I doubt this third instalment will disappoint fans of the genre as you get exactly what you pay for. However, as a standalone film, Step Up 3D makes a spectacular advertisement.

Excessive pre-teen violence aside, The Karate Kid is your stock-standard underdog film, making no effort whatsoever to deviate from the same old zero-to-hero formula.

Thirty-odd minutes into Knight and Day, the action-comedy concoction from director James Mangold (3:10 To Yuma, Identity), and things are looking surprisingly good. Tom Cruise oozes charisma, Cameron Diaz has pizazz. The story has me guessing, the action has me smiling. “This is great!” I say to myself, almost prepared to call this one of the more entertaining Hollywood blockbusters of the year so far.

Directed by Carlos Saura and set in the lavish world of upper class 18^th Century Venice and Vienna, I, Don Giovanni is a tribute to opera and the libertine movement, and in particular a dedication to Venetian lyricist and poet Lorenzo de Ponte.

The film starts very promisingly as we are introduced to the protagonist, Lorenzo de Ponte (Lorenzo Balducci), a Jew who has been forced by [...]

Right up there with “pull my finger”, Cop Out is a bit like one of those silly “wouldn’t it be funny if…?” remarks you joke about with your mate. It’s amusing at the time, but you never actually act on the idea because, well, that’d be stupid. Director Kevin Smith, however, has made a career out of elaborating on stupid ideas. His films Clerks, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Zack and Miri Make a Porno aren’t exactly high brow comedies, yet that’s precisely why people tend to like them. They pander to the fowl-mouthed toddler inside all of us; the slow, dopey part of our brain that needs a tickle every once in a while.

Thomas Craven is a man of impulse and no consequence. Your daughter being shot to death would do that to you. Especially if she was standing beside you on the front porch. So begins Mel Gibson’s first acting appearance since 2002, as a father seeking revenge (or answers) for his daughter’s death. As the second adaptation of a BBC series this summer (following January’s In The Loop), Edge Of Darkness holds a mix of British and American filmmaking, but the merger fails to deliver.

It’s easy to get caught up praising The Princess and the Frog for what it does differently in the biz of children’s animation. First off, it’s the spirited revival — or attempted revival, depending on how well it does at the box office — of the classic hand-drawn 2D animation style that has gone the way of the VCR in the age of Pixar. More importantly, it’s the first Disney animation ever to feature an African-American princess, even if she does spend most of her screen time as a frog.

Directed by Australia’s own John Hillcoat, The Road is a brutally bleak, borderline misanthropic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s brutally bleak, borderline misanthropic post-apocalyptic novel of the same name. Admittedly, the end of the world is quite a depressing scenario, and credit must be given to Hillcoat (The Proposition) and his team for audaciously choosing not to dilute McCarthy’s heavy words (to which I haven’t read). By comparison, The Road makes other post-apocalyptic movies like I am Legend and Terminator Salvation look like Disney movies. But without a glimmer of hope on the (burning) horizon, The Road inadvertently alienates itself from the audience it is so eager to milk emotion from, pandering primarily to McCarthy fans and those with suicidal tendencies.