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?

Kenny Ortega’s offering of behind the scenes footage, however lukewarm it might be, gives us a tiny glimpse of an artist who affected popular music like few have ever before. Michael Jackson always said, “I want to start where everyone else would end”. The film doesn’t do enough justice to his musical and choreographic brilliance – it might be called ‘This Is It’ but we know that this is definitely not. Michael Jackson’s legacy will live on forever.

Take a romatically challenged, cynical workaholic and cross her with a victim of heartbreak who thinks with what’s in his pants. What do you get? True love apparently. Boy meets girl. Girl hates boy. Boy wins girl over. It’s nothing we’ve never seen before – The Ugly Truth is your typical boring battle of the sexes ‘romantic comedy’. Yet another sickly film to leave us with a floating outlook on relationships. And that’s the ugly truth.

It’s been a long time coming for this first of Jodi Picoult’s bestselling tear-jerkers to make it to the big screen. The slightly odd casting of Cameron Diaz in a serious drama role leaves a little to be desired, but her younger counterparts shine with charming vulnerability and maturity. Overall, it’s a well-adapted modern ethical tale that will have you blubbering like an idiot ten minutes in.

We at Best For Film are probably in the majority if we say we’ve never seen Meryl Streep in a bad movie, so it’s not surprising that in safe, recession-era Hollywood, a rom-com with her name in top billing is one of January’s big releases. Add director Nancy Meyers of Something’s Gotta Give fame to the mix and you should have a surefire hit. But despite having all the hallmarks of a Meyers film, this fluffy romp still falls a little flat.

When it comes to that greatest of British cultural exports, the punk rock movement, figures don’t come much bigger than Ian Dury, so when we at Best For Film learned of the release of a Dury biopic starring the fantastic Andy Serkis, we were psyched. Serkis is spellbinding in his complete embodiment of the eccentric, mercurial rock star, but it’s almost too good a performance for his support cast to hold their own against. Mat Whitecross’s patchy and confusing narrative also leds proceedings down sufficiently.

So Yong Kim’s haunting drama Treeless Mountain, tells the story of two young sisters living with their single mother in South Korea. Six-year-old Jin and her sister four-year-old Bin, are sent to live with their evil aunt who has no maternal instincts before they go to visit their grandmother who lives on a remote farm far from the hustle and bustle of the city.

We need to be honest with you… we’re nerds – pocket protector owning, corduroy wearing, Windows 3.1 loving nerds and have been long before it became quasi-cool (thanks Pharrell). While our playground peers were debating The Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan, we were having deep discussions about phasers, warp drives and why Captain Kirk would make the best dad ever. This makes us the worst type of nerd – a Star Trek nerd. And while we’ve never gone to a convention, it didn’t stop us pestering our mother’s in to making us a Federation captain’s uniform out of a knitted yellow jumper, some kitchen foil and a carefully cut egg carton. Hence you can only imagine our trepidation at the prospect of the Mr. Mission Impossible 3 J.J. Abram’s, reboot – but we and our fellow geeks needn’t have worried.

There are few stories more tragic amongst the continuingly unstable African political landscape than that of Zimbabwe. This heartbreaking new documentary by Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey is a portrait of a local family under siege as a result of Robert Mugabe’s regime, this time through the eyes of an oft-overlooked category of victims – the white African. It’s a rare filmmaking triumph that makes it impossible to turn away from the injustice of life in this harrowing country.

It’s sad when your realise something you used to find endless entertainment in as a child is no longer appealing to you. Much like discovering we would rather play drinking games than jump rope, it seems the time has come where we may have outgrown the Chipmunks. Either that or this modern-day retelling of the rodents’ rise to fame in the music industry was, well, crap.