Battle of the Damned was probably made for R500. I’m actually being generous and quoting on the higher side. This is a sort of movie that makes Asylum products like Sharknado look like James Cameron action film; it’s that cheap and tacky. It’s ridiculous and in fact, mysterious that it got a theatrical release, that too in India.

Queen gets almost everything right, beginning with its unusual plot. Strangely there is not one but two endings in the film, and the second one seems shoehorned and unnecessary, because the first one does everything and does so perfectly. But all these are just small complaints, not jarring enough to make one dislike the film. So go watch it.

The problem arises in the scenes in between the action mayhem where we’re forced to look at people who are even blander than in the previous movie. It’s when you want to tell director Noam Murro dude just give us the action, not the lame and boring attempts at character development.

The first question that popped into my head after watching Mr Peabody and Sherman was simply this — why isn’t anyone talking about this movie?…The film is directed by Rob Minkoff, the director of The Lion King and Stuart Little, and it shows. There’s a lot of heart in the film and more effort put to infuse soul into it than on animation (although it’s still a visually dazzling film). The sense of childlike wonder found in Minkoff’s earlier films is omnipresent here, as is the thirst for adventure and the themes of parenthood. And because of the film’s time travel plot device, the filmmakers get to let their collective imagination run wild.

It’s a moving drama, and probably the most sincere film of 2013 and it’s good of PVR to release the film in India.

The film skillfully avoids the cheesy or preachy drama route and does a great job of establishing some dignity into a formerly despicable character.

Payne’s latest effort, Nebraska, is familiar territory that screams vintage Payne — a road trip, a disillusioned old man, social barriers, psychological damage and the dark hilarity of it all. Some might call this a retreading of genre elements for Payne, and some might criticise him for delving into the same themes over and over again. On that front, Payne is doing what Woody Allen has been for all these years — taking similar themes and characters and making something new and interesting out of them.

Pompeii is just like Anderson’s films of the past ten years – aggressively stupid, full of CGI and bland characters, with a script that is somehow neither interesting nor laughably bad. It’s something akin to Gladiator meeting a Roland Emmerich movie, with a dash of Anderson’s trademark lack of subtlety and inability to craft good action sequences.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what went wrong with The Monuments Men because it seems to have so many elements going for it – the great cast, the World War II setting, direction by Clooney himself, a decently big budget and Grant Heslov in the producer’s chair. With so many positive aspects, it would generally take an awful script to undo a film’s advantages but even that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The film is not an epic disaster by any means; it’s just uninvolving and too lethargic in its pace.

There is so much to appreciate in Highway and if it can goad other commercial filmmakers to take notice and also dare to try something new, we’ll all be richer for it.

Thanks to the success of Twilight and its sequels, the Young Adult genre seems to have exploded and we’ve been blessed with dozens of clones and carbon copies. Last year’s Mortal Instruments was one disaster, and this year’s Vampire Academy follows suit.