There’s an age old maxim that goes a little something like this: “you can pick your friends…you can’t pick your family” - and while that sentiment is indeed accurate, it’s still a bit specious. As a matter of fact, you can make a conscious decision to leave your legally linked biological others, and the only repercussion may be an innate sense of sadness (unless you really, really hate them) and the occasional odd look from those who don’t understand such distance. There’s also the instance where you “run out for cigarettes” and recreate a new communal brood out of the remnants of such an unexpected “break-up.” We ‘step’ through life like this all the time. So, in truth, you can pick your family—not in the literal sense (unless you have some sort of cosmic control on procreation)—but in the more flawed, figurative sense.

At first, it seemed like a fluke. No actor from “overseas” was going to displace the American thesp as the leading cinematic staple in films. After all, we had Bogart and Cagney, Nicholson and Newman. But slowly, over time, the English have retaken their colonial territory, if only in the Cineplex sense. It began back when a certain Sir Lawrence introduced the Bard and his bad boy, Hamlet, to unsuspecting ‘40s audiences. Throughout the rest of the century, the UK produced one amazing male actor after another (though the ladies found their fortunes earlier—more on that next time). By the time the ‘80s rolled around, there was even a bit of a backlash among American performers, arguing that, every year it seemed, another English newcomer was walking away with the praise (and prizes).

In some ways, the studio’s position is understandable. When you have a huge tentpole title like Star Trek, and you’re trying to generate the kind of commercial buzz that will guarantee a Summer 2013 windfall, you’ll do anything, within reason, to protect that. To this end, Paramount has decided on a tactic that has many film critics around the United States fuming. After offering pre-release PR stunts like red carpet celebrations and exclusive phoner Q&As to a select few in the industry, the company has completed its Into Darkness schedule by setting up its only press screenings… the day of opening… hours after the film will be available in the IMAX format for any paying customer to see.

The son following in the famous father’s footsteps. The woman that comes between them. A rivalry played out among the sun-dappled seashores of the South of France. The end of one startling career and the burgeoning promise of another. These are the elements that make up the nobly intended biopic Renoir. Helmed with a kind of holy reverence that borders on the inert, Gilles Bourdos look at the last few months in the life of painter Pierre-Auguste and the inspiration for son Jean’s desire to enter filmmaking feels like a glacier glanced through a prism of practical hero worship. There is nothing wrong with the narrative or actors, overall, but the film as a whole fails to engage us since the catalyst for our caring - the arrival of a bohemian actress/model redhead named Andrée Heuschling - is, in truth, a psychological cipher.

When did horror fans become so persnickety? When did they determine that only a certain type of scary movie, made within a specific set of dread central parameters, was worthy of paying their neo-nerd attention to? This seems to happen a lot recently. A deliberate and effective work like the Evil Dead remake is dismissed because it’s not “funny enough” while outings such as Kiss of the Damned are condemned for being too respectful of the Hammer Horror past. Now comes No One Lives, a weird WWE-produced byproduct of the wrestling giant’s desire to broaden their media meaning and there are genre-specific websites crowing about how it’s unbelievable, brazen and too bloody. Right, like celebrated classics like John Carpenter’s The Thing should be dismissed to a similar set of standards. You’d think something this gory would get a bit more modern macabre respect.