By Jason Adams, MyNewPlaidPants

Edgar Allen Poe was a sickly alcoholic who died at the age of 40, so naturally he’s been turned into a mystery-solving action hero played by the 46 year old John Cusack in the new movie The Raven. Naturally. This is what the Sherlock Holmes movies hath wrought. It’s all Robert Downey Jr.’s fault. (I’ll take any opportunity to say that.) The premise here goes that a killer’s using Poe’s stories – Buried alive! Bladed pendulums! - in a sadistic Jigsaw sort of way, and a detective, played by the totally heterosexual Luke Evans, needs Poe’s help to suss out the murderer and save the day. There will be a lot of running around on cobblestones in slow-motion with dramatically flaring-out coattails, no doubt. Plus tuberculosis. Lots and lots of tuberculosis.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Salmon Fishing in the Yemen came out and I said something along the lines of, “Emily Blunt is a charm machine!” and here we are with her pouring on the charm offensive again, this time opposite Jason Segel, in The Five Year Engagement. They play a couple of lovely folks, as they’re wont to do, who can’t seem to make it to the altar because of piling-up circumstances. The film’s from the director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I really liked, and apparently Jason Segel gets naked again, so one surmises this director really likes Segel’s penis. The supporting cast is stuffed with comic wonders – Chris Parnell, Chris Pratt, David Paymer, Mindy Kaling, Molly Shannon, and Community’s Alison Brie who according to certain folks steals the whole movie.

It seems to me at this point that they shouldn’t even bothering giving the new Jason Statham movies a name. They should just call them The New Jason Statham Movie, and everybody would know what they were getting, and everybody would be fine with that. Anyway they’re still bothering to name them at this point, and The New Jason Statham Movie out today is called Safe (because apparently they want us to think The New Jason Statham Movie will have him hiding in a polymer igloo from poisonous chemical fumes. - fifty points to those of you who get the Todd Haynes reference) and is about a little girl with a knack for numbers (and yes she is played by an Asian actress, why do you ask?) that Statham’s got to protect from Bad Guys while wearing A Nice Suit in an Anonymous Cityscape.

From the good folks at Aardman Animations, who’ve given the world the hilarious wonder of Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run, comes The Pirates! Band of Misfits, their take on ye olde swashbuckling tale. Aardman can do no wrong if you ask me – I even love Flushed Away, although I can understand how all that “rats running around inside a sewer” thing turned people off.

In limited release there’s the wonderful Norwegian thriller Headhunters, which is full of twisty violent turns and too-close-for-comfort escapes for its put-upon hero, and co-stars A Game of Thrones incest-prince Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as a very scary, very attractive chap. Also in limited there’s Bernie, with the first stop of Matthew McConaughey’s road-to-redeption tour – it reteams him with his Dazed and Confused director Richard Linklater, and co-stars Jack Black and Shirley Maclaine in a black comedy about old lady murder. And everybody loves old lady murder!

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