I think we can all agree that the last thing the film world needs as another tale of mopey, bloodsucking teenagers, but Neil Jordan's latest vampirical tale, Byzantium, is clearly doing everything it can to distance itself from the world of Stephanie Meyer. Based on a play by Tamara Drew...

Epic is the latest 3D CGI romp from Blue Sky Studios: the team behind the lavish and lucrative Rio and Ice Age films. Directed by Blue Sky co-founder, Chris Wedge, Epic tells the story of a young teenager named...

J. J. Abrams' second voyage into the Star Trek universe is a bigger, brighter, but not necessarily better affair, but fans of the 2009 movie will be happy to hear that there is just...

Marvel have kicked off 'Phase 2' in fine style with Robert Downey Jr.'s fourth outing as self-styled billionaire/playboy/philanthropist, Tony Stark.  With Shane Black taking the reins from Jon Favreau, the promotional campaign for Iron Man 3 has successfully wrong-footed its audience with its bleak, Nolanesque trailers, only to deliver a...

"We won the war, but we lost our home", laments Tom Cruise's Jack Harper in Oblivion's textbook opening voiceover, with an amalgam of ennui, self-parody and faux-sincerity. It is a pretty good indicator of what is to come over the next 126 minutes from Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski's by-the-numbers...

Dark Skies is the latest in a rather long line of bland horror flicks from the producers of Insidious and the prolific Paranormal Activity series.  Dark Skies shares similar DNA with its predecessors, but this time around it has been given an extra-terrestrial, conspiracy-theory twist by writer/director Scott Stewart, whose...

Danny Boyle's first film since silencing the skeptics at last summer's unforgettable Olympic opening ceremony arrives in the form of low-key London-based noir, Trance.  This mind-bending, psychological-thriller is a far cry from sky-diving monarchs and jitterbugging nurses, but Boyle hasn't completly reined in his penchant for spectacle.  James McAvoy stars...

French auteur, François Ozon's follow up to 2011's Potiche arrives in the form of another stage adaption: Juan Mayorga's The Boy in the Last Row. In The House, which picked up the top award at last year's San Sebastian Film Festival, is a jet black, yet oddly playful comedy about a...

Yaron Zilberman's debut feature, A Late Quartet is a delicately handled and brilliantly-observed relationship drama about the internal dynamics of a world renowned string quartet. When the group's 'cellist, Peter (Chistopher Walken) is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, he reluctantly informs the group that their next performance will be his last. However, the...

21 & Over is the directorial debut from The Hangover writers, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, and they make surprisingly little effort to distance their new film from the 2009 super-hit. The film starts with our two heroes, Miller and Casey (Miles Teller and Skylar Astin), strolling through a...

British action veteran Simon West and Nic Cage have teamed up for the first time since their 1997 monster hit, Con Air, for Stolen: a unashamed B-movie that willfully draws comparisons with Luc Besson's inexplicably successful Taken films.  The film follows notorious bank robber, Will "Gum" Montgomery (Nicolas Cage), who...

Veteran rapper and self-styled P.I.M.P., Snoop Dogg, has teamed up with hipster magazine Vice to document his transition from weed-smoking hip-hop artist, to weed-smoking Reggae artist, to produce a companion piece to his upcoming record. Directed by Vice editor, Andy Capper, Reincarnated follows Snoop as he leaves his LA roots behind...

Ken Loach is not a director who has kept his political cards close to his chest, but his latest film, The Spirit of '45 is his most direct advocacy of Socialism yet. Told with a mixture of period footage and monochrome talking heads, the film depicts the political landscape of post-Second...

Set in the near future, Jake Schreier's Robot & Frank is a quiet, low-budget sci-fi flick about the friendship between an ageing jewell thief and his Robotic assistant.  At first glance this could look like your typically quaint, Sundance-friendly indie-comedy with a high concept and a hollow centre, but Schreier's...

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is the latest is a seemingly never-ending line of fairy tale rehashes for the Twilight generation. The story takes place a decade or so after the Grimm's fairy tale, and Hansel and Gretel (Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton) have recovered from their traumatic experience in the...

It's easy to forget what made John McTierman's Die Hard such a landmark in action filmmaking. Its claustrophobic, localised setting, surprising depth of character and perfectly pitched tone coupled with its iconic set pieces, gripping pacing and wry one-liners made it an instant classic that has spawned endless rip-offs and...

There is a line in I Give it a Year, in which one of the peripheral characters describes the wedding they've just been to as "like being in a Hugh Grant film".  It's a strange line; it indicates either that the film is wryly acknowledging its own derivativeness, or that...

Katherine Bigelow's follow up to her Oscar winning The Hurt Locker was a film about the hunt for 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Ladin, which due to a significant and unignorable event in the real-life narrative, quickly became a film about the demise of Osama Bin Ladin. Zero Dark Thrity - which...

Steven Spielberg's long awaited biopic of 'honest' Abe Lincoln has been in the pipeline for over a decade now, with Liam Neeson set to take on the role before an unlikely turn of events saw him became one of Hollywood's most bankable action stars. Neeson's loss is Oscar-hoarder Daniel Day-Lewis'...

It's been about a decade since Arnold Schwarzenegger left acting to embark on his political career. Two terms and the revelation of a secret love child later, and the ex-Governator has remained true to his famous refrain, and will indeed "be back" for his first leading role since Terminator 3 in...