A fortnight ago it all looked so different. An early review of selected footage from James Cameron's space opera, posted anonymously on Gawker, comprehensively panned what had been hailed as a game-changingly ambitious and successful foray into the world of 3D. Avatar, said the writer, apparently an industry insider, was "literally vomit inducing". Despite some "beautiful moments", concluded the review, "overall it's a horrible piece of shit".

Rupert Wyatt, the director of The Escapist is in post production with the newest Ape film. Written by Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa, Rise of the Apes seems to be a remake or re-imagining of the ’72 film Conquest of the Planet of the Apes or a prequel to it.

Eat Pray Love was more than just one woman's story from the very beginning-- writer Elizabeth Gilbert funded her year-long trip around the world with a publisher's advance, and experienced her stays in Italy, India and Indonesia with the knowledge that they would go into a book, and hopefully a successful one. The resulting bestseller phenomenon is something no one could have anticipated, but now that we have Eat Pray Love the movie, it's clearer than ever that Liz Gilbert, as played by Julia Roberts, is more avatar for all women than an actual human being. We watch her and her blond highlights and her tasteful clothes travel the globe because we cannot do the same, and whatever story might come along with it needs only to not get in the way of all the wish-fulfillment going on in the theater.

The story told by “How to Train Your Dragon” — the new 3-D feature from DreamWorks Animation — is a fairly standard one, exploring themes that are so familiar in the universe of all-ages cinema that they hardly need elaborating. The hero, a young Viking named Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), is a misfit adolescent who proves his mettle, pleases his hard-to-please father (Gerard Butler) and saves the world while learning important lessons and rattling off some wisecracks. Supporting characters include a spitfire love interest (America Ferrera), a gaggle of goofy friends (including the inevitable Jonah Hill and Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a crusty old mentor (Craig Ferguson) and a cute nonhuman sidekick.

Plenty of movies come with a built-in fan base these days. This week, we are reminded of such things with the two major releases: Twilight: Eclipse and The Last Airbender. Both have a long line of fans who yearn to see their favorite books (or in this case animated series) given a proper Hollywood treatment. And for the most part, I don’t give the connected end of a rat’s tale about these people. I mean no offense, but my job isn’t to be an avenger of fandom. I’m here to talk about whether or not the movie is good, from the most objective place possible. But this time I can’t help it. It’s just too much to bear. To the fans of the original series: I am offended on your behalf.

To the sad story of a father who was trapped inside a snowman for the winter ("Jack Frost"), we must now add "Tron: Legacy," where the father has been trapped inside a software program for 20 years. Yes, young Sam Flynn has grown up an orphan because his dad was seduced and abducted by a video game. Now a call comes for the young hero to join his old dad in throwing virtual Frisbees at the evil programs threatening that digital world.

This is a movie well beyond the possibility of logical explanation. Since the Tron universe exists entirely within chips, don't bother yourself about where the physical body of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has been for the last two decades; it must surely have been somewhere, because we can see that it has aged. The solution I suppose is that this is a virtual world and it can do anything it feels like, but how exactly does a flesh-and-blood 20-year-old get inside it? And what does he eat?

Hellbinders is a low-budget action/horror crossover flick written, directed, and starred in by martial artists and stuntmen who all have some seriously impressive Hollywood resumes. Ray Park, who plays the European accented mercenary who now operates in the City of Angels, was Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode 1 and Toad in the first X-Men movie. Johnny Yong Bosch has done stunt work for numerous Power Rangers movies and television series, as well as a ton of motion capture and voice acting for video games in the Resident Evil all the way to some of the latter Final Fantasy games. Our third and final hero Cain, played by Esteban Cueto, has been an actor who normally plays beefy henchmen in movies such as XXX, Bloodrayne, and The Scorpion King. Behind the camera, Mitch Gould, Hira Koda, and David Wald have all worked on movies as either stuntmen or actors with some large projects such as Ultraviolet, Domino, Avatar, Rush Hour 3, Serenity, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End to their collective credits, just to name a few. It becomes abundantly clear that all three of these men, who also split directing duties of the film, know how to orchestrate fun and propulsive fight scenes, but after sitting down with Hellbinders, I also came away fiarly impressed with their ability to direct a feature length film, especially one that with such a small budget.

Massy Tadjedin's (2005's The Jacket screenwriter) feature directorial debut Last Night is a stunning tale of fidelity and marital trust. Tadjedin seduces both her characters and the audience to the point she has you in the palm of her hand. To assume you know how the relationships in this story will play out means you are underestimating her script as she teases and keeps you on edge up and beyond the film's last breath.

It’s Assassin’s Creed II week! I have to hand it to Ubisoft for their promotion for this game. They haven’t bombarded us with so many videos that I feel I’ve seen half the game like so many publishers do these days, but they have given us a very impressive prologue to the story in the form of Lineage, a thirty-six minute short film produced by Ubisoft themselves and released freely in three parts via YouTube. It is said to link very closely with the game, and with the game and film production teams working closely together on assets and the two projects sharing the same lead cast it’s easy to see Lineage as a true part of the series.

In his directorial debut Repo Men, Miguel Sapochnik is going for something unusual-- or at the very least, something only familiar in an offbeat, screwball kind of way. For while the movie takes place in your typical bleak future and has the standard caustic attitude toward the promise of a brave new world, Repo Men is funnier, bloodier and weirder than most post-apocalyptic tales.

"The Losers" is a classical action movie based on a comic strip. It does just enough nodding toward the graphics of drawn superheroes, and then gets that out of the way and settles down into a clean, efficient and entertaining thriller. It's a reminder of how exhausting this kind of material can be when it's brought to a manic level by overwrought directors. But "The Losers" looks, feels and plays like a real movie. There is another reason to be grateful: It's not in 3-D. You have to treasure movies like this before they're entirely eaten away by the marketing gimmicks.

Thanks to Irreversible, the notoriously graphic film that stirred up Cannes and Sundance audiences a few years ago, Gaspar Noé is already well known as a pusher of buttons and a churner of stomachs. His latest, Enter the Void, is certainly not a departure from that, but it is quite a bit more palatable, not to mention more thematically mature. From a technical standpoint, it is a marvel. From every other standpoint, it is totally jacked up. But I mean that in a good way. I think.

Noé revels in trying the viewer's patience, and Enter the Void commences its assault in the opening credits, which are set to pounding techno music and bright flashing lights, and sped up so fast they're impossible to read. It's Noé's little joke, rushing hilariously through the credits in order to leave more time for the film itself ... which is 161 minutes long and is frequently, shall we say, unhurried.

A colleague of mine once observed that the very manner by which Chev Chelios had to keep himself alive in the Crank films respectively represented the approach that writing/directing team Neveldine/Taylor took for each of them, which is to say that Crank 1 was all about keeping our hearts racing and Crank 2 was all about shocking us as an audience. It's a simple, literal assessment that nonetheless cleared up why yours truly was a fan of the first and yet let down by the second -- I'd rather be excited than appalled any day.

Russell Mulcahy’s “Give’em Hell Malone” is one of those anachronistic film noir filled with characters more appropriate in ‘40s and ‘50s detective movies featuring heroes with names like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. As the film opens, Thomas Jane’s Malone, a private dick with a very big gun that he brandishes expertly, is killing his way through a hotel full of bad guys to get to a metallic case that he has been sent to retrieve. Shot up to hell and back, but still alive, our hero seeks out some answers from his handler Murphy (Leland Orser), eventually discovering that they were both hired by the vivacious lady in red Evelyn (Elsa Pataky). Meanwhile, crime boss Whitmore (Gregory Harrison) dispatches his best enforcer, the brute with a heart of gold Boulder (Ving Rhames) and some other dangerous killers to take back the suitcase by all means necessary.

We play a lot of games here at IGNPC. A lot. We see some good, a lot of mediocre, and a few terrible titles. And then every now and again, we get something in the office that spews a breath of fresh air all over us that not only is good, but also changes the way you look at a particular genre. Well Shiny not only managed to make an incredible game, but also managed to give a new look to a couple of genres by blending them in an incredible mix of fun and fantasy. Not only that, but it appealed to my sick sense of humor and love of the twisted. This game is a riot and a half and I'm hoping that anyone that is a fan of action and RTS games will go and pick this one up. While it isn't a title you can really just jump into and expect to be superb at right at the start, it has so much depth and so much character, you'll be spending those late nights trying to think up the screwiest strategies possible for kicking your opponent in the teeth. I think I've gotten ahead of myself just a little here. Let's start at the top.