Judd Apatow is back in the directing chair after working as a producer on most of America’s comedy output: Anchorman, The Five Year Engagement, Wanderlust, Get Him To The Greek, Superbad– the list is impressive. However, while Apatow has shepherded a lot of quality comedy talent in those films, his own directing and writing efforts (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up) have received mixed feedback. In This is 40, he casts his own wife and kids as a family reaching a crisis point as the couple turn 40, in a plot that seems to imitate his own life. Sticking a little too close to home here proves to be the film’s downfall as laughs are few and far between.

What with Toby Jones playing Alfred Hitchcock in a new TV drama, there’s only question on everyone’s minds: who wins Best Hitchcock Impersonator, Toby Jones or Anthony Hopkins? The new biopic of the ‘Master of Suspense’ is certainly stylish, but lacks plausibility as it introduces a fictitious storyline between Hitchcock’s wife and Whitfield Cook. That being said, it’s entertaining and breathes new life into Alma Reville, ‘the woman behind the man’.

Principally an investigation into the trading of illegal hormones in the beef industry, Bullhead drags the viewer into the dark mafia underworld where power and greed are creating a moral maze. But this film is mainly about one man’s wounded masculinity and his struggle for acceptance by both sexes. The film was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar last year, and was beaten by Iran’s A Separation , but has only just been released into UK cinemas.

We’ve been lacking in Bill Murray love for a while, haven’t we? Aside from his all too brief appearance (for us, anyway) in Moonrise Kingdom last year, we’ve waited long enough for another heartwarming starring role from Murray. In comes Hyde Park on Hudson; sentimental, amusing and heartfelt, the film follows the love affairs and political concerns of Franklin D. Roosevelt at the start of the Second World War. Murray may deliver a wholly believable performance, but the film’s tendency to drift in between storylines severely and unfairly lets it down.

After United 93, Snakes on a Plane, Red Eye and Final Destination, I thought I’d survived the worst airplane disaster movies (despite my fear of flying). That was until Flight came along, loosely based on Alaska Airlines Flight 261, which crashed in the year 2000 killing 89 people, and inspired a whole new level of plane-related fear. Plunging the viewer into the ground at a few hundred miles per hour should be enough to raise the heart rate, but it is Denzel Washington’s story of alcohol addiction that is the most powerful.

The sequel to the 2008 hit Race, Race 2 encompasses enough action, gorgeous humans (hiiiii John Abraham) and complicated plots to work as a stand-alone action thriller. There’s no denying that Bollywood films ever EVER lack vivid colours, great cinematography and music that’ll make your head burst (with what, I’m unsure). But it’s thin dialogue, awfully superficial characters and chimerical plot let the film down abysmally. Race 2 really attempts to be a great success, and manages it sometimes, but its triple-twists and quadruple-bluffs turn into one (addictively) outrageous farce.

Movie 43 may already be the most derided film of all time, and it’s only been in the cinema for less than a week. It’s an ‘anthology film’ of thirteen or more (depending on how you count) short, non-related comedy sketches directed by various different people. We decided to check it out and reflect on what, if anything, it could all mean.

Fire in the Blood is a documentary about injustice. The unjust decision to favour the maintenance of profits over the maintenance of people; the unjust decision to allow millions of lives to be extinguished while counting up the value of profits achieved by making that decision. It is about how while the light went out of the eyes of millions who could have been kept with us, some of their fellow human beings battled against the prevailing dark. Justice is a light that profit attempts to extinguish, but it survives undimmed as long as some people know what it is. Fire in the Blood is an attempt to make people remember.

Never mind Zero Dark Thirty, 5 Broken Cameras is the closest we’ve ever been to conflict, and it’s a staggeringly powerful piece of filmmaking. Despite being one-sided, there’s little to dispute in a film depicting such extreme injustice for Palestinian people. This is a great cinematic achievement, and its Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature shows it have been given international acclaim. Here’s to history in the making.

Reality is a modern-day fable for a new generation; a bleak yet superbly colourful and humorous observation on the impacts of reality television on today’s society. Reality treats whimsical notions of fame and fortune with a slice of satire, and remains visually stylish from beginning to end, slipping only in its Jersey Shore-esque depiction of Italian culture.