If, like me, you’ve never really got into Westerns, perhaps what you need to win you round is an Eastern. Jiang Wen’s frenetic, action-packed romp through cinematic and cultural cliché takes no prisoners, dispensing bullets and dark humour in every direction. It’s just… stupid, quite a lot of the time. Really quite stupid.

What do you mean, you haven’t meticulously planned your summer around the amazing film events which are going on all over London? You’re not right, mate. Fortunately, we definitely have organised our getting-burnt-in-the-park sessions so they work around the special screenings we just can’t miss – and if you’re nice, you can peek in our diary.

For the longest time animation was simply perceived as something for kids, and wasn’t taken seriously by adults. If an animated film did in anyway achieve the hallowed ground of ‘appealing to kids and grownups alike’ it was considered a pretty rare thing. Today, animated films about toys are getting Oscar nominations and reviewers like to deal out their opinions based on one neat bit of criteria: is it any good?

The world of film is awash with Marmite topics – actors, genres or even cinematic styles which make some movie-goers dampen their plush seats and others tear the stuffing from the punter in front. In our J’accuse series, two of Best For Film’s writers go head-to-head and debate a controversial aspect of cinema. This time round it’s the worst nightmare of every indie Japanese director – the Hollywood remake.

From the writers of Sexy Beast comes 44 Inch Chest, a new Brit gangster flick starring Ray Winstone, Ian McShane and John Hurt. It’s the story of Col, a cuckolded mob who gathers his friends together to take revenge on his wife’s French lover. But with the loss of his wife imminent, Col starts to reassess his life, suddenly unsure of the abject masculinity he’s surrounded himself with all his life.

From horror flicks to romances, Hollywood owes some of its most original film ideas to the Asian film industry, and has done for the past 40 years. And why not? Remakes of Asian films offer a cheap and market-tested method of reaching audiences and earning big bucks. But simply buying the rights does not always a smash hit make.