Can The Amazing Spider-Man capture a female audience?

It’s well documented that 2012 will be the undisputed year of the superhero. We’ve already seen Joss Whedon’s Avengers bring down the box-office, and The Dark Knight Rises might be the most anticipated film of the decade. But the underdog blockbuster, released next week, was always going to be The Amazing Spider-Man, arriving at a time when audiences are tired of the endless reboots and having their heroic spandex-needs met elsewhere. But a couple of critics have already seen how it turned out, and discovered something altogether unprecedented.

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Who are the new characters in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (and who should play them)?

Casting news for Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire has been popping up everywhere of late, and it’s only going to get more ferocious in the coming months. Judging by reactions from fans of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and Twilight in the past, we know that a hell hath no fury like a reader scorned, and the internet has just added another forum for speculation. We have our Katniss, Gale and Peeta, but what about the new tributes? Be warned, lots and lots of spoilers lie ahead.

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‘Magic Mike’ review

When the first trailer for Magic Mike arrived, people were a little surprised by what they were being faced with. Here was one of Hollywood’s biggest leading men, with director Steven Soderbergh and an ensemble of up-and-coming big and small screen stars, making a film about male strippers. Was this a good idea? Especially when Channing Tatum has only just managed to grab hold of some credibility and we’re faced with Soderbergh’s threatened retirement/sabbatical. Well, I can tell you, it was a very good idea, and Magic Mike has defied the odds to emerge as a film worthy of all the parts that made it.

‘Lay the Favourite’ review

Premiering at Sundance at the beginning of the year, Lay the Favourite is a supremely hard film to work out. On the one hand, it has a pretty decent cast on its side, including Bruce Willis, Rebecca Hall and Vince Vaughn, but on the other, it makes as little sense as you’d think walking into a room full of gamblers in real life might. Accomplished director Stephen Frears is at the helm of this weird little film that offers little joy to anyone not deeply acquainted with the ins and outs of the life of a Vegas bookie.

‘Chernobyl Diaries’ review

‘From the makers of Paranormal Activity’, the slogan plastered all over the promotion for Oren Peli’s latest horror effort, Chernobyl Diaries, was supposed to be a sign of faith. What it does instead is build up hopes far too high for this cheap, tedious, and scare-free film to ever live up to, and disappointment is often far worse than being underwhelmed. Diaries, which looked so promisingly spooky in the trailer, has the genuinely bright idea of putting the characters in an entirely abandoned city, but squanders that potential at every turn.

‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’ review

Some films have obvious titles, but Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter isn’t one of them. It’s a film, like Cowboys and Aliens and Lesbian Vampire Killers, that relies entirely on the intrigue that a silly combination of words can earn you, and we can at least agree that it paid off better than many that adopt the same tactic. Sadly, that’s not the biggest compliment in the world, and AL:VH is actually a deeply flawed movie that lacks that vital sense of humour that could have made it a classic guilty pleasure for fantasy fans and history buffs alike.

‘The Five-Year Engagement’ review

When it comes to romantic comedies, an audience wants predictability. As with the action movie or the horror film, we go in expecting a certain feeling to emerge, and just hope it’s achieved in a way that entertains along the way. The Five Year Engagement, the latest collaboration between Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller (after Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Muppets) does away with these comforting expectations fairly quickly and, although it reaches the dizzy heights of romance at all the right moments, takes an unconventional route to that destination.

‘Red Lights’ review

Having spent his last movie, the fantastic Buried, with just one actor kicking around in one location, Rodrigo Cortes has spent the interim assembling a cracking cast for new magician-thriller (yes, you read that right) Red Lights. Magic is all the rage right now, with various films like Steve Carrell’s Burt Wonderstone coming to cinemas, and Cortes’ pretty ludicrous, but oh so much fun, movie kicks of the renewed trend with style and promise that sadly gets squandered before the credits roll.

‘Cosmopolis’ review

Everything we’ve seen and heard about the first in two (or more) David Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson collaborations, Cosmopolis, has suggested that the film would mark a return to the director’s usual barmy style post-A Dangerous Method, which got Cronenberg fans’ back up for its perceived conservatism. In fact, Cosmopolis might be the weirdest, least commercial, movie either of them has ever made, a risky move given its leading man’s hungry fan base.

Top 5 British sports movies

After a brief blip in our patriotic spirit to discuss Ill Manors, we’re well and truly back on board. To prove it, here is a list of five (in our opinion) of the best British sports movie, to serve as good luck for the England football team this evening. With the Olympics coming to London this summer, and a great British sports movie arriving in cinema’s this weekend (Fast Girls), there’s never been a more apt time to take stock of the mixed bag of sports movies this country has produced.

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