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"Sucker Punch," the latest barrage on the senses from writer-director Zack Snyder ("300", "Watchmen") is his first film that's based on his own source material. And it proves to be quite stunning definition of pop filmmaking. In a triumphant marriage of style and tone, Snyder has created his own "Kill Bill" by going deep down into the rabbit hole. A glorious pastiche of colour, CGI and kinesis, "Sucker Punch" even through its obvious flaws, has set a new bar for graphic storytelling that attempts to transplant the purity of imagination onto the cinema screen.

Essentially cohering around a simple premise -- hot chicks kicking ass and taking names, the film's bravura opening charts Baby Doll's (Emily Browning) institutionalisation by a wicked stepfather after her mother's death and her introduction to the asylum where damaged young women are sent to be kept away from society. She meets the people-in-charge, Blue (Oscar Isaac) and Dr. Gorski (Carla Gugino) as well as the other girls in the institute: Rocket (Jena Malone) and her sister Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Amber (Jamie Chung) and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens).

The story that follows Baby Doll reveals a larger canvas of a clever narrative conceit that coincides three realities together ("Inception" comparisons, tread lightly); the first being the asylum, the second is a burlesque brothel run by Blue and trained by Gorski and the final and most resplendent one is Baby Doll's hyper reverie focused on destroying the forces of evil -- be it shogun titans, zombie Nazis or killer androids. The darker the reality preceding it, the deeper and more risky the wormhole of fantasies go. There is a real sense, despite its tremendous parade of visual set-pieces that Snyder wanted a narrative strong enough to endure the weight of spectacle, and in many respects he has. He uses the age-old device of character quests to propel the plot, peppering it with familiar consequences until he doesn't. The flow culminates in an intriguing final act that sets it a mark higher than anyone would have expected, or even needed from a film that already proudly wears its stripes as pure escapist entertainment.

Snyder goes the way of Tarantino in appropriating and amalgamating artistic and stylistic influences from the most conspicuous of genres and mediums. Within the real world or whatever the relative equivalent of what exists in this film's dark and twisty tone, the film uses templates in the vein of sexploitation female prison grind-house features from the 60s and 70s like "Love Camp 7", "99 Women", "Caged Heat" and the grandmother of them all, 1950's "Caged". As the film progresses into its action-oriented enterprises, it quickly recalls the dizzying array of cut-scenes from video-games and punk anime-style design in how it encompasses the digital environment. Snyder's thematic goal is to situate the idea of imagination as a coping mechanism for terror, a concept seen recently in "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Tideland". The landscape of the mind is uniquely realised here by Snyder, who etches a remarkable amount of detail into each CGI frame, an hyperbolised celebration of artifice and invention that is at once magnificent and exhilarating as it is compelling and spellbinding.

Werner Herzog once posited that the dearth of new and unique imagery that do not reflect the times we live in will be the death of civilisation. If anything, "Sucker Punch" truly defines the generation of filmmaking we exist in -- a sophisticated and passionate emblem that delivers an overload of sugar high through the ideals of creating and maintaining a creative medley of pop-culture influences, bridged together with keen commercial sensibilities. Suddenly, Snyder holding on to the helms of the next Superman film makes more sense than it ever did.

In the 2010 Palme d'Or winning "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives", Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has elevated himself into a true visionary of the medium. His oeuvre culminating here in what must be called his magnum opus. Twining politics and intellectualism together by holding his native land close to his heart, he explores history, memories and cinema itself.

Weerasethakul's follow-up to 2006's "Syndromes and a Century" follows the final days of Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), an ailing old bee farmer, who returns to his countryside abode in the north-eastern jungles with his sister-in-law, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) and a male caretaker, Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee). Weerasethakul attributes Boonmee's ailment -- kidney failure -- with an autobiographical nod to details of his father's own passing. The narrative structure stands at its most absurd but also at its sturdiest when Boonmee's state of mind and body brings forth the ghosts of his demised family members: his lost son Boonsong, who is now part of the monkey spirits residing in the jungle and has transformed into a striking hirsute crimson-eyed ape-man; and his dead wife Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk), who appears at the dinner table in a remarkable scene where the veil between the living and the dead come down in the gentlest way possible.

The main scope is limited to these characters, as we observe them in moments of gilded reticence as they navigate through this time of great personal revolutions, food and final thoughts are divulged, until the deep wisdom of the film and filmmaker bubbles up to the fore. Deeply meditative and gentle, it brings us on a journey without tugging us along to show us one point after another; its mien remains as organic and serene to the nature of the filmmaker and its characters' own journey.

Ostensibly a film about transition, transmigration and the ontology of our evolution -- who we once were, who we are now and who or what we will become -- Weerasethakul pulls together ancient mysticism and visual cues to form an amorphous narrative that speaks about existence of the living earth and its relationship within and of itself; and how environments shape its denizens as individuals. The film contemplates our cosmic existence and attempts as serenely as possible to reassure us that everything is in order, that it all makes sense and that we are where we were meant to be. Reconciling his belief in the spirituality infused into nature and its relationship with the human experience, his belief in the idea of animism captivates Weerasethakul who regards the reincarnation of the soul and spirit into different forms; life never ends and death feeds into the next plane -- the renascence of energy and spirit and a transcendence beyond an established, ephemeral identity.

The song ends but the melody continues to linger -- the easy friction between the film's human and spiritual realms, proffered by the use of magic-realism, is at once supremely stirring as it is assuredly calming. In an excursion by Boonmee into one of his past lives, a particularly resplendent vignette of an aging princess yearning to be young once again who offers up her physical self to a talking catfish who promises her the beauty she once possessed. Entrenched with the otherworldliness of a ghostly folk tale from Weerasethakul's own youth and fanciful and erotically charged as Weerasethakul's own recent films, it points towards the filmmaker's syncretism of his own fractures memories and refined aesthetics.

There is a sense that Weerasethakul set out to make a film about his home and the vanishing spaces that his mind once occupied but along the way, stumbled upon the synthetic truth of cinema -- the film transforming into an earnest ode to the forgotten national cinema of his youth. He has described it as a way of preserving the memory -- the fabric of that point in the nation's cultural landscape -- through a hazy melange of related myths, idealised imagery and the shared experiences. He uses traditional techniques to create something new and revolutionary, eliciting a wonderful sense of exploring and pushing the boundaries of the medium by exploring the metaphysical through cinema and artistic fervour. By invoking the power of the screen and its abilities to meld its spatial and temporal realities with our reality beyond the projection, Weerasethakul observes the medium's propensity to not just reflect but alter history and the revision of certain truths.

Photographs play a large part of Weerasethakul's ode to permanence and the sense of past lives lived but never forgotten. Time is evoked as a Moebius strip where the past, present and future are in concurrent unity when members of his lost family turn up to relive the past or when Boonmee comments on the state of how things were before describing a future existence that begins to look remarkably like a present-day portrait of oppression in the volatile political maladies plaguing Thailand. Weerasethakul slyly alludes to political components inherent in his work -- a monk who finds ataraxic comfort in modernity rather than in the austerity of his robes or monkey spirits being led to torture by armed soldiers.

Touching on the dark history of the Nabua region it is set in and Boonmee recollecting his own role in the mutual slaughter of the Communists to Jen by invoking karma in considering his current illness, that he somehow deserves his fate. Jen responds that she was proud for having her father for serving the nation, yet resisted the violence by going into the jungle and hunting animals as well as communicating with them. This symbiosis of regret and avoidance signifying the suppression of violence as a natural impulse of humanity serves great purpose in looking through Weerasethakul's perspective of our natural internal states.

It is important to note that despite it's perspicuous title, Nimrod Antal's "Predators" is no reboot of its establishing material. It's a honest-to-goodness sequel to the first two Predators films; a long awaited one at that after a couple of detours into the realm of crossovers into the "Alien" universe. It does however represent a stylistic update and intriguing expansion of the franchise's filmic mythology that also spans Dark Horse Comics' graphic novels and its video games.

However, if there ever were to be a more convincing statement of intent in relaunching this franchise, it would have been putting its marquee producer Robert Rodriguez to work in a film so suited to his aesthetics and stylistic idiosyncrasies. But Rodriquez's pick to helm this film almost proves to be reason enough to watch this given that Nimrod Antal is one of the most exciting directors around these days. Antal's direction has always coincided with his a strong sense of atmosphere and character development. With his fascinating debut, "Kontroll" and his cleverly constructed meta-slasher, "Vacancy" as well as with last year's taut action spectacle "Armored", Antal has shown himself to be an effective genre director in that he's both comfortable in affirming a particular genre as he is deconstructing it. And in "Predators", he infuses it with not just a showcase of tried and tested sci-fi ideals but also a discernible impression of a robust horror film.

Antal keeps things moving along at an exhilarating pace by introducing a rag-tag team of mercenaries and criminals getting air-dropped into a highly tropical and vegetative alien planet tailored by the ruthless and single-minded Predator race as a game reserve for the insufficiently armed humans and other prey. Its mise-en-scene immediately hearkens back to the jungle warfare of the first "Predator". As the movie gods demand, the herd gets thinned as the race of alien hunters reveal themselves to be superior in both their technology and understanding of game theory. Kept alive by de facto leader, the preternaturally perspicacious Royce (Adrien Brody), the band of humans begin to formulate their plan of survival against the truly fearsome Predators and their formidable weaponry.

Brody's presence seems almost folly at first – a gruff vocal inflection worthy of Christian Bale's in "The Dark Knight" underscores a predictably rote tough guy but to his credit, a good actor always manages to sell his act despite himself. Like his character, who sees no virtue in human connection but instead adopts a ranger-like approach to survival, Brody doesn't seem to create much chemistry with his cast mates in his relatively new role as action hero. The rest of its main supporting cast are split of into archetypes – Alice Braga is Isabelle, an Israeli soldier and its burgeoning conscience, Topher Grace plays Dr. Edwin, the geeky comic relief and notably, the talented Walter Goggins of TV's "The Shield" and "Justified" is the smarmy knife-wielding death-row convict, Stans. Also, rounding of the surviving humans is the reticent Yakuza gangster, Hanzo (Louis Ozawa Changchien) and the relatively noble Chechnyan soldier, Nikolai (Oleg Taktarov).

Antal manages this character list well enough. As the chase progresses, you get a distinct feel of each human before they start to fall victim to their raison d'être. Besides a late flurry of actual and conspicuous violence, "Predators" actually fares better in its early scenes where the humans explore their predicament and the film plays the suspense card remarkably well. There's an actual interest in finding out the psyches of these mysterious humans who are hunters and monsters on Earth but scurrying mice on the Predator's turf.

If anything else, the script provides little genuine surprises in it storytelling. Given its inherent similarities, the film bares a stunning amount of resemblance to last year's terrific "Pandorum" – where a space crew wakes up with no memory onboard a vessel designed as a Noah's Ark of sorts to vicious creatures hunting them. There's a scene with Laurence Fishburne as the planet's loony veteran survivor that cribs more than just mood but actual dialogue from the superior film.

"Predators" doesn't change the game too much but as far as delivering a solid and experience to its fanbase, it releases itself from the shackles of relying on crossovers and re-establishes the Predator as one of Hollywood's most fertile sources of sci-fi villains.