For a film regarded as "the decade's Spirited Away" by Empire Magazine, Your Name (or its native Japanese title - Kimi no Na Wa) has plenty to live up to in terms of caparables, but boy does it deserve that lofty accolade.

The film, from Makoto Shinkai, is a lot more than a teenage body-swapping film (Freaky Friday anyone?), with elements of sci-fi and romance masterfully braided together like our two cross country characters, Taki and Mitsuha, two high school students across Japan. As the two grapple with each other's life in the bustling city of Tokyo or the quaint lakeside, we get a beautiful glimpse of actual scene-chewing Japanese scenery and architecture, all rendered gorgeously in anime form.

After Captain America: Civil War got Marvel Studios' Phase 3 slate of franchise films off to a flyer, matters now turn to another one of Marvel's classic comic characters Stephen Strange, whose last real-life portrayal coming all the way back in a 1978 television film! Scott Derrickson, known for his work in the horror film circuit, with Sinister & Deliver Us from Evil under his resume, is tasked with introducing Doctor Strange, with his mystical powers into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and while last year's Ant-Man benefited from its Avengers connection, can Doctor Strange pull a rabbit out of the hat with a new horizon for the franchise into the realm of magic?

Right from the get-go, Doctor Strange treads very closely to the usual origin story beats, and more particularly in tandem with the original Iron Man way back in 2008, with the film beginning with your egotistical protagonist (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) whose accident puts him on a path to help others with the assistance of irregular abilities. Sounds like someone took the Iron Man script and labelled a sticky note saying "ADD MAGIC!" (no discredit to the writers here).

Suicide Squad, about a team of reluctant villains forced to band together to fight for the government, is not your standard superhero film. Initially passing off as a serious superhero film with an intensely gritty Comic Con trailer last year, its entire tone look a crazy 180 degree shift this year, with a more upbeat marketing campaign including a Bohemian Rhapsody-heavy trailer, along with more colourful yet expressive posters. The newer trailers were among my favourite teasers in recent memory, and expectations were at a fever pitch as the months rolled by to August, especially with the introduction of several of DC's rogue gallery, and a new incarnation of the Joker eight years after the late Heath Ledger's. So, after the tepid reception towards Batman v Superman, could David Ayer's Suicide Squad be the saving grace that finally gets the DC Film Universe up and roaring?

#OscarSoWhite! Scarlett Johanssen in Ghost in the Shell! Women in Ghostbusters! Hollywood can't seem to get a break when the race card rears its unpleasant head around here. Almost every time a controversy regarding casting of an ethnic character gets blown up on the Internet, we're treated to the same myriad of articles proclaiming that Hollywood isn't exactly a diversity-friendly haven for actors of ethnic minority, and for good reason. Other than the whitewashing of ethnic characters in many big budget films, the same minority groups have to endure the brunt of severe stereotyping on screen which can be traced back to the decades.

We get it, Hollywood is a convoluted system, and many decisions are rarely decided by single person. There's also the business element when creating films, where forecasted revenue are brought to the fore in favour of  pleasing the fickle minds of the audience. I certainly believe that while whitewashing is not the worst action condone on screen, the creative liberties taken with it mist be justified in a manner that persuades the audiences that the studios made the right call, and does not spark further outrage. 

In this piece, we're going to be looking at the for and against elements towards Hollywood whitewashing, focusing on the Asian American dilemmas this time around.

20 years is a long time for a sequel, especially one based on what is perhaps one of the more iconic films in the nineties. The 1996 film Independence Day (ID4) made us of its American holiday namesake, as well as an exploding White House in its marketing, to drive it to the top of the box office charts for the year with $817 million worldwide, while helping to solidify its lead actor, Will Smith, as a bona fide global movie star. The original 1996 film, now eyed as a classic in the sci-fi genre, spawned out plenty of imitators with common themes: to FUCK EARTH UP destroy Earth with whichever disaster special effects could muster up, or the less delicately named - 'disaster porn'. 

Armageddon, Deep Impact, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds followed suit, and even ID4 director Roland Emmerich could not resist returning to the genre with the crazy-looking The Day After Tomorrow and the now silly-looking 2012. The sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence is being released in a marketplace already saturated in terms of city-leveling exploitation, with no landmark safe from the clutches of the Hollywood blockbuster, meaning this new installment needed to bring something new to the table. Most of the casts are back from the original, sans Will Smith, but with Emmerich, pioneer of disaster flicks returning, is this another defining entry in the alien invasion catalogue?

Films based on video game sounds like a match made in heaven. Saying so, why have we yet to receive an adaptation that can be considered commercially yet critically successful, while being faithful to the source material that it is based on? Prime examples of video game film failures span as far as when video games were conceived perhaps, with the ill-fated Super Mario Bros. Movie, the embarrassing effects showcase that was Mortal Kombat Annihilation, the Angelina Jolie-led Tomb Raider franchise, and the surge of abominable Uwe Boll-directed adaptations in the noughties.

2016 looks to continue Hollywood's burgeoning effort in creating a successful recipe for video game films, with not one, but four films this year alone. You have probably seen three of those already, depending on whereabout in the world you live in, with Ratchet & Clank Movie, Angry Birds Movie and Warcraft all receiving less than stellar reviews (and Assassin's Creed on the way). On the contrary, it's the films that are inspired, instead of being outright based on the source materials, that have thrived with critics, with recent examples being Disney's Tron series as well as Wreck-It-Ralph. However, what if I told you the best video game film adaptation isn't derived from an existing game at all?

If you look back on the past decades of cinema, we get the same set of genre films every year. You have your small scale horror films, a mixed bag of comedies, the recent superhero uprising, at least one Adam Sandler excuse for a film, and lastly a romantic drama to boot. This month we have the latest in the long standing genre in Me Before You, directed by first time-director Thea Sharrock, who had mostly plied her trade in theater work, and starring two stars from two of the biggest franchises around.

Based on the novel (only knew so from the opening) by Jojo Moyes, who also wrote the screenplay for this, sets us up with Louisa Clark (Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones), a recently unemployed town girl who soon finds work as the caretaker to Will Taynor (Sam Claflin/Sugar Cubes guy from The Hunger Games), a member of the upper class who was wheelchair-bound after a tragic car accident. Initially cold and ignorant towards his new guardian, Clark's charm and exuberance soon wins Will and his heart over...... wait, this sounds exactly like the plot of the 2011 French film The Intouchables, starring François Cluzet & Omar Sy, or a romantic/fan-fiction version of it anyway. Charles Dance (also of GoT), Janet McTeer, Matthew Lewis (well if it isn't Neville Longbottom), Steve Peacocke and Jenna Coleman round out the supporting casts, but the highlights of Me Before You, and the reasons you may be weeping your eyes out, is definitely on Will's unfortunate daily struggles being confined to a wheelchair (though the ending has its share of controversy with the disabled community), and the eventual blossoming relationship between these two attractive stars.

"Everything they built will fall, and from the ashes of their world... we'll build a better one!" bellows Oscar Isaac's Apocalypse in pretty much all the trailers in X-Men: Apocalypse, the latest installment in the long-running X-Men franchise. That may be a reference, or indeed a pitch of sorts, when 20th Century Fox went about making X-Men: The Last Stand, the Brett Ratner-directed final film in the previous trilogy which tarnished all the goodwill created from Bryan Singer's first two mutant efforts.

With all those bridges burnt, the silver lining that came out of this was the birth of the prequel trilogy starting with Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class and followed by the critical darling of a sequel Days of Future Past (DOFP). The newer films worked as it centers on the main three trio of younger versions of Professor X (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence)... and Nicholas Hoult's Beast for that matter, as well as tying their stories by the decades with links to real world events. Having the old cast and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) returning in DOFP certainly gave the series a commercial boost it lacked from First Class, and here we are now with the latest world-ending installment. With the last two films being high watermark for this 16 year old franchise (along with a hysterical Deadpool film this year), can X-Men: Apocalypse continue the hot streak?

Comic book movies are a dime a dozen these days, with one released pretty much every season in a year. Back in the early days (till this year anyway), these films' premises were simple yet effective: it was always the case of good guys vs the bad guys. This doesn't seem to be the case anymore, with the desire for more convoluted plots and an array of characters, fueled by the success of 2012's The Avengers, has prompted film studios to craft up fresh takes on these fabled comic characters, often resorting to their long list of comic iterations for a hint of inspiration.

We've already seen the first of these, Warner Bros' Batman v Superman serving up an overstuffed and frankly depressing take on their planned DC Comics Universe, with that film also failing to consolidate itself in terms of box office receipts after a lofty opening. Thus, a month later on, we now have our second seismic Hollywood face-off of 2016, pitting the Captain of America against the Man of Iron in Captain America: Civil War.

Directed by Antony and Joe Russo, the 13th Marvel Cinematic Universe entry aims to follow up on the events of 2014's The Winter Soldier (which the Russos' also directed) as well as last summer's Avengers: Age of Ultron, and like Dawn of Justice, both films tackle the nature of a superhero's responsibilities on civilian casualties amidst their display of strength in saving the world, resulting in a  divide of super-heroic proportions. All of these, whilst introducing a third Spiderman in less than a decade, seems like an almighty feat indeed, but did the Russo Brothers' second Marvel feature do a better 'clash of the superheroes' depiction than Zack Synder's DC offering?