Stunningly good, A Prophet, the latest film from The Beat That My Heart Skipped director Jacques Auidiard grabs you from the start, pulls a burlap sack over your head and doesn’t let up with its intensity and drive for any one of its 155 minutes. A gruelling masterclass in taut, engaging and wholly believable cinema, A Prophet is one release that’s going to be essential not only for fans of crime drama, but also those who like to take their cinema seriously.

“Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn’t.” Marc Webb’s 500 Days of Summer is refreshing because as its tag-line suggests, it tells the truth about love. Sometimes things just don’t work out. Simple. And that’s fine.

Turns out the hope we held out for Brothers wasn’t unwarranted. This tragic portrait of the effects of war on young lives brims with real emotion and powerhouse performances from its lead actors, particularly Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman. For the most part, despite the potential for cheese in its subject matter (man goes off to war, brother steps in to fill his shoes on the home front, man turns out not to be dead and returns to awkward situation in family), the narrative avoids cliche and leaves you with a real, confronting sense of heartbreak. It’s a harrowing film experience that hits you right in the guts, and it could well be the resurrection of Maguire’s post-Peter Parker career.

Ninja Assassin is an abysmal car crash of a movie, not even redeemed by its semi-slick and overly-repetitious fight scenes. Jeong Ji-hoon, AKA Rain, gurns and grunts his way through this daft revenge fantasy as Raizo, a trained-from-childhood ninja who becomes disillusioned with his taskmasters’ shady dealings and harsh discipline. The Wachowski brothers once more prove themselves as a laughing stock, a one-trick-pony whose sell by date expired at the precise moment the first Matrix film ended. With any luck, this dreck will be the last we see of ’em, and good riddance.

The Boys are Back doesn’t work as well as it thinks it does. By all accounts, it should be a stand-out for the drama genre this year – a teary but heart-warming memoir of an absentee dad thrust into single parenthood, brought to the screen by the king of the subtle dramatic performance, Clive Owen. Add in some lovely scenic shots of the South Australian coast and acclaimed Shine director Scott Hicks at the helm, and you should be onto a winner. While it’s an interesting look at what loss can do to a family, it’s not exactly a warm-and-fuzzy tale for the ages.

Though Toy Story 2 3D is not the immersive, mind-blowing experience that watching Avatar is, there’s no denying that this film only gets better with the added technology. And the difference is that – unlike Avatar- Toy Story 2 never had to rely on its special effects to captivate your attention.

Catholic schools. Priests. Sexual abuse allegations. Does this equal a film we’d want to see? Probably not. At best, it would be dull, at worst quite disturbing. Nevertheless, given the Oscar hype surrounding this adaptation of John Patrick Shanley’s play last year, we decided it couldn’t be that bad. In fact, this 1960’s-set drama centring around a nun’s mission to prove a progressive priest guilty of sexual abuse of a student turned out to be quite a unique and thought-provoking film experience.

Gran Torino is vintage Clint Eastwood at his best. From Dirty Harry to Million Dollar Baby, he’s made his signature character into an art form, a hypnotising, hardened beast of a human that you can’t take your eyes off, and yet one that’s never without redeeming qualities either. In this self-directed tale of a bigoted retiree coming to terms with his Asian neighbours in middle America, Eastwood gives us enough bad-ass attitude, along with poignant drama to stand Gran Torino alongside his earlier Oscar-winning efforts.

It’s nice when documentary filmmakers come up with new angles to the ‘poor underdog’ theme. Since the genre first became commercial enough for cinema release, we’ve had our heartstrings pulled every which way, to the point where the concept’s getting old. But Joe Berlinger’s new release Crude, which centres around a class action by a group of Ecuadorian tribes against a US oil giant, manages to raise some unusually interesting points about the nature of the environmentalist movement and just who is right and wrong in a case like this.

Bill Bailey goes all-out musical in this new DVD, recruiting the entire Albert Hall symphony orchestra to assist him in his mad, amusing rambles. Taking a tour of the entire orchestra, Bailey drags in everything from the sound of trombones, jellyfish, the Doctor Who theme tune, Bach and Motzart. It’s a huge show – easily Bailey’s biggest – and while his trademark wit and surrealism still sparkle, the massive repetition of material sadly bogs down this release.