Taking a pay cut and probably some light brain surgery in order to deal with an actual story, Hollywood's gung-ho alpha male, Michael Bay  finally gets to make his pet project. It must have been such a struggle for the billionaire blockbuster titan as one of our most bankable to-go men to get this thing made, but even so he still dropped about 30 million dollars on this neon injected, blue sky filled, rotting corpse of a crime caper…

Growing star Josh Duhamel and writer director Dan Fogler star in this frantic but simple story of two old friends stranded in Death Valley after their car breaks down. The imminent horror doesn't come from a monster lurking in the scrub or a ghost on the highway or even an axe wielding maniac…

Film making chameleon Marc Forster certainly had a fair amount of time to ponder World War Z during its infamously painful re-write and re-shoot production. Max Brooks' sociopolitical zombie novel must have been laid out in little piles all over a million separate production offices before this thing finally made it to location and a million more during the editing process…

This bitingly funny subversive horror film may be low on budget but it wields its ideas like a well sharpened scalpel using gender, sex and subculture in a way that even David Cronnenberg would be proud of. At its helm are Jen and Sylvia Soska (also known as the Twisted Sisters) who debuted their schlock b-movie Dead Hooker in a Trunk back in 2009…

Joshua Oppenheimer and Christine Cynn's masterful documentary ominously lists one other director as Anonymous. "Anonymous", in fact, shows up many times in titles for The Act of Killing; A reenactment of sorts and in part which is used to jaw dropping effect as swift attack on the genocide and communistic purge which wiped out an estimated 600,000 people in Indonesia between 1964 and 1965…

Refn and Gosling get the lightning rod out again and try to light up this sombre, cold and heartless slice of style pie but despite Kristen Scott Thomas chiming in with a few well place expletives and some pretty photography by Larry Smith, Only God Forgives is pretty much an all out failure…

Jordan Voight-Robert's brilliantly nostalgic film takes us back to a time in our lives when the world we had not yet truly experienced seemed too much to handle. That whim of fleeing everything to live in the woods away from responsibilities, overbearing parents and general high school awkwardness are staples of growing up…

New comer, Fede Alvarez puts Sam Rami's original film through the wood chipper in this fun, completely over the top, adrenaline rushed, gore filled version of Evil Dead. It's not clever and it's no post modern take; Alvarez knows exactly what he's doing and uses his camera and some wonderful sound design to darken the tone to near black…

Since its re-release in 2009 fans and detractors of the Australia New Wave classic Wake In Fright have been talking and talking and talking about the film. The director Ted Kotchef has been put through the ringer a few times already by an angry Australian public, the RSPCA and the American studios after the film failed to gather a good intake at the box office after the praise it was showered with in Cannes in 1971…

The third film in the series which began with a fateful impulsive romance between an American guy in Vienna and a lone French girl on a train in Vienna is the most real, sad and bold yet. Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke's Celine and Jessie are together after the wonderful cliffhanger ending of the second film with twin girls of their own…

Brad Anderson returns with this high concept thriller which is in constant danger of completely buckling under its own far-fetched plot, obvious dialogue and turned up to 11 performances. The director, who hit the big time with The Machinist and Christian Bale's painfully skinny body, disregards the taught, slow and smart horrors he's capable of delivering and buckles down for a slightly more by the book thriller.

Niels Arden Oplev infiltrates the states with this double-edged revenge tale hampered by its own slow ham-fisted scripting and a stagnant performance by Colin Farrell. Reconnecting with Noomi Rapace whom he made a star out of after his version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the director seems affectionately drawn to the American mobster thriller but J.H Wyman's story trips up what could have a been a dark, tight, metropolitan chase film in favour of a plodding, murky piece of dirty work.

Pertii Kurikka's Name Day are a Finnish punk band you may never of heard of. The autistic temperamental lead singer Pertti Kurikka and front man Karl Aalto, and the Down's syndrome rhythm section of Sami Helle and Toni Välitalo have a little more to rage about than the government and revolt. Their afflictions and their anger surrounding their lifestyle is filtered through a typical punk mindset makes for a touching, genuinely funny and heartbreaking look at a different side of life in band…

Last year's surprisingly good horror anthology V/H/S gave 5 directors free rein with digital cameras to tie together story concerned with the haunting and creepy quality of a lost medium through tried and tested horror tropes. The result was a genuinely scary short film compilation. The good news is that it's follow-up stays true to the format delivering 4 interesting shocking and sometimes hilarious 20 minute films…

The very public retirement the outspoken, genre bending Steven Soderbergh came with the release of two films; This years Behind the Candelabra (a bio pic of an intense period of the life of composer Liberace) and, true to the directors eclectic stylings Side Effects which is a sort of social commentary laden thriller about the over medication of the general public which morphs several times into a stranger and stranger beast. It's thankfully and cleverly a film which somewhat encapsulates the career of an un-pin-able, endlessly creative mind by, itself twisting and turning its way out of every corner…

Jonathan Levine has always been an interesting young film maker a blossoming career filled with unique choices and startling left turns. Kicking off with the somewhat underrated slasher All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, the seriously underrated The Wackness and the touching, honest and controversial 50/50, he's a man of many genres. Warm Bodies is partly a retelling of Romeo and Juliet through the eyes Nicholas Hoult's lonely zombie named "R".

1988's Die Hard is a classic action film; Simple, fun, excessively violent, loud and confined. It rebranded the action hero as an everyday Joe (or John as it were) and it paved the way for 2 sequels which were adequate in almost every way. Renny Harlin bringing John McClane back to the screen and basically doing the same film but in an airport and, in 1997, John McTiernan returned for a ludicrously over due but enjoyable race around New York City in Die Hard with a Vengeance…

Tobias Lindholm has already delivered one incredible piece of work this year, helping out Thomas Vinterberg in penning the rather excellent The Hunt. That slow burning film, taught with uncertainty and wonderfully handed by Vinterberg in the directors chair, is now neck and neck with Lindholm's own brilliant slow burning exercise in tension with the equally intense A Hijacking; This story of a rusted cargo ship which is boarded by Somali pirates and the cold business like negotiations performed by the company's CEO is certainly one of the years best films.

Park Chan-Wook's English language debut feature is filled with wonderfully tense moments, sublimely edited single sequences and sound design to make even the most strong stomached cinema goer go a big wobbly one but it's seriousness becomes a crutch in the film's final third when the Korean director tries to entertain with the obvious instead of shock with his unique mind…

Derek Cianfrance's sprawling triptych of a film is certainly an ambitious follow-up to his heartbreaker par excellence Blue Valentine; This is a finely acted and beautifully shot morality tale which consumes two families over the course of more than fifteen years. Sagging slightly in the middle despite a fantastic performance from Bradley Cooper, the films bookending tales are when The Place Beyond the Pines is at it's best with a typically tight-lipped performance from Ryan Gosling as a bank robbing motorcycle rider and from Chronicle quiet kid Dane DeHaan as a high-schooler uncovering the truth…