David at the movies

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL

Take a cast of elderly British acting stalwarts and transport them to a photogenic foreign location and what you get is Tea With Mussolini or, in this case, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Both films are a pleasure to sit through, but where Mussolini had OTT stellar acting - and Cher's to-die-for wardrobe - Marigold has lower-key performances - and clothes from Primark.

Responding to an online advert, six British pensioners decide to spend their twilight years in a crumbling hotel in India. Only Judi Dench (who is hard-up) and Tom Wilkinson (playing gay) are given a tiny amount of plot development. Maggie Smith, wheelchair-bound, gets to do a working-class accent for a change although, like her Downton dowager, she turns out to have a card or two up her sleeve. Ronald Pickup has the Leslie Phillips role of the ageing lothario with Celia Imrie as his matchmaker, a non-singing Dolly Levi. Penelope Wilton drew the short straw and plays a middle-class Mona Lott oblivious to the charms of Jaipur; Bill Nighy is her put-upon husband, reminiscent of Hyacinth Bucket's poor Richard. Former Slumdog Millionaire Dev Patel is the cash-strapped manager of the Marigold Hotel; he shouts rather than speaks and looks like his Asian babe girlfriend's kid brother.

Despite Penny Wilton's moaning about the squalor of India, we are only shown a city that is chaotic and colourful - even the beggars are happy and smiling: no mutilated amputees here. There's a handful of crisp one-liners, a couple of farcical highlights and one moment of poignancy, but overall this is a big-screen cross between a sitcom and a Carry-On.

Somehow Marigold Hotel is greater than the sum of its parts. It's not going to resonate the way Tea With Mussolini does, but - I'll say it again - it's a pleasure, almost a joy, to sit through.

J.EDGAR

A Clint Eastwood movie is always worth seeing. This 'biopic' of J. Edgar Hoover is very much in the style of Changeling (2008) but not quite as enthralling. As in Meryl Streep's recent take on Mrs Thatcher, Leonardo DiCaprio spends a lot of his screen time playing seriously old (amazing make-up - it didn't look like prosthetic but clearly was!). The flashbacks to his life and achievements are given more depth than Margaret's but here too the emphasis seems a bit skewed. There's a lot about the Lindbergh baby kidnap case (for which Hoover falsely claimed more credit than he was due) and plenty about his relentless pursuit of US Communists, but not enough about his fractious relationship with the Kennedys (and other administrations) - just a brief scene of him listening to a JFK bedroom tape on the day of the president's trip to Dallas.

Edgar's momma's-boy closeness to his clingy old ma (Judi Dench) is sensitively brought out, although the context of the single "little black dress" moment (which I was impatient to see!) tends to evoke the spirit of Norman Bates. Hoover's relationship with his FBI personal assistant Clyde Tolson is covered in depth but a bit coyly. There are some cosy domestic scenes (they lived in separate homes) and a bit of discreet hand-holding, but we seem to be invited to infer that the 'affair' was platonic (although Richard Nixon is allowed to suggest otherwise in a particularly fruity moment!). There's a pleasingly cringe-making scene when a starlet asks Edgar for a dance and a nice edgy row with Clyde when Edgar lets slip that he's been dating Dorothy Lamour (wish we'd seen more of that).

DiCaprio gives an Oscar-worthy performance, and Arnie Hammer is excellent as Tolson, teetering on the edge of camp (though he gets short-changed in the old-boy make-up). Dame Judi is good as always, and Naomi Watts makes Edgar's tirelessly loyal secretary an intriguing character. The film has a palette so muted (too muted) it often seems like black-and-white. Eastwood's direction, like the script, is solid and makes a real effort to unravel the enigma that Hoover was, but the movie comes very close to being leaden in parts. Hoover served eight presidents: perhaps this makes him too sacred a cow to be put thoroughly through the revisionist meat-grinder.

THE ARTIST

I hate to be a party-pooper but for me this is not the greatest movie of recent times. Yes, it's charming, even beguiling - and it's got the most appealing dog in cinema history! - but it's kind of slow and kind of, dare I say, not very original.

George Valentin, a silent movie star (played by Jean Dujardin as a combination of Ramon Novarro and Douglas Fairbanks), is marooned by the coming of sound, while Peppy Miller, a girl he once helped (played by Berenice Bejo with an androgynous quality that reminded me of Jack Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like It Hot!), becomes a superstar in the new era.

OK, then: the coming-of-sound theme is from Singin' in the Rain and the falling/rising-star theme from A Star Is Born. Like Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond, our hero has a loyal chauffeur. He also has the cutest smartest dog you could wish for. The new element here is that both the onscreen and offscreen stories are played silently with the dialogue printed out for us; the soundtrack is a Muzakal succession of hit tunes from the 1920s. A scene where George has a nightmare with actual sound is surprisingly disturbing, and you somehow know there will be another sound scene towards the end.

I wanted to like this film more, but the lack of dialogue became slightly monotonous. It might have worked better if George's scenes had been the only silent ones, with Peppy's and the studio scenes having sound. But there are many moments of pure joy in this French-made 'hommage' to the Hollywood of yesteryear. It's a triumph of both acting and directing - and in Uggie the tricksy Jack Russell it is very clear that .... a star is born!

THE IRON LADY

Oh dear - more like The Old Rust-Bucket! This biopic of Mrs Thatcher spends around half its length showing her as a dotty old bird constantly talking to her dead husband. As ghosts go, Denis (Jim Broadbent) is quite handy, pouring soda into her scotch and reminding her of this and that. But as ghosts go, I was soon wishing he would do exactly that: go.

Margaret's early life as the grocer's daughter who goes into politics is shown in brief flashbacks. Then, suddenly, she's outside Number Ten, quoting St Francis. Fast forward to fighting the miners, sending troops and Exocets to the Falklands, having a narrow escape when her Brighton hotel is bombed by the IRA, facing riots over the poll-tax and rebellion in her Cabinet, saying goodbye to Downing Street (my personal favourite memory of the Thatcher Years).

Her career is played like an album of Greatest Hits, but it's not so much Beethoven's Greatest Hits as Cilla Black's. "Thatcherism Lite" is what we're served up here. The comparisons with Churchill get an airing, and the episodes of rioting contrast with the cheering crowds after the Falklands are liberated, but there's very little sense of the ideology she embraced (Victorian Values, etc) or the real divide she created between the haves and the have-nots - a chicken which is still coming home to roost in the era of global recession. Ronald Reagan, her soulmate, is here only as a dance-partner; her perception of Gorbachev as "a man we can do business with" is not touched on (for me her finest hour). We see the Berlin Wall come down, but we do not see her arguing against the Reunification of Germany (her biggest mis-call).

Meryl Streep is simply brilliant both as the powerhouse PM and as the doolally baroness; the voice and the look are uncannily recreated. Alexandra Roach as the young Margaret and Olivia Colman as her put-upon daughter Carol are very believable. Anthony Head makes a superb Geoffrey Howe, but Ted Heath and the two Michaels (Foot, Heseltine) are disappointingly underplayed.

The film itself ultimately disappoints. A skimpy "tribute show" bookended by an over-emphasis on Thatcher's date with dementia, a date that was also played out by Reagan, Churchill and Wilson. There was a point to this in Iris, showing a brilliant writer destroyed by senility. Here the only point seems to be to turn Thatcher into a figure of fun. Love her or loathe her (no prizes for guessing my position!), her life - her legacy - deserves more than this pantomime pastiche.