama feel to it. I’m still not sure if Ewan McGregor can act. There are flashes of wit, but not enough of them – baffling given the richness of the source material. It improves as Emma undergoes her character development, but Clueless, which adapts and updates the same story, is a far more entertaining and successful tribute to Austen’s talent.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)

Episode II is even more awful than you remembered. There is so much wrong with it... Some of the worst “acting” you will ever see. Flat dialogue. “Jokes” that simply are not funny. Brightly lit green-screen sets that never seem real. Ponderous, almost faux-Shakespearean exchanges that hint at a weighty “significance” that never arrives. When Anakin tries to do “romance” – declaring his love for Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) – or indeed any kind of acting, it is excruciating. Hayden Christensen is way out of his depth and grotesquely miscast in the role of the troubled child about to become the evil dictator Darth Vader. Never once can you believe in him.

As with Episode I (1999), the weakest in the series, there’s something fundamentally “not quite right” about the whole film. There’s way too much of Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) just...wandering around. And, but for a few action scenes, it’s incredibly s-l-o-w. Hard to believe this was designed to appeal to kids. Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine is the one redeeming feature.

The Impossible (2012)

Scary and moving true story of a family caught in the 2004 tsunami that redrew the map around the Indian Ocean. It shows the shocking brutality of the event itself, but the focus is on what happens to the family when they are split up and wounded. It could so easily have been corny, but there were several moments that brought me to tears. It's gruelling and distressing to see so much human pain on such an epic scale.

Naomi Watts is highly convincing as the badly injured mother, trying to keep going for the sake of her son and the family members she believes lost. Ewan McGregor is less so as the father, although he's much better here than when he was being Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The film has been criticised for focusing on the "tourist experience" of the tsunami, rather than on how the event affected local people. That seems inevitable, somehow, but at its centre The Impossible celebrates the universal value of life and portrays all of the victims with compassion. For a "disaster film", there’s a refreshing absence of cliché and sensationalism.