While Haythe and Waugh have a message regarding drug laws they want to impart (not with anything approaching subtly) they still do it by constructing characters and situations easy to connect with. Snitch is hardly original but it does have style, it certainly has energy and it remembers to put story and character before the action, giving the audience a reason to be applauding and not just a wooden heroic mannequin to halfheartedly root for.

Like Someone in Love, freestyling and evolving much like the jazz standard that inspired the title, is a refreshing blend of heart, lust, longing, desire, family and friendship I couldn’t take my eyes off of. Kiarostami proves once again he is one of the true cinematic titans working today, and even with minor reservations his latest is a masterful excursion into existential consciousness I’ll happily drown myself within again relatively soon.

A strong, if not entirely successful, motion picture, NO is a gripping and thought-provoking procedural sure to spark complicated and stimulating debates for many years to come.

Be that as it may, as fifth go-arounds are concerned this one is certainly not a charm, and for fans of the series it’s best to just say ‘yippee-ki-nay!’ and leave this latest installment well enough alone.

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.