Season’s Greetings, dear readers! We hope you had a very merry Christmas and are looking forward to an excellent New Year.

Our pick for the holiday week is Margin Call. The thriller is set over 24 hours in an investment bank whose analysts have just figured out the investment bond market is about to crash. An A-list cast headed by Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons paint a convincing, dispassionate, and empathetic picture of the eve of the 2007 financial collapse and the bankers who were at the centre of it all.

Steven Spielberg delivers his most sentimental war movie yet with War Horse, a touching tale of a very young man, his pet horse, and the last hurrah of cavalry in World War I. The film melds both harrowing depictions of the war and its toll on both humans and animals, as well as an unabashed sentimentality that comes automatically with casting cute animals as main characters in films.

Tsui Hark continues his return to form in Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, a wuxia revenge film that reworks his favourite topic of court intrigues of the Ming Dynasty. It's also a refashioning of the King Hu classic Dragon Inn. Tsui Hark's first 3D film shows off the director's technical skills and solidifies his role as the George Lucas of the East.

James Lee may be better known as Malaysia's arthouse director but Petaling Street Warriors is his first commercial film. It's a rambunctious tribute to the Wong Jing school of filmmaking — a crass, politically incorrect, but ultimately funny period flick set in historic Kuala Lumpur.

Till next week,

Vernon Chan