Beautiful Creatures isn’t perfect, and there are certainly elements that could be improved upon if the film ends up generating future installments. But it gets far more right than it does wrong, the movie achieving a poignant ebullience that’s bewitching.

Bateman and McCarthy aren’t left well enough alone to do what they do and as such the pair are forced into going far more over the top than they’d likely otherwise have gone, their respective performances as grating as nails screeching down a well-worn chalkboard.

Side Effects is the first great movie of 2013.

But even when the vicious Queen Spider breaks out onto the streets of New York, even when Muldoon and Campbell’s daughter finds herself stranded in the middle of the alien arachnid’s hive, even when the military starts attacking as if Godzilla himself was rampaging throughout the city, Spiders 3D barely registers, the film devoid of a pulse and, disappointingly, is nothing short of dead on arrival.

I guess that means I liked Bullet to the Head, flaws and all…Walter Hill, even at 70, shows he hasn’t lost his touch, and without him at the helm I doubt there’d be anything here to talk about.

Needless to say, [Girls Against Boys] will not be a pleasant experience for everyone. The first kill is shocking in its ruthless normality, while a later dismemberment had me clutching my armrests so tightly I worried I was going to break a finger.

Yet when the focus stays on our two heroes, when their story remains front and center, Warm Bodies achieves a heartfelt ebullience that’s inspiring, and for a movie about the undead watching this made me feel as alive as anything I’ve seen in ages.

As great as the production design is, as sensational as the costumes are, as wonderful as some of the set pieces can be and as magnificent and unique as the grossly perverse gore effects are, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is head-scratching nonsense that does annoy. The movie never catches fire, doesn’t generate any steam and very seldom comes alive, the whole enterprise as dead as the decapitated corpses littering the supernatural fairy tale countryside the characters inhabit

You already know who you are if something like John Dies at the End is your sprinkle of soy sauce. Fans of Coscarelli, of which there are many (and I’m one of them), are sure to want to give this darling of the midnight festival circuit a look, while the genre curious are warned to give it a cockeyed gander at their entertainment peril.