With Tron Legacy on the way after 28 years, the original Tron has clearly left a lasting impression. Whether this impression is worth a tight sequel, with a strong story or a glossy, shallow cash-in, remains to be seen. However, an examination of the original 1982 film may indicate whether Tron Legacy will be worth the price of your ticket in the end. This is why I have decided to review Tron on DVD, as any upcoming sequel deserves at least a small investigation of its origins.

The golden rule of film criticism (for me, anyway) is to always consider the target audience. During a family film, for instance, I occasionally glance around the cinema to see how the children are behaving; are they quiet and attentive, or fidgety and disruptive?

In the case of the animated adventure How to Train Your Dragon, the cinema was blissfully silent. There wasn’t a peep beyond gasps of elation and bursts of laughter. And I’m not just talking about the kids.

The Eclipse, written and directed by Conor McPherson, to put it briefly, is a beautiful low key drama of a man dealing with loss and grief. It’s also the scariest movie I’ve seen in some time. And not just scary in some thematic intellectual sense. Quite literally it’s the jump-in-your seat, screaming-in-the-audience kind of scary.

And it has ghosts in it. Really freaking scary ghosts.

Whenever Hollywood remakes an acclaimed foreign film, there’s an inevitable backlash of people who start asking “Why? What’s the point in remaking something that doesn’t need improving?”

The answer is fairly obvious: where there’s a good story left untold to the masses, there’s big money to be made. That answer, however, doesn’t as readily apply to Jim Sheridan’s (In America, The Boxer) remake of the 2004 Danish film Brødre [Brothers]. Sure, it replaces everything foreign with an all-American cast and all-American setting, conforming to the presumption that Western audiences can’t relate with anyone who speaks in subtitles. But unlike most remakes, it doesn’t feel as though it exists just to make money. It wouldn’t be such a slow-burning urban drama if that were the case. Instead, it seems genuinely interested in bringing the slight but captivating story, which explores the emotional effects of war on a soldier and his family, to a wider audience.

If there was one issue that has appeared consistently during the turn of this millennium, it would be the issue of asylum seekers. Whether the parent is global warming, modern conflict, drugs, disaster, genocide or globalisation – the effect is almost always tied to the seeking of asylum in one way or another. The conflict between righteousness, authority and preservation of society is strong enough that some film makers have chosen to address the issue in different ways.

Following the short series The Kids of Degrassi Street (1982), Degrassi Junior High (DJH) truly established the franchise centring on a bunch of young teens from Toronto that come together from all walks of life at their local school. But the difference between Degrassi and everything else is what hadn’t been explored before on television, perhaps anywhere in the world – the true issues facing teenagers. As testament, Australian public broadcaster ABC issued warnings of adult themes before screening each episode, and would continue to do so decades later on Degrassi: The Next Generation.

Alice in Wonderland is the result of Disney inviting director Tim Burton, a certified specialist in cinematic lunacy, and author Lewis Carroll, the pioneer of literary nonsense, to the same tea party. In other words, it’s the closest you’ll get to absolute madness without being locked in a room with padded walls. But being bonkers isn’t so bad. As Alice’s father remarks, “all the best people are.”

I may be going out on a limb here, but if the Coen brothers recent gem A Serious Man was a lot more, well, serious and the religious themes were replaced with homosexual ones, then the result might look something like A Single Man. It’s clear from the outset that the two films share more than just a similar name; both are set in 1960s America and concern a College Professor trying to find clarity in their lives after they’ve been given a royal shake-up. And both are driven by the masterful performances of their respective leads, which in the case of A Single Man is British deity Colin Firth, who has leapt out from Hugh Grant’s rom-com shadow to deliver his most earnest and refined performance to date. For good reason, Firth is in the running to be the third actor in five years to win the best actor Oscar for portraying a gay man, the previous winners being Sean Penn in 2008 for his role in Milk and Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2005 for his role in Capote.