Pedro Almodóvar’s latest brightly-coloured offering to the cinematic landscape is a hefty move away from the dark, stirring masterpieces that catapulted him as one of today’s most stylish directors. I’m So Excited is more akin to the likes of Airplane! (whilst being simultaneously the opposite, because Airplane! is actually hilarious and this film is not) than anything like The Skin I Live In. Shoving cheesy 80s wit and iridescent montages into a blender, I’m So Excited will try to convince you that tasteless stupidity, bright colours and nonsensical characters boasts a great film. Unsurprisingly, it does not.

Matt Damon makes an early bid for Oscar glory in Promised Land, a gentle yet compelling drama about a small farming town facing an economic and industrial meltdown. While the financial difficulties faced by its characters will resonate with a lot of people, it feels a little out of date and we never get a sense of why this particular story is being told now.

Sam Raimi‘s cult classic Evil Dead has been controversially resurrected, but, despite a few new plot additions, director Fede Alvarez hasn’t quite managed to breath new life into the story. It has some satisfying similarities with the original – gallons of spewing blood, an integral chain saw, an evil force rushing through the forest at an ungodly pace and non-consensual tree sex – but RIP low-budget aesthetics and downright silliness, you are greatly missed.

When it comes to the ocean, nothing quite terrifies us measly humans like a great white shark. Jaws is still the best and Deep Blue Sea held its own but beyond that this monster of the deep has had some rather pitiful cinematic representations. In 2012, the Land Down Under in conjunction with the Lion City sought to remedy this terrible Hollywood failing, with a shark tale that turns out not half bad.

All hail Shane Black, the genius behind the latest Iron Man film. Bursting with humour, crammed with more twists than a bag of fusilli and built around a plot that actually – I’ll be damned! – holds together under scrutiny, Iron Man 3 is far and away the best of the series, and certainly the funniest offering from Marvel so far. That’s right, folks. Tony Stark is back and he’s better than ever.

In the 80s a new flavour of action flick ran rampant through our cinemas. By the 90s the movement had lost its gusto: storylines were beyond belief, action bordered on the generic and the bad guys came out as cardboard copies. We’d been there, done that and no longer found the thrill in a good ass-kicking, the cheer in a villain’s gruesome death, the humour in snappy one-liners. Until now…

Scary Movie 5 is an insult to parody films that are actually funny. Ashley Tisdale might just be the only positive thing to come out of this, and she wasn’t even THAT good. Lazy characterisation, flimsy plot, poor jokes, an uninspired Usher cameo: the list of absolute FAILS is endless. With any luck, we’ve seen the last of the Scary Movie franchise.

Is there any name better known than that of Wes Craven? It’s pretty hard to forget the man responsible for unleashing the fiendish Freddy Krueger and effectively making sleep an impossibility. The man takes his place as a legend of the slasher flick genre, every era spawning another attempt to scare the bejeesus out of people. A directing career that started in the XXX industry (not surprisingly really seeing as sex and violence usually go hand in hand) led to such horror classics as the The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and most recently the Scream franchise. With his popularity never waning, Shout! Factory has taken it upon themselves to scrounge up one of his earlier works and release it for the first time as a Collector’s Edition on both Blu-ray and DVD.

A wide-reaching crime drama from the director and star of intimate relationship study Blue Valentine seems an unusual prospect on paper, but in practice the transition isn’t as big as you might expect. Bold and sweeping as The Place Beyond the Pines may be, it still revolves around family – it’s just a shame Derek Cianfrance tries to spoil his child a little too much.

Dead End Drive-In is a thrilling reminder of grindhouse cinema and everything that made it unique. The story is pretty straightforward, but a particular part of the plot that is presented as a turning point in the characters’ lives is nothing more than baffling. Still, watch with a nostalgic open mind and a loud set of speakers, and remind yourself of one of cinema’s best-loved genres.