With this summer’s spectacularly bad Grown Ups and Dinner for Schmucks still fresh in our memories, we could be forgiven for writing off the US comedy machine for this summer. Happily, The Other Guys has gone some way to redressing the balance with a fresh and funny take on the ‘buddy cop’ motif that’s well worth a watch.

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 we’re struggling to get to the bottom of Marc Forster’s psychological drama Stay.

Three skiers are trapped in an abandoned chairlift. Their survival depends on life-or-death decisions. Should they try to escape or stay put and take their chances? Unless they want to end up frozen, there’s only one way to find out.

John C Reilly and Jonah Hill plod happily through comedy/drama Cyrus; it’s just such a shame that their material never quite matches their obvious talent. Though a few moments of great dark humour lift the storyline, dreadful camera work and a lack-lustre ending drag Cyrus’s high flying stars down almost to amateur level.

A foreigner working through the last ten years of British cinema could be forgiven for thinking that this is a nation composed entirely of council estates, sports fields and leftover shreds of the Second World War. After such a torrent of grittiness, Tamara Drewe feels like it’s going to be a real treat – which makes it even more of a shame when it fails to deliver on almost every level.

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 we’re looking at the Japanese classic; Afterlife.

We’re happy to see that Chris Morris’s fantastic Four Lions has reached its well deserved place in the DVD top ten. Simultaneously hilarious, heartbreaking and terrifyingly intelligent, this attack on stupidity itself is vital viewing for every one of us.

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…

Steve Carell and Paul Rudd don’t so much star as blackhole in Dinner For Schmucks; a deeply unfunny comedy so stupid it makes Kenan And Kel look like The Importance Of Being Earnest. An army of talented cameos only highlight the ludicrous, all-encompassing foulness of this creation, and the only reason it scrapes a half-star is that Flight Of The Conchord’s Jermaine Clement manages to steer clear of the worst bits as a vaguely amusing goat/artist.

Comedy veteran Drew Barrymore and an astonishingly buff Justin Long sparkle in this bromance/romance about all that stuff that rom-coms are about. Though it uses every trick in the book, fantastic lead performances, a killer soundtrack and a focus on comedy rather than fluff makes Going The Distance a cut above the rest.