This Sunday, Colin Firth was awarded the Best Actor Bafta for A Single Man in a blaze of long overdue glory. Though he didn’t manage to clinch the Oscar, based on the performance his gives in this stunning, subtle, and achingly lovely film we reckon he deserved it.

The furry fiend known as The Wolf Man first howled at the silvery moon in 1941 with a suitably hirsute Lon Chaney Jr in the lead role., joined in the golden age of beasty baddies like Frankenstein and Dracula back in the 40s. Almost 70 years later, the eponymous beast runs free again across the blood-spattered English countryside in director Joe Johnston‘s tongue in cheek -and exceedingly bloodthirthy – remake.

It’s always a risk when film-makers decide to try and attach heavily religious messages to blockbusters, and it doesn’t get more heavy-handed than in The Book Of Eli. Sadly, this post-apocalyptic story of one man’s quest to bring Jesus-based enlightenment to a wretched humanity comes off as what it is; a sermon with added guns.

Warning – don’t go and see this film expecting another Twilight. No doubt that’s what the studio financing this Aussie-made vampire flick is hoping you’ll do, but the blood-suckers in Daybreakers are not so much your new-school pretty-boy vegan variety. They belong firmly to the old guard of demonesque bad guys who have overrun the earth and must be hunted down with big machine guns, crossbows with exploding bolts and other such gore-porn paraphernalia that will have teenage boys wetting themselves in excitement.

Alice had the best opening week in US history, grossing $116 million and getting rave reviews for it’s gloriously inventive visuals. There’s no denying that visually, Alice is a treat. But despite the exuberant effects, play with perspective and 3D glory, it cannot be denied that in terms of story, Alice is more than lacking.

After the mammoth critical and commercial success of No Country For Old Men, it was perhaps inevitable Hollywood would turn to Cormac McCarthy’s next book and hope the success can be repeated. But brothers Joen and Ethan Coen, who produced and directed No Country, are very special filmmakers indeed. Could The Proposition director John Hillcoat turn McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road into another multi-Oscar winner?

It’s not too surprising that in recession-era Hollywood, where only the surefire box-office earners are getting made, a rom-com with the name Meryl Streep in the top billing was one of January’s big releases. When you add director Nancy Meyers (What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give) to the mix, it was virtually a written guarantee to fans of the genre that you’re in for an enjoyable 90 minutes. And with Meyers’ generally sharp and incisive writing, it might even be a cut above your average brainless rom-com. It’s Complicated certainly delivers on the first count, but whether it does on the second is debatable.

So 2009’s Holmes certainly got the full Ritchie treatment – the question is, did it work? In our opinion, the result wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. Sure, there are a lot of action sequences, and the staid Holmes of old seems now to have morphed into a buff athlete and martial arts expert played by Robert Downey Jr. Yet despite this, we were hard-pressed to find a moment in the entire film where we weren’t either having a chuckle or glued to the screen.

Ten years of production, the development of a whole new stereoscopic technology and a marketing blitzkrieg so intense that even lost tribes in the jungles of Borneo are aware of it. The buzz around Avatar has been almost unprecedented – James Cameron’s long-awaited return to sci-fi has been panned, praised and everything in between even before it was released. Approaching Avatar with an open mind, we discovered one of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful and immersive films of recent years.

Regular visitors to Best For Film will know that we’re a little bit sceptical when it comes to films that rely primarily on CGI effects to impress. Add to that we’re not exactly smitten with the oeuvre of serial planet-abuser Roland Emmerich (seriously, the guy’s destroyed the planet so many times he makes Galactus looks like a sulky toddler in a sand pit) and 2012 isn’t exactly the kind of film we usually look forward to