Computer animated play-doh.

As far as Christmas movies go, it’s fair to say the old ones are the best ones. For all the versions of A Christmas Carol we’ve had, it’s always Alistair Simm’s Scrooge that comes out on top; It’s a Wonderful Life continues to be watched year in year out by many; and not a December goes by without Home Alone being aired on TV.

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been any more recent Christmas movies that have been good, but for all the Christmas movies that get made every year, few are any good. I think Elf, starring Will Ferrell is the last really good Christmas movie that’s been released, and that was back in 2003.

Well deck the halls and jingle my bells the wait is finally over as someone has actually done another great Christmas movie. That movie is Arthur Christmas.

Beware the Ides of March.

American politics is corrupt, conniving, power-craving, misogynistic and undemocratic world. But one thing you certainly can’t call it is boring.

Hence why most of the political stories across the ages have been set in the land of the free, whether they be fact or fiction. The latest offering to the fictional pile is The Ides of March, a film that stars its own writer and director, George Clooney. 

I don’t really know why the film has such an important meaning for the 15th March but it does, maybe that’s election day or something. My best guess is that it’s making reference to the fall of Julies Caesar, but who knows maybe the DVD release date will be on 15th March.

Steven Spielberg and the motion captured quiff.

Ladies and Gentlemen it’s been a while but Steven Spielberg is finally back on form.

Yes after directing turkeys like War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull and producing turds like the Transformers movies, Spielberg has finally lived up to at least some of his reputation with his latest movie: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.

Obviously based on the comic strips by the Belgian artist Georges Remi (Hergé), Tintin is done quite proud here in this movie. It’s fun, energetic, suspenseful, and thoroughly entertaining stuff! And yes that is a colon you see in the film title. Inevitable sequels ahoy!

Johnny English: Licensed to annoy continuously.

Rowan Atkinson was back on the big screen in 2011 with a sequel to the bungling spy flick Johnny English and as much as I love him, Johnny English: Reborn is below average at best.

Sure, the first movie was okay, but it wasn’t anything that really blew you away. The whole bungling spy thing has been done several times, take The Naked Gun for example. Johnny English never really added anything to the genre, it just existed within it.

The whole premise is essentially: what if James Bond was an idiot? And the filmmakers pretty much ran with that for the first movie. For the second they do very much the same thing. 

Smashy Robot UFC. To a T.

2011 was a year which featured a couple of movies that showed off large over-compensating robots beating the living hell out of one another. One was the boring conclusion to the Transformers trilogy: Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon and the other was Real Steel.

Real Steel stars Hugh Jackman as a down-and-out former boxer who now pits his fighting robots against other mechanical wizzbots. Think of it as Wolverine but with giant robots… that aren’t Sentinals.

Israeli Debt Collectors.

With the Summer blockbuster season over and done with, October started to throw out a few smarter movies onto the screens.

One of those movies was The Debt directed by John Madden (no, not that John Madden). Set in a post-war Berlin, three Israeli agents set out to bring justice to their people by capturing Doktor Bernhardt, the Butcher of Birkenau. The mission is an apparent success but decades later it becomes apparent that the agents lied about the death of Bernhardt, failing to admit he’d gotten away. 

Cage Rage.

Mark Wahlberg’s The Fighter made a large impact on the movie scene earlier this year, so it probably isn’t too much of a surprise to see another fight movie pop up towards the end of it.

Starring the ever impressive Tom Hardy, Warrior is like the brutal step-brother of The Fighter, grappling and pummelling its way to our affection.

Is it as good as The Fighter? Well, no. But it’s a good effort all the same.