As subjects for screenplays go, there’s not much more interesting or worthy matter than that of existing and little-known social injustices. And of those injustices, the US policy of extraordinary rendition, where any US citizen can be invisibly transferred to the soil of a foreign country where torture is not forbidden by law, is one that is so odious that we should really applaud any effort to educate the ignorant masses of it’s use and abuse in today’s world. Unfortunately, although Rendition gets ten out of ten for its intentions, its execution is far less inspired.

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I know musicals are a treasured genre by many movie lovers but, I must admit, the whole concept leaves me cold. Whenever I start getting drawn into the story, I’m inevitably jarred back into the real world by the obvious artifice of otherwise normal people suddenly breaking into song. It just seems so anachronistic in this day and age. The only other type of music film we ever see are films like U2: Rattle and Hum or Stop Making Sense, but these are music documentaries, not musicals as such. The great achievement of Once is that it reinvents the musical, overcoming the issue of spontaneous singing and mysterious backing music by telling a story about musicians and letting their naturally presented music take centre stage.

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It’s been a good year for a dodgy genre. There have been two great superhero flicks made - a bit of an achievement for a genre so riddled with bad films that the mediocre ones have almost felt like triumphs. The first great film was Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight. With an utterly different, but just as fresh an approach to the genre, comes Jon Favreau’s Iron Man.

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You know when Ridley Scott is at the helm, the film is going to be an exquisitely professional piece of work. But given his tendency to create films on such an epic scale, it appears critics’ expectations have been adjusted accordingly. Body of Lies has been widely criticized as being “just another spy film” despite its technically immaculate execution and big-name leading men. But what’s wrong with just making a genre film with the highest production values?

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Given the possibilities of the cinematic art form, it really is a bit of an indictment that the film industry still relies so heavily on the plodding old plot formula – one to three main story arcs winding steadily onwards chronologically to some sort of dramatic climax. It’s based on the traditional story form entrenched in written fiction and drama, which itself was rooted in the spoken storytelling that originated in prehistory. But unlike fiction, whose practitioners now experiment endlessly with plot structure and premise (especially in the genre of writing now so pompously referred to as “literature”), cinema seems only rarely to mess with the formula. In taking a completely alternative approach to plot progression, Vantage Point joins the ranks of such classics as Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and Chris Nolan’s Memento - stylistically, if not quite to the same level of success.

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The time immediately after World War II is a bit of a murky one for most of us who didn’t live through it. We get taught lots about how the war started and how it was conducted, but very little about how it was wrapped up. This is significant when you consider that many of the world’s conflict zones exist today as a result of decisions made by the victorious Allies as to how the world would be divided up politically. Set in Berlin immediately after its capture by Allied troops, The Good German turns its focus on one particularly significant episode in recent human history by throwing its protagonists into the middle of the conflicting forces that had already started to fill the vacuum left by the Axis’ defeat.

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It’s really quite fascinating how fantasy has evolved from being exclusively the domain of children’s stories to now more frequently being targeted at adult audiences. No film embodies fantasy’s new darker form than Pan’s Labyrinth. Guillermo del Toro has created a fable so brutal, so frightening and yet at the same time evoking such imaginative wonder that it makes your head spin.

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