Black

Dredd ★★★★
Let's just never mention the Stallone film again.
The Raid: Redemption but in the future.
Grim, brutal and good fun.

Aquamaroon

Skyfall ★★★
Overhyped new James Bond.
Not as shit as the last one.
It's a fairly typical Bond film - enjoyable enough for what it is but it's still only a Bond film.

Purple

The Bourne Legacy ★★★
The Bourne films weren't really all that.
This isn't bad but it's got nothing to do with the previous Bourne films, except the occasional off camera reference which is a bit distracting. 

Black and white

Frankenweenie ★★★
Stop motion animated horror comedy kids film.
Not quite as good as Paranorman.
But a lot better than anything Tim Burton has done for years.

Green

Paranorman ★★★
Stop motion animated horror comedy kids film.
Slightly better than Frankenweenie.

Brown

Total Recall ★★
Unnecessary remake. 
Not different enough to be all that interesting.
Not as if the first version was up to much anyhow.

White

Arthur Christmas ★★
Even lesser Aardman effort.

Ginger

Brave ★★★
Lesser Pixar effort.

Nose

Looper ★★★★
In the future, CSI type investigating has become so good that it's impossible to kill anyone without getting caught. 
So criminals send people back in time to be killed. 
But only 30 years back. 
Not 3 billion years which would seem easier.
I like time travel films and always hope that they might have some sort of internal logic even if only within the rules that the film sets itself. 
This one doesn't. 
If killing people is so hard to get away with, why do the future people shoot that woman?
I probably shouldn't worry about it but thinking about that at least took my mind off Joseph Gordon-Levitt's nose - which was preposterous.

Web

The Amazing Spider-man ★★★
Cynical reboot that goes over the same ground as the previous film which was only done 10 years ago.
A likeable enough Peter Parker, the special effects have got better in 10 years but it lacks the energy of the Sam Raimi version.

Axe

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter ★★
You know what you're getting into with a title like that.
It nearly works but the pacing is all over the place and the effects aren't quite up to it.

Stop-mo no go

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! ★★
Almost passable kids film.
Almost the first ever decent film with Hugh Grant in.
Almost funny.
Almost but not quite.
Bit shit.

Is that an alien in your pocket...

Prometheus ★★
Tagline: 'They went looking for our beginning. What they found could be our bell-end.'
Tried to ignore the whole 'set in the Alien universe' thing by imagining it was set in the Muppet universe.
Disappointing lack of suspense, didn't make much sense, all a bit ponderous and computer generated.
Enjoyed the bit where Kermit confronts Big Bird and gets his head knocked off.

Snow good

Snow White and the Huntsman ★★
Looks good in places but there isn't enough story to justify over 2 hours of plodding pouting.
Wants to be Lord of the Rings but lacks almost everything that made those films worth watching.
Not helped by Snow White who would lose out in a fairest competition to Ray Winstone's dwarven arse.

It sucks

Dark Shadows ★★
My patience with Tim Burton has finally run out.
When was the last good film he made?

Since 1999 he's directed Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland and now this.  

Not sure what this is supposed to be, a comedy/horror/drama without any of those things.

Got wood

The Cabin in the Woods ★★★

Remember the 80s? 

Remember 'video nasties'?

Remember 'Driller Killer', 'I Spit On Your Grave', 'Last House On The Left', 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre', 'The Burning', 'The Evil Dead', 'Hellraiser' and 'Friday the 13th'? 

So do the people who made this.

Ever watched any of them again in the last 30 years and realised that what seemed scary and transgressive to a teenager was actually with a few exceptions fairly tedious low quality nonsense?

Although this film plays with the same ideas, it has a massive budget and a decent script.

Not scary but not scary in a knowing post-modern way, so that's ok.

...but in space

Lockout ★★

Slightly bigger budget than a number of low quality single word 80s action films that it seemed to want to be.

Falsely convicted ex-government agent has one chance of obtaining freedom by infiltrating a prison where the inmates have taken over and rescuing the Presidents daughter. So it's Escape from New York mixed with Escape From New York but in space.

Lacks originality, excitement, violence and anything approaching a decent story but does have the odd good bit of dialogue and Joe Gilgun playing a psychotic Scottish bloke.

Bloodless

The Hunger Games ★★★

Not terrible. Relatively interesting take on Battle Royale but overly sanitised and lacking the impact of what is obviously the original, no matter how much people try and deny it.

Disappointing ending leaves you wondering if the film-makers could try finishing one story satisfactorily rather than setting up the inevitable sequels.

Bare

Ted ★★★★

Funniest film of the year so far.

May not be to everyones taste.

Test quote to see if you want to watch it with anyone else around:

Ted (the magically bought to life, teddy bear) is reluctantly interviewed for a job by Frank a supermarket manager:

Frank: You think you got what it takes?
Ted: I'll tell you what I got. Your wife's pussy on my breath.
Frank: Nobody's ever spoken to me like that before.
Ted: That's because their mouths were full of your wife's box.
Frank: You're hired.
Ted: Shit.

Knightfall

The Dark Knight Rises ★★★★
Admittedly there are problems with the incredibly unsubtle foreshadowing of the end, the miraculous healed spine (not to mention the leg), the timing issues both in terms of how long the film is and the spinal injury, also the amount of time the police spend underground. Then there's the 'six mile blast radius' bomb issue. And that terrible 'Robin' reference.
But then this is a film about a billionaire who dresses as a flying rat.
Yes it's serious but that doesn't mean it should be taken seriously.
Good fun, actioned packed, ticks most of the boxes and ends the trilogy on a high note.

Plastic

The Lorax ★★
Perhaps if you've some attachment to, or knowledge of, the Dr Seuss book this wouldn't seem such an obvious unsubtle enviro-fable.
Cutting down trees is bad - m'kay?
Just not very entertaining.

Teenage the fuck up

21 Jump Street ★★★★
Remake of an 80s American TV series I never saw.
Two policemen go undercover into a school posing as students.

Different from the vast majority of mainstream successful comedies in that although it's full of completely predictable characters and an absolutely formulaic story it is actually funny.

Titanic (not)

Wrath of the Titans ★
Of all the seven sins to chose from, they went with wrath. Yeth wrath.
Sloth or greed might have been a bit more appropriate at this is a lazy sequel existing solely to milk out a bit more cash.
Terrible. Nonsensical story involving an actual titan this time (Chronus) depicted as a giant lava monster fighting Sam Worthington who on reading the script must have decided it wasn't good enough to even pretend to be anything but Australian or to bother acting at all.
If only shit was a sin - although 'Shit of the Titans' would have deserved an extra star just for the title.

Rusted

Iron Sky ★★
Finnish-German-Australian 'sci-fi comedy' that tries far too hard to be a cult and ends up only two letters away.
Although some of the effects are well executed, the script just isn't good enough, the jokes are poor, some of the acting is terrible and not in the 'so bad it's good' way they were aiming for, just bad.

Serbuan maut

The Raid: Redemption ★★★
Indonesian martial arts film about a disastrous police raid on a tower block.
You know where you are with a description like that - there will be hammers and machetes and large amounts of the ultraviolence.
This is well done, high quality ultraviolence, energetic, skillfully choreographed and quite good fun.

Number Two

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island ★★
Maybe the grammatically incoherent title should have been all the clue that was needed but I still had some hope that this would be fairly enjoyable update of those 70s adventure films usually staring Doug McClure.
But it wasn't.
Although it does have Michael Caine riding a giant bee.
Everyone involved should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves

Mibiii

Men In Black III ★★★
Slight improvement over previous one.
Less retreading of the same jokes but not a lot of new ones.
Fairly inoffensive, poorly thought out time travel, unnecessarily sentimental ending and weird face melting.

Oldeuboi

Oldboy ★★
Add another country to my no-go list.
South Korean film about a bloke who gets kidnapped, held in isolation for 15 years and then released and given 5 days to find out who imprisoned him and why.
Darkly amusing in places but generally quite hard going.
Rated O for live octopus eating.

Ultimates

Marvel Avengers Assemble ★★★★

Leaving aside the insulting change in the title in case anyone was confused about a film with a green giant fighting gods who might be expecting Patrick Mcnee in a suit this is a surprisingly good effort.

The obvious qualifiers apply 'for a comic book film', 'for a hollywood blockbuster', 'for a 12A', 'for something aimed at the widest possible audience', 'for something with Captain America in it'.

Good action, witty script, less Captain America than you'd think and the best Hulk yet.

Hodejegerne

Headhunters ★★★★

Norwegian thriller about a seemingly successful small businessman who in order to fund his expensive house and out of his league wife has a sideline in stealing art.
Obviously things are going to go wrong but just how wrong is the main fun of the film. Just when you think it can't get any worse for him, it does, repeatedly.

Clever, funny and surprisingly brutal.

A Lemon Entry

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows ★★

Carbon copy of the first film.

Same ideas.

Same problems.

But with more explosions.

The previous one just about got away with pissing all over everything that made the Holmes character great.

In this one, the nonsensical plot, complete waste of decent actors (obvious exception Jude Law - he isn't a decent actor) and pointless wandering over Europe is just a bit too irritating to ignore.

Don't Get Carter

John Carter ★★
Tarzans less famous literary brother.19th century ex-soldier gets faxed to Mars and can jump really high.

I've always had a fondness for the John Carter stories probably because they were some of the first books I borrowed from the library, the ten year old me attracted to them due to their lurid 70s covers of four armed green martians.
This effort is just too clean, bloodless and boring to do justice to the books.
It's probably the fact that it does derive it's story from a hundred year old book that's its biggest problem apart from the length and the stupefyingly wooden acting. All the ideas have been seen before.

Skid Mark

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance ★

Impressively managed to be worse than my extremely low expectations.
No story, appalling acting, excruciatingly bad direction and unimaginative special effects.
How they managed to take a character whose head turns into a blazing skull and remove any sense of excitement or interest is quite an achievement.
Avoid at all costs.

Kari-gurashi no Arietti

Arrietty ★★★

Old school hand drawn animation from Studio Ghibli based on Mary Norton's Borrowers.

In terms of Ghibli adapatations of western stories it's more Tales from Earthsea than Howl's Moving Castle. 

Not directed by Hayao Miyazaki and with a bit too much Disney influence.

Tin Times Two

The Adventures of Tintin ★★★
Mo-cap animated adventures of Hergé's curious boy/man Tintin and his seaman (that's seaman) friend.
Non-stop roller coaster ride? Not quite but imagine how sickening a 107 minute roller coaster ride would be.
The animation is excellent and lets Spielberg create some excellent action sequences but the whole thing just feels a bit weird with strangely deformed characters.
Near photo-realistic computer generated human characters seem more inhuman than less well rendered ones.

Number Five is Alive and a Muppet

The Muppets ★★★★
It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are only three good musical films:
Little Shop of Horrors, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
This is the fourth (almost enough for a top five).
Hard to separate out the nostalgia effect of something that was so well known and liked from back in the day (the day being 1976) but it's clear that the people who have made it were also fans from then.

Cinematic

Hugo ★★★★
Scorsese's tribute to early cinema wrapped up in a fairly simple kids story about a boy who lives in the Paris train station fixing the clocks.
Not that the story is all that important, this is all about the visuals, from the seamless extended opening sequence (like in Goodfellas but with less pen stabbing), through the frequent references to other films, events and techniques (Harold Lloyd, the derailment of the Granville-Paris Express in 1895, stop motion animation) to the painstakingly recreated Méliès films.
Technically this seems unbelievably complicated and well constructed, although it is a bit let down by a fairly straightforward story and some odd choices of actors.
Still it's one of the more interesting Oscar contenders and must be a cert for best Director.

Fly

Chronicle ★★★★
Unpopular troubled teenager accidentally develops telekinetic powers becoming more and more unbalanced as his powers grow, resulting in city wide mayhem with him flying around in a hospital gown crushing cars and destroying buildings.
Tribute, homage and just nicking stuff is ok but it should be properly credited.
This takes two of the nerd trinity, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira and Alan Moore's Marvelman, adds the slightly annoying 'found footage' style and the result is one of the more interesting and enjoyable superhero films even if it isn't doing anything that wasn't done better in other formats over twenty years ago.

Jenga

Tower Heist ★★★
Throwback to the eighties, a straightforward comedy/action type film that does exactly what you'd expect.
A dysfunctional group of people get ripped off by evil Alan Alda and plan a robbery to reclaim their pension fund.
Unlikely, unrealistic and lacking even a basic understanding of how heavy gold is, but amusing and entertaining enough as long as your expectations aren't too high.

The Littlest WoHo

War Horse ★★
Five or six episodes of little horse on the prairie set in a strange bloodless World War One.
Look at the sad horse, look in its eyes, it's SAD, now cry for the sad horse.
Poor, far too long and about a horse.

Non

Midnight In Paris ★★★

Mary Sue, in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author or reader.(wikipedia definition).

This is the Woodster using Owen Wilson as his most obvious Mary Sue, his stunt cock, so we don't all feel too sick when he starts leering over a teenager.
The film isn't terrible even if it does seem like a pastiche of earlier better efforts, it has something to say about nostalgia and the central joke where every person in the past is ridiculously famous and they all hang around together is a good joke.
The problems with the film are that it's so light and flimsy it seems like a stretched short story and this idea that Paris is so wonderful. 
It isn't. 
It's a bit shit.

Pythagorean expectation

Moneyball ★★★★

Knowing almost nothing about the rules or history of baseball actually helped.
I genuinely didn't know how it was going to turn out whilst obviously hoping for a triumph of statistics over traditional methods whatever they were.
Decent story, didn't go for the soft-focus, slow-mo, soft-rock clichés that ruin most sports films.
Made me want to watch a game and keep some stats.

Coma Die

The Descendants ★★★

Famidramedy that's better than it's ridiculous soap opera premise.

Rich bloke tries to deal with slightly unruly kids and an important land deal whilst cheating wife is dying in coma after a speedboat accident.

Amusing in places, fairly understated and the Hawaiian setting keeps it visually interesting.

Kept from getting a fourth star as it tried a bit too hard to be heartwarming and poignant.

If I want to watch that I can kick a puppy.

Men Who Hate Women

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ★★★

Hard to get away from the three main problems with this film.

Firstly it's a remake of a two year old film and apart from having everyone speak English and looking more expensive, I'm not convinced it's actually any better.

Secondly, it's about a computer hacker and full of absurd Mac product placement. Since the hacking is treated as basically magic, maybe it doesn't matter how implausible that is.

Finally because it's set in Sweden, everyone has unnecessary Swedish Chef style fake accents.

Would probably have got another star if I hadn't seen the original.

Backstabbers

The Ides of March ★★★

Decent cynical political thriller about the compromises necessary to succeed in American politics.

Lots of good actors, acting good.

Dumb

The Artist ★★★

Much hyped naked emperor circle jerk tribute to silent film.

Dull, predictable and devoid of humour.

Had one moment to redeem itself when the main character could have blown his brains out but didn't.

Anyone who says this is above average is wrong.

Bronzed Turd

Immortals ★

Feature length perfume advert. 

Entirely without any redeeming qualities.

So bad, it's bad.

Cat Flap

Puss in Boots ★

Third part of the hardcore trilogy that started with Cock in Jodhpurs, followed by Ringpiece in Waders.

This time bravely re-imagined as a childrens cartoon about a swordfighting mexican cat.

Just awful.

Already a contender for worst film of the year.

Beige

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ★★★★
70s cold war thriller.
Doesn't explain much, so it's up to you to work out what Control, Karla, the Circus and the 70s were.
Atmospheric, smoky, slightly shabby and very brown, like a trip back in time to Ponders End.
Jim Gordon and Sherlock Holmes in a wig stare at each other a lot and track down a Russian mole in some sort of low rent gentlemans club.
Evokes the spirit of the time so well that you don't realise that not a lot actually happens.

Wu Tang

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame ★★★
Another chinese story 'inspired' by a true story from over a 1,000 years ago.
So basically completely made up.
A series of murders where the victims spontaneously combust, is investigated by .....it doesn't matter really, there's some not too terrible CGI, excellent wire work and a lot of fighting.