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Leave it up to Unchained Melody, Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze to make pottery making into a cinematic statement screaming beauty, love and suggestive undertones. If there has ever been a more romantic scene in either film or real life, than I certainly haven't seen it! Ghost is giant melting pot of romance, thriller, suspense, comedy and a hint of the supernatural and with the loudmouth medium Whoopi Goldberg added to the roller coaster ride, you know it also has the vibrant and colourful cast to match.

A young couple move into their first apartment together; she's an artist and he's the corporate type. But once again love sees no class because these young kids are deeply in love, aww how sweet, I think I might need a tissue. However soon tragedy strikes as Patrick's character Sam Wheat is murdered but what seems at first at the hands of a low life street mugger. But this is Ghost and love is so powerful and eternal that not even the afterlife can keep these two apart as Patrick spirit returns. How unfortunately the only person who can see or hear him is medium Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg), so the pair must work together in a race against time to save Demi's character Molly Jensen's life when it to comes under threat.

When I say the power of love, you say; Pretty Women, Dirty Dancing, an Office and a gentleman and the Notebook, but for me the true heavyweight in the world of romance is Ghost, the very epitome of love conquering all. You can't spell forever without love.

Only once in a decade do you feel that a film has truly opened its soul to you; we have had the likes of Apocalypse Now in the 70's and its brutal honesty about the destructive power of war. Shindlers List in the 90's and its personification of mans remarkable ability to change and self sacrifice. Now in the 2010's we have 12 Years a Slave, which I consider to be a Pandora Box story at its centre, showing that hope can often be the only thing left strong enough to guide you through some of the most unspeakable cruelties.

Director Steve McQueen's 12 Years of a Slave is a historical drama based on real life accounts of Solomon Northup, a Free African American family man with a beautiful musical gift (Chitwetel Ejiofor) who in 1841 who was wrongly sold into slavery for 12 years. During that long struggle, his every turn was fraught with pain of being kept away from his family and the pain of watching his fellow people subjugated to stomach turning horror. But unlike on TV, when the horror gets too scary and real, you can't change channels. During those years of being sold and moved, he encounters a wide spectrum of different people and masters; on one side he comes under the ownership of Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) one the very few slave masters who seem to have some semblances of a moral compass as he tries in vain to keep a family together instead of allowing them to be sold separately. Then later on we have a cameo from Brad Pitt playing Samuel Bass, a builder who seems to be the only white person in the film who voices adamant objections to the treatment of the slaves. While on the offer more sinister side there is Tibeats Paul Dano a man who is clearly threatened by the far more intelligent Solomon who is fast becoming a favourite of Ford, which causes Tibeat to seek to humiliate Solomon and punish him at his every whim. But the real villain is Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) who starts off as the most ambiguous of the other slave masters encountered. In the beginning he seems passive and submissive to his wife, but as the film progresses he grows more and more deranged and insane fueled by his predilection bordering on obsession with Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o), a cotton picking slave girl. This truth infuriates his wife (Sarah Paulson), causing tension between the two of them, especially when the wife is faced with the crushing blow that she will always play second fiddle to Patsey. Just to play devils advocate, from four amazing actors who brought you Tyler Durden, Eli Sunday, Magneto and Sherlock, one of my few criticisms on 12 Year of Slave is that I would have wanted to see a little more of these fine actors and the characters I felt remained largely unexplored in the film. On a film diet consisting of emotional drenched Marlon Brando ramblings and big resounding Al Pacino speeches, initially it perplexed me how Nyong'o's and Ejiofor 's more subtle and less extravagant performances were able to garner a Oscar win and nomination. However upon reflection I realized that the performances were perfectly suitable to express both characters systematic beating down, the time and era and the emotional stress each was under throughout. And because Nyong'o and Ejiofor were able to evoke and encompass such difficult hardship in natural understated manners, it showed their deep understandings of the text as a whole and the unique turmoil of each character.

In terms of an overall response to 12 Years of a Slave; I initially didn't know much about this subject because back in school I always felt that the slave trade was a segment of history that was always underexplored. But this film sought to correct that, as it offered a great educational experience teaching me a lot about the plight and hardship unfairly thrust on to these innocent people.12 Years also reminded me again that cinema has the ability to transcend from shackles of just being about entertainment and the spectacle, when in fact it can be so much more than that. It can be a way to hold to our society a mirror reflecting only unflinching sincerity exposing the truth of humanity, from our compassionate nature too our darkest and sinister capacity for evil. While at other times a single film can teach you a lot more than an entire library of textbooks, because while a good book asks you to engage your mind, a great film asks you to engage your entire being and soul . Another thing about 12 Years that I enjoyed was Patricia Norris's good enough to put Downton Abbey to shame costume design certainly which caught my eye. At times it was like watching a beautiful 1900's painting of the bourgeoisie coming to life. 12 Years of Slave remain on the fine light between the arguments of; is it is important to constantly remind ourselves of the past so to ensure that it never happens again? Or does such reflection only ensure that the past is repeated because by continuing to look at the despicable atrocity of the history, you only succeed in adding more timbre to the blaze of hostility and breed more mistrust. But my stance on the subject is rather cleaner cut; by ignoring of the past is denying the essences of these good people the solace of allowing their suffering to act as a reminder to all future generations of how not to treat people, because whilst the slaves lost their bodies to the slave trade, the masters and owners lost more in the way of their souls and humanity.

Written and Directed by Sofia Co Coppola, Somewhere is pretty much a hollowed out remake of Lost in Translation. With all its melancholy heart and that cold wintery isolation that you could empathise with from the main characters completely stripped out. Similar to Murray in LT, our main character Johnny (Stephen Dorff) is an actor living from hotel room to hotel room, whilst emotionally and consciously withdrawn from all the various awards ceremonies and press junkets he is made to do. Annoyingly from the gecko we are left completely indifferent to the main character, partly due to the face that his motives and desire throughout the whole film consistently remain ambiguous and dubious. When certain thinks do break the monotony of his existence, they still have no real implications on Jonny, for example in the opening sequence he breaks his hand, but as the film progresses it never has any affect on his life. Isn't the guy an actor, wouldn't a broken hand be bad for business? Then later in the film Jonny witnesses a car crash involving a sport car very similar to his own, but instead of contemplating the frivolity of material wealth in the face of death, he just carries on driving by as if he saw a plastic bag floating in the wind instead.

The only smallest flicker of emotion we ever do see emanating from our main character is when his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) is dumped on his door step by his ex wife. Although the moments they share together are sweet and endearing, particularly in a scene where Jonny is watching his daughter ice skating through with his eyes filled with affection - ice skating is an activity Cleo plainly is really good at and highly enjoys doing. Ultimately I find the inclusion of the daughter rather strange, this is a guy who spends his time randomly sleeping with women, drinking profusely and gambling, yet the sudden emergence of his daughter has little effect on his destructive lifestyle. While on the daughters part even when she joined at the breakfast table by her father's most recent female conquest, Cleo doesn't even seem to mind that this woman out of nowhere has barged in and disrupted the little cocoon she has with her father.

However what I do applaud, in a sea of impossibly fast actions scenes that rip past your eyes in seconds found in so many American films nowadays; I enjoyed Sofia use of long takes that focus on the in between, non sensationalised moments in life. In particular a scene in which Jonny has to wait as the prosthetic glue on his face has dried, even when all the make men has gone out of lunch. At first I felt it was on screen for beat too long, but then I realized in was a rather poignant way of showing the not so glamorous and often tedious side of acting – getting special effects make up put on. It's not all red carpets, adoring fans and fat pay cheques you know!

I understand that the theme is showing the numbing effect of fame, that can leave you as an empty vessel just going with the motions, but it is the fact that nothing really is resolved in Somewhere or evoked with any real meaning and with the fact the main character never physically experiences implication on his life based on his actions, instead just takes everything in his stride with cool nonchalance. This leaves the film reminiscent of an empty shell being dragged in the wind, with no real direction or meaning to its existence. "Somewhere," won the Golden Lion at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, all I can say, I never knew that a national Italian pastime was watching paint dry.