The new year brings with it the first Golden Globe and potential Oscar shortlist, My Week with Marilyn. The film adaptation of a memoir is a coming-of-age tale and a vivid fly-on-the-wall story about a young, fresh-faced hand on a film set whom the capricious Marilyn Monroe chooses as her confidant, best friend, and boy-toy. The rest, as they say, is history.

If you're going to have a remake, you might as well get the best director to do it. In this case, David Fincher's remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo comes across as a visually stunningly film that adds precision, nuance, and detail to the original — and comes close to surpassing it.

Special Forces is a French action film where a team of elite soldiers attempt to rescue a hostage kidnapped by terrorists in a failed state. Very slick production values and minimalist direction conspire to make this a war film that doesn't feel like a self-conscious war film at all.

Gerard Butler continues his portfolio of playing characters that might have jumped out from a comic book in Machine Gun Preacher. Here, he plays an ex-con, ex-druggie who turns good and wages war in war-torn Sudan against an army of kidnapped children in order to save kidnapped children!

Till next week,

Vernon Chan