Film releases: October 28

The Ides of March – part-written, directed by and starring George Clooney – is a marvellously stable thriller that squeezes you so expertly you react in all the ways it wants. Clooney plays a Democrat running in the presidential primary race. Ryan Gosling is his devoted press spokesman, and Philip Seymour Hoffman their unsentimental campaign manager. Shot in Michigan, it takes place over a few days in a leaf-tramped winter, in and out of campaign buses, high-end hotel rooms and town halls. Like The Candidate, the 1972 Robert Redford vehicle, the smallest details of running a campaign (cold calling etc) are enjoyed to the max, but unlike that movie Ides does not get bogged down with actual politics or in melodramatically enlarging the scale of moral hideousness. It just has an unusually strong sense of forward movement.

Ides is a political thriller, not a political film – Clooney plays the poetic fantasy of a Democrat going around giving dream speeches (“For the next 10 years no new American car will have an internal combustion engine!”). Clooney is on screen far less than Gosling, but when he is there, filmed close-up, listening, thinking, he silently imparts the wisdom of a master illusionist, as though he could jump inside your head and read your thoughts. Warren Beatty and Redford – Clooney’s closest actor/director analogues – had less of Clooney’s natural wit and much more actual political ambition to muddy their path. (But then all actors love to imagine themselves politicians: both professions comprehend perfectly the power of rhetoric.)

Clooney turned 50 in May. He looks older – those are deep lines. But it’s a face sun-tanned from summers in Italy, and clambakes in the Vineyard. A face that knows it will never see loneliness, or a bed-sitting room, or the melancholy finishing of a brandy and soda in some mouldy Pall Mall club. That’s why Clooney would not have made a convincing Bond. One always has to worry slightly that Bond might one day wind up, solitary, curdled, washing his own socks in a Westminster mansion flat.

Gosling on the other hand has the lovely, bland appeal of the young Kevin Costner (the whole film reminded me slightly of that great 1980s nail-biter No Way Out). He’s not the greatest young actor around – Joseph Gordon Levitt would have aced this had he been five years older – but is certainly having his moment, and is an enormous hit with the girls (they could have called this movie The Ides Candy of March). There is, like Costner, something slightly removed about Gosling, something sad – like the late summer sun slatting the bleachers. Sometimes he’s incredibly present; sometimes he’s more like a schoolboy watching a laboratory experiment: disconnected, emotionally atonal. He’s well cast here as both a press manipulator and political idealist, someone essentially compromised, imperfect. Gosling’s face is literally off-key. His left eye is ever so slightly lower than the other, as though it were sliding, ineffably disappointed, off his face.

Glossily mounted and arriving on the tidal wave of its gobsmacking $166m US box office, The Help, adapted from the Kathryn Stockett bestseller about the cruel lot of black maids in 1960s Mississippi, suffers from an obsequious lust for stereotypes. All white people are either spoiled honeybunches (some of whom we are meant to adore) and all black people are motivational speakers (“You gon’ do somethin’ big with your life, Missy!”). Being chock-full of broads, it makes sure to touch on domestic violence and serial miscarriages too and there’s a great deal of teary, spiritual agony.

What a brave sorority house the shoot must have been! I cherished this quote from the press notes: “Jessica Chastain, a vegan, had to eat fried chicken in one scene and Bryce Dallas Howard, who doesn’t eat wheat or sugar, has to eat a chocolate pie.” Take that, Malcolm X!

In the questionable Anonymous, Elizabeth I delivers several illegitimate children and unwittingly has sex with one of them when he reaches adulthood – an experience that turns him simultaneously into William Shakespeare and the Welsh national treasure Rhys Ifans. As literary conspiracy theories go, this is a long way from cheese and wine in the English faculty lounge.

Roland Emmerich (Stargate, 10,000BC) must be on the agave nectar again, and I say rock on Roland. The whole movie is amusingly camp and impudent – its zest feels genuine – although ultimately nonsensical. Could the 17th Earl of Oxford really have written all those plays? Didn’t he croak before half of them were even thought of? But Ifans, naturally, is excellent: a life of hard smoking sparkles from the actor’s teeth and as he composes another line of Hamlet he wafts his ink-stained fingers to show us his neuro-receptors are in particularly high gear.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn – directed and produced by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson – is a 3D animation whose USP is to get us to look at every character it presents from every imaginable angle in an attempt to project something approaching an über-Hergé facsimile into our brains(and possibly further – on to the moon?), using extreme digital refining, sculpting and detailing. And yet instead of really comprehending Snowy or the streets of the 1930s – instead of feeling a sweet, unmediated love for all things Tintin – one helplessly pictures the banks and banks of Hollywood animators and their snarling supervisors, like the exhausted workers under the streets of Metropolis. This is the ugliest film ever made. Simply, it out-aestheticises Hergé and murders him.

The hit Miss Bala (it wowed at Cannes, and is the Mexican entry for the next Foreign Language Oscar) is the story of a sorrowful beauty queen forced to become a driver and drug runner for a gang. Violent, loud, frequently thrilling, it whips effectively from super-real scenes of random murder under the blue blur of strip lights to characters gazing sadly out to sea, which crashes eternally on to perfect beaches. The camera follows the lead actress (Stephanie Sigman) around like an insecure lover, as though in awe of her willowy perfection, which we all are 10 minutes in. She’s no scowling angel, but so cow-eyed and radiant she gives the whole Mexican-peasant-with-a-heart-of-gold thing a royal workout.