At the invitation of the Swedenborg Society, Best For Film is publishing a special series of reviews to follow its ‘Images of the Afterlife in Cinema’ film season, which will be exploring life, death and everything in between. This week it’s the turn of Adrian Lyne’s harrowing supernatural classic Jacob’s Ladder. Hold onto your sanity…

A Paris outsider seeks to hurl himself off a bridge, buckling under the weight of a debt as huge as the chip on his shoulder. His plan is foiled by a mysterious Amazonian beauty who walks around changing his life and being tall. Is the allegory behind Angel-A as heavy-handed as its title suggests?

Russians, eh? Just when you think there’s no more Hollywood mileage to be had out of their sinister accents and evil shirts, along comes Salt. With a plot straight out of a Cold War thriller, twists that don’t bear any scrutiny whatsoever and set action pieces that have been done countless times before, Salt shouldn’t be that good. So why did I enjoy it so bloody much?

Someone needs to stop Sly Stallone before he wastes any more celluloid. An overblown, overacted mess, watching The Expendables is like liquidising all your Rambo DVDs, pouring the resulting testosterone-laden gloop into a shotgun with a generous slug of protein shake, and shooting yourself in the face.

One expects this film’s curious title to be a weak pun on the surnames of the lead characters. One would be wrong. The name, ‘Knight,’ is tenuously linked to Cruise’s character but other than that there is no explanation for it. This lazy and incomprehensible title becomes rather apt for a film which does not require you to leave your brains at the door but rather put them in a lead lined box from which there is no escape.

Jen wasn’t the only one who felt strapped to her seat whilst experiencing The Bounty Hunter. Joyless, clichéd and hackneyed, we never want to watch Gerard Butler in a rom-com again. Do you hear us Gerard? Do you?

Karate just isn’t cool anymore. It is a sad state of affairs that, aside from pasty nerds doing high kicks in front of their bedroom mirrors (i.e. me), most modern youths would sooner knife their enemies than face off against them in the dojo as an eighties synth-pop tune plays. So has Harald Zwart’s remake of The Karate Kid rehabilitated karate for modern youths? Hardly – Jaden Smith’s ‘Karate’ kid Dre actually learns Kung Fu, not Karate, cynically cashing-in on the original’s good name and contributing to the feeling that the whole film is an empty, if harmless exercise in raising the profile of Will Smith’s son

The A-Team is ridiculous. But given that it’s based on perhaps the cheesiest TV series ever to star a be-Mohawked ex-wrestler with a serious thing for bling, that’s not really its fault. Anyway, the A-Team movie replaces him with a cage-fighter who has given all four of his sons the middle name ‘Rampage’, which is frankly BOSS.

Another day, another remake. But before you throw your computers across the room at the mere sight of the dreaded ‘R’ word, take heart – Breck Eisner’s The Crazies is actually a pretty good horror film, and a definite improvement on George A. Romero’s original.

Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five sees Po return to teach a rabble of young bunnies the philosophy of the ancient Chinese art. The short animated feature, originally a deluxe DVD extra, is now a film in its own right. But is it cute and succinct or a not-so-secret attempt to simply rake in more money?