Get Him To The Greek foolishly promotes a supporting player – Russell Brand’s egotistical rock star Aldous Snow from the 2008 relationship comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall – to centre stage in his own film. You can have too much of a good thing and we have our fill of Aldous’s sexist outbursts well before the first hour.

This Sunday, Colin Firth was awarded the Best Actor Bafta for A Single Man in a blaze of long overdue glory. Though he didn’t manage to clinch the Oscar, based on the performance his gives in this stunning, subtle, and achingly lovely film we reckon he deserved it.

If you’re already aware of The Killer Inside Me, chances are you’ll almost certainly know of it as “that film where Casey Affleck beats seven shades of blue out of Jessica Alba’s face.” You don’t have to wait long to find out that you have not been lied to. Indeed, if The Killer Inside Me sets out to make audiences feel uncomfortable, then it is an undeniable success. But does the film have anything else noteworthy to offer us?

Alice had the best opening week in US history, grossing $116 million and getting rave reviews for it’s gloriously inventive visuals. There’s no denying that visually, Alice is a treat. But despite the exuberant effects, play with perspective and 3D glory, it cannot be denied that in terms of story, Alice is more than lacking.

Sex And The City 2 has been lauded as a slight on feminism, a betrayal of a TV series that inspired a generation of women, and a diamond-encrusted step backwards for independent ladies everywhere. But it seems that the negative press has failed to affect box office power. What’s the story here, then?

Enter Up in the Air, the latest romance-comedy-drama from Juno director Jason Reitman, and starring perhaps the most universally idolised and desired movie star of our generation, George ‘Smooth As Silk’ Clooney. The prospect of such a dream team was always going to be a hotly anticipated one, and we’re pleased to report that this is one of those few wondrous instances of a film living up to its press.

In these troubling times of global warming, financial crises and that nice Tiger Woods cheating on his wife, it’s comforting to know that one man alone remains staid and unchangeable: Hugh Grant. Yes, he’s pretty much played the same character for the past 20 years, but goddammit, the man does it well. His latest frothy outing with toast-of-New-York Sarah Jessica Parker is no exception – this time, a posh man is heading into the wilds of the American midwest after he and his estranged wife witness a murder.

A couple of months ago, Matthew Vaughn’s hyperviolent Kick-Ass somersaulted over the graves of Watchmen and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, proving that comic book-inspired action movies can be every bit as smart and sassy as the cult pictorials they are based on. Director Sylvain White continues the good work with The Losers, an explosive romp based on the potty-mouthed DC Comics series written by Andy Diggle and illustrated by Jock.

So 2009’s Holmes certainly got the full Ritchie treatment – the question is, did it work? In our opinion, the result wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. Sure, there are a lot of action sequences, and the staid Holmes of old seems now to have morphed into a buff athlete and martial arts expert played by Robert Downey Jr. Yet despite this, we were hard-pressed to find a moment in the entire film where we weren’t either having a chuckle or glued to the screen.

As an exercise in controlled madness, Werner Herzog’s remake – or is it? – of Abel Ferrara’s celebrated 1992 film certainly has plenty of screws loose before the credits roll. The charismatic German director has often been drawn to eccentric loners in his documentaries and demented heroes in his works of fiction. His tempestuous working relationship with actor Klaus Kinski on Aguirre: Wrath Of God, Nosferatu and Fitzcarraldo is the stuff of Hollywood legend – the filmmaker famously threatened his leading man with a loaded gun to prevent him from walking off set.