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Somewhere under the multiple layers of aesthetic beauty that shimmer away on the surface of
Beasts of the Southern Wild are a number of very, very familiar stories; a father struggles to find the momentum to raise his rebellious daughter, a community consistently on the brink of collapse struggles to maintain uniformity, a child whose innocence is under constant threat wrestles with life's infinite and perplexing contradictions.
If any of the above scenarios are well known to you and the medium through which they are familiar is a movie set in the American South featuring a soundtrack of orchestral folk, a cast of mostly young non-professional actors and also includes the essential contribution of a voice over to constantly remind you to follow the story, then you might as well stop reading, as the film in question and the remainder of this review will hold very few novelties.
If on the other hand this is not the case, or you are merely not bothered but, in fact, empowered by clichés and the general fact of cinema and indeed fiction, perpetually repeating itself then read on.
As far as the on-screen adaptation of Ian Fleming’s James Bond saga goes, it’s had its fair share of ups and downs over the years. From questionable Bond actors (Pierce Brosnan anyone?) to production pauses, due to movie studio debt, the much loved spy series regardless still manages to draw audiences from far and wide. With that said, the latest addition to the franchise could well be its finest, as well as offering the game changing reinvigoration it so desperately needed.
Time travel has always been a fascinating subject in popular culture. It is notoriously hard to make a time travel movie whilst keeping an eye on all the various paradoxes that will undoubtedly appear. Somewhere around the '80s two seminal pieces of film making changed all that - The Terminator and Back To The Future.
What directors James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis showed us was that if they make a movie fun enough we, as an audience, would be more lenient towards the plot holes. This allowed for a slew of excellent films that ranged from the dark 12 Monkeys (more on that later) to last year’s whimsical Woody Allen comedy Midnight in Paris. The fact we are less pedantic about loopholes is what allows the new Rian Johnson movie Looper to be such a triumph. 
East Asian cinema is renowned for the quality of its genre movies, with Japan and Korea producing some of the scariest horror flicks in the region, terrifying local and international audiences alike.
For years, Japanese and Korean filmmakers have thrilled moviegoers, sending shivers down the spines of horror cinephiles with majors hits, cult favourites and classics like Ju-on: Girl In Black, Whispering Corridors, the record-breaking Ring and popular Grudge trilogy.
The Middle Kingdom and Land of the rising Sun are hotbeds of genre films; Asia's little shops of horror. The two powerhouse nations are masters of the monster movie.
Taiwan, on the other hand, is the new kid on the block. 
It can be difficult to determine the start of the summer in this part of the world. One obvious clue is the clocks going forward by one hour and the other slightly more obvious hint is the sudden emergence of superhero movies made with gargantuan budgets in multiplexes all over the Northern Hemisphere.
Fortunately, with the release of Marvel’s Avengers Assemble, this summer promises to be no different. And fortunately again, Assemble promises not so much to be a superhero movie but a kind of superhero orgy characterised by a frenzy of flowing capes, mutating monsters, exploding spaceships and infinitely expanding egos. Overall the best attributes of any decent summer blockbuster. 
When I first read the synopsis of this movie, I let out the most pretentious scoff you have ever seen this side of North London. I was instantly reminded by an interesting phrase used in literature and movies. A phrase popularised by Spike Lee in the early '90s when discussing movies like ‘Driving Miss Daisy’. That phrase was the ‘Magical Negro’. 
Trailers are an art form within themselves. The director has anything between 30 seconds to four minutes to convince you that of all of the movies out there, this is the movie you want to watch. All the while, trying to find a fine balance between revealing important plot lines, scenes, cameos or just general giveaways that would tempt you to invest in their product. Some, literally, can qualify as