Higuchinsky makes his phenomenal feature-length debut with Uzumaki (Spiral), one of the most original, surreal and subtly terrifying horror films of the last decade. Based on Junji Ito's episodic manga of the same name, the premise of the film quite literally depicts Kurouzu, a small Japanese town and its inhabitants being possessed / infected by spirals. Not a plague of zombies, vampires, werewolves or anything Hollywood would ever dare consider whilst producing a horror film; but spirals.

The beautiful Eriko Hatsune plays Kirie Goshima, our central character, as she gradually begins to notice that something is not quite right in her small, isolated town. Whilst skipping to her boyfriend's house, she notices his father filming a snail; she's intrigued, though when she asks what he's doing he is entirely non-responsive. As the film progresses, the relevance of spirals throughout the film becomes increasingly bizarre and obsessive. Kirie's father commits suicide via a washing machine which spins his corpse into a spiral, local students begin to transform into snail-like creatures and an enormous spiraled cloud formation looms in the sky over Kurouzu with an ever-growing sense of menace.

Over recent years, we've seen a few treasures in Japanese horror cinema; Ringu (1998), Dark Water (2002) and Ju-on (2002), to name a few, though Uzumaki seems to be a forgotten gem amongst the greater successors. Perhaps this is due to its decidedly abstract concept as it manifests in excessively grotesque ways, or perhaps it is a product of the `Lost Decade' in which Japan experienced economic turmoil and recession throughout the 1990s. Higuchinsky could potentially have been toying with the idea of his country being destroyed or taken over.

With a fabulous sense of David Lynch inspired surrealist humour reminiscent throughout Uzumaki, the film boasts some alarmingly frightening and wildly imaginative set-pieces such as a girl whose hair comes alive in spirals, similar to the Greek mythology monster, Medusa, and local residents transform into enormous snails and begin to crawl up the sides of buildings. All of this terminates in an astonishingly chilling, mysterious, non-resolute finale comprised of a mixture of live action, oil paintings and stop motion animation.

That said, Uzumaki does not come without its flaws. One of the main problems is that we do not particularly have any characters we can thoroughly connect with or care about. Obviously we have Kirie herself, who however is just a child; as the film is aimed at a much more adult demographic, we find ourselves feeling eventually slightly disconnected from her story. Furthermore, the film's storytelling is highly unconventional and, in retrospect, fairly difficult to understand. Because of this, it doesn't help that the editing is so hyperactive; clearly we can see, particularly demonstrable in the various scenes in which Kirie bumps into her persistent admirer, that it's shot and edited in such a way that connotes a spiral. This is extremely innovative and clever, though is potentially distracting or even off-putting for certain -more mainstream- audience members.

Still, Uzumaki remains one of the most astoundingly original offerings of horror cinema the world has encountered in over a decade and certainly deserves a much wider audience.

Eventually, Walt Disney was undoubtedly set to attempt an emulation of the phenomenal success of James Cameron's Avatar. Both Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time and Tron: Legacy performed reasonably disappointingly at the Box Office, though still managed to stand their ground as simple, standard Blockbusters. However, a few years along the line and we have Andrew Stanton's John Carter, one of the most embarrassingly, excruciatingly desperate sci-fi flops of recent years.

Based on the 100 year old Edgar Rice Burroughs story, John Carter depicts the life of a 19th century explorer who, whilst scouting for gold in Arizona, happens to accidentally transport himself to Mars (or `Barsoom'). He meets a beautiful princess, gets taken for prisoner by the local aliens (Barsoomians), quickly becomes their leader and puts his new-found super-human abilities to the test in an epic war of good versus evil.

Rumoured to have a budget as big as (if not, bigger than) Avatar at over $250 million, John Carter seems to do nothing but squander pathetically around on the pre-production floor for over two gruelling, miserable hours, ultimately finding absolutely no personality of its own and instead feeding off far too many other, better, sci-fi sources.

This in fact is the first, most fatal step that Andrew Stanton makes towards failure; John Carter does not have a personality. It's so distractingly unaware of what it wants to be, so fixed upon pleasing its audience that every character and every scene simply falls flat. The entire film feels like a large, ugly combination of every other mildly successful sci-fi Blockbuster that has hit our screens over the past ten years.

After directing Finding Nemo and WALL.E, you'd think that Andrew Stanton would have enough storytelling blood in his veins to make his live-action debut. Unfortunately, apparently not.

The presentation of Mars itself is as intriguingly bland and unoriginal as its odd, four-armed, unashamedly Jar-Jar-Binks-gone-wrong inhabitants. It's as if nobody who took part in the film's production had any sense of wonder or imagination: The badly choreographed, utterly nonsensical airship battles seem as though stolen directly from James Cameron's abandoned ideas book in Avatar's pre-production and the unintentionally terrifying dog-like characters `look like they were conceived after consulting the wadded up sketches in George Lucas's wastebasket.'

From TV's Friday Night Lights we have ex Diesel and Abercrombie & Fitch model Taylor Kitsch in the title role; he mumbles, grunts and poses his way through the film to degrading effect; you swiftly find yourself cringing whenever he speaks and wishing that he'd just put a shirt on. Lynn Collins is slightly more impressive in the role of Dejah, our femme fetale and Kitsch's love interest, working what convincing drama she can from a script so dire, clumsy and disjointed it has the potential to make your ears bleed. More interesting stars such as Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morton are foolishly pushed aside in order to accommodate frustratingly generic alien / creature special effects.

To call John Carter a `bad' film would be a remarkable understatement. It is a product of Walt Disney Pictures' excessive arrogance and greed, as a result being capped to be one of the biggest critical and commercial flops of all time. In this respect, maybe Disney will learn their lesson, stop assuming that their audience members are stupid and actually produce some half decent live-action kids features in future with enough brains and imagination to make up for this astonishingly disappointing dross.

Del Rey has been met with an avalanche of bad luck and critical hatred; from her nervous SNL performance to being sued for copyright theft for her viral video for Video Games, is it not about time we cut this girl some slack and actually invested some time in listening to her wonderful music? Modern music critics focus so much less on the actual talent nowadays- what seems to be more important is the artist's personal life, background etc, and I honestly believe this to be utterly pathetic.

Despite whatever sickening personal stabs you may have noticed rumouring arond the internet about Del Rey recently, keep this in mind: Born To Die is one of the most astonishing, beautiful, passionate, sexy, epic and emotionally devastating debut albums to reach the masses in a good few years and if you're a fan of Florence or Marina, you'd be a fool to miss this.

Lana Del Rey is the next big thing. Welcome a new icon into the spotlight, 2012 is hers.

Red White & Blue is very much a film of two halves that almost entirely juxtapose one another.

The first is a subtle, dialogue-free character study about Erica, a young woman (played with a wonderfully quiet desperation by Amanda Fuller) who drifts though life, lost in the world, diving into bed with every man she meets simply in order to foundation her loneliness. It's a beautiful, transcendent montage of cinematographic successes.

The revenge-driven second half takes an astonishingly drastic U-turn as Erica's love life suddenly goes sour. Director Simon Rumley (The Living & The Dead) cranks up the tension and ups the violence to literally excruciating levels as he perfectly orchestrates a brutally aggressive, hideously violent powerhouse of a climax.

Rumley directs with a fantastic cinematic energy, performances are incredible all round and the film as a whole is a visual feast. Whilst some may find certain elements too challenging (the first half of the film is almost entirely free of dialogue), others will understand the sublime storytelling quality and emotional depth on display here.

Embrace what is one of the most beautiful and significant artistic ambitions this year, Red White & Blue.

I had my eye on Uninhabited a while before its release, hoping that I'd found a little gem of direct to DVD survival horror. What I got was quite the opposite.

A Marine Biology student and her boyfriend travel to a remote coral island on the Great Barrier Reef for a romantic sun-sea-sex holiday. Supposedly deserted, the island would seem like the perfect paradise. However, when our couple find mysterious footsteps in the sand near their camp, it becomes chillingly apparent that they're not alone.

You'd think that Uninhabited has the perfect setup for at least an original plot and some effective scares, though it fails quite dramatically on almost every level, becoming a painfully predictable and tiresome struggle to reach the final frames. Chemistry between the couple is completely non-existent and the acting, particularly from the male lead, is noticeably bad. I found myself glancing anxiously towards the clock around the half way mark, which is never a good sign.

That said, the film does take good advantage of its gorgeous, eerie locations and is reasonably well shot, considering the fairly low budget. Hence two stars instead of one.

Ultimately, Uninhabited is a disappointing missed opportunity. What could've been a fantastic, innovative and surprising survival horror is instead a forgettable waste of time and money. See it if you have 'must see every single direct to DVD thriller ever made' syndrome, like myself, otherwise I'd leave it well alone.

I Come With The Rain is certainly not typically a film in which you'd expect Josh Hartnett to be involved with. Abandon what you know of his previous acting history, for here we see him bravely stepping right out of his comfort zone and into this deeply symbolic meditation on religion, art and mental disintegration, unwisely disguised and marketed as a mainstream action-thriller.

Hired by a billionaire industrialist to find his missing son, Hartnett plays Kline, a profoundly disturbed ex-cop who finds himself in Hong Kong ballancing the confrontation his torturous, terrifying past and maintaining his present profession as a private eye. Intrinsically, I Come With The Rain is a film to be experienced as a richly atmospheric, exquisitely stylised nightmare vision.

Unique in every conviction, aesthetically gorgeous and featuring one of the most memorable breakthrough performances in the past few years, I Come With The Rain uses its pretentions and manipulates them into art. It will leave you in a wearying state of disorientation and amazement and is undeniably rewarding viewing for anybody interested in intense, original and brave arthouse filmmaking.

Initially I thought Paranormal Entity would be a cheap, uninspired cash-in on the hugely successful recent horror phenomenon, Paranormal Activity. I've really been there with horror; it's my genre, my obsession. There are the obvious classics, but sometimes I just enjoy snuggling down with a truly awful one. Paranormal Entity had all the signs of a cheap, rubbish horror: Direct to DVD, attempting to clone a successful mainstream movie, unknown actors, bad production values, etc.

What is so surprising about Paranormal Entity is that it really makes you believe that some direct to DVD horror can actually be better than some of stuff that poses and flashes around mainstream cinemas. It's completely popped up out of nowhere and put Paranormal Activity to shame.

The brief plot follows along similar lines. But this time, as opposed to a couple, a family of three have been tormented by a 'negative presence' within their home, so have therefore set up cameras in various places to try and capture whatever happens at night on film.

For a super low-budget movie, the acting is fantastic. There's real chemistry on-screen between the three characters (in contrast to the occasional awkwardness between the couple in Paranormal Activity), which was nice to feel and helps us to believe that we're genuinely watching a family home-movie.

Another thing I admired about Paranormal Entity was that it was just so pumped full with very innovative ideas. Obviously presented as 'found footage', there are absolutely no credits, but the filmmakers have to be praised for really making something out of nothing at all. The shocks are perfectly timed and some of the extensive one take shots are assured to have you in awe. The very end is so utterly frightening and disturbing I'll be surprised if even the most hard-core horror fans don't get nightmares. Paranormal Activity had three endings; this has one, and it's scarier than all three others put together.

In conclusion, anybody who turns their nose up at this, passing it by as a cheap cash-in on Paranormal Activity should be ashamed. Not only does it stand boldly as one of the best in the 'found footage' genre, but ranks as one of the most surprising and scary horror films of the year. I demand you give this a chance. Paranormal Entity is a real discovery and will remain proudly in my DVD collection, though it did have coaster potential.

In a similar way to the recent hand-held phenomenon, Paranormal Activity, The Fourth Kind was marketed almost completely through false blog-spots and internet rumours, boasting real abduction footage.

Frankly, The Fourth Kind isn't all it's cracked up to be. What it suffers from is a very silly plot, a cringe worthy, melodramatic script and an excessively padded running-time. However Milla Jovovich gives a typically decent lead performance, along with a number of sub-characters. On top of this, there are a few memorable scares and the imagery -on occasion- is quite beautiful. However, whether this is enough to satisfy demanding mainstream audiences is a tough call.

So then, why three stars? Simply because of Olatunde Osunsanmi's drastic directorial come-back. To go from a film like The Cavern (of which deservedly went straight to DVD) to a decent, classy thriller like The Fourth Kind is an astonishingly large step of achievement. With Osunsanmi developing his directorial skill this rapidly, his next film will definitely be at the top of my list.

The Fourth Kind deserves your attention. Give it a shot.

After The Ordeal I was extremely excited as to what Fabrice du Welz would produce next. Vinyan certainly doesn't disappoint. It's a more rounded film when compared to The Ordeal- the rough edges have been feathered with a slightly higher budget.

Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart play a young couple whose son has gone missing in the recent Thai tsunami. They therefore travel deep into the eerie jungles of Thailand in order to try and rescue him. As the film progresses, our couple become uncompromisingly lost within the Thai wilderness and we not only begin to give up hope that their son is still alive, but begin to wonder whether they themselves will survive.

The film is beautifully shot: There are some genuinely amazing singular takes on show here and the deep jungles are photographed gorgeously. The only criticism I have is that Welz has dropped the jet-black humour that made his debut so successful, making Vinyan a stone-hearted, emotionally draining experience.

Nonetheless, it's certainly worth checking out.

Pandorum is ultimately a beautifully choreographed game of cat & mouse between human and monster around an enormous, abandoned space ship. If I didn't know otherwise, I'd say that it's probably an adaptation of some kind of best selling video game. In fact, the best thing about Pandorum is that it's totally unique.

What begins with two characters awaking from cryogenic chambers, having completely lost their memories, soon turns into something I can only describe as a brilliantly tense cross between Neil Marshall's classic The Descent and Frank Vestiel's more recent Eden Log.

Director Christian Alvart not only appears to be a master in tension-building, but has a fabulously witty sense of humor. Those tied up within the film's complexities probably won't notice this, but there are definitely some sly jokes mixed in with the scares.

In conclusion, there's some very good acting on show here as well as a great few twists waiting for you within the final 10 minutes. It's not the next Alien and critics won't be friends with it, but it's certainly a very good evening's entertainment.