Damon Smith

As weakling Peter Parker discovered to his cost before his transformation into web-spinning superhero Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility.

NEW York City celebrates thanksgiving with an annual parade of giant balloons and these colourful festivities on the streets of the Big Apple provide a perfect cover for a daring robbery in Brett Ratner’s action-packed comedy.

NEW Zealand-born screenwriter Andrew Niccol has consistently conjured dark clouds with his dystopian visions of life in the 21st century and beyond.

ONE man can make a difference in Marc Forster’s inspirational true story, based on a screenplay by Jason Keller.

IN 1971, legendary director Sam Peckinpah sparked a wide-ranging debate about violence in cinema and the depiction of women with his coruscating thriller Straw Dogs, based on the novel The Siege Of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon Williams.

BASED on the novel by Kathryn Stockett, The Help explores the touching relationship between two black maids in 1960s Mississippi.

DIRECTOR Roland Emmerich courts controversy with this historical drama penned by John Orloff, which suggests that William Shakespeare might not have been a literary genius after all.

WRITTEN and drawn by Belgian artist Georges Remi under the pen name Herge, Tintin first sprang to life on the page in 1929 in the gung-ho adventure Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets.

FROM the moment it premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s bravura adaptation of the award-winning novel by Lionel Shriver has been generating awards buzz.

DIRECTED by the masterful Steven Soderbergh, Contagion is a stylish thriller, which imagines the panic when a deadly new virus threatens to become a global epidemic.