Now that the Oscars are over and done with, it's high time we turned our attention to popcorn entertainment!

Our pick of the week is John Carter, an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's swashbuckling Barsoom series. The sci-fi adventure brings us back to the heady days when the frontiers of the universe had just been opened to humanity, where one could dream of a universe teeming with life right at our doorstep.

Arriving just after its Best Foreign Film win at the Oscars is Iranian film A Separation. The drama, ostensibly about a comfortably middle class couple and their various legal difficulties, is testament to the ingenuity of Iranian filmmaking and storytelling.

Dr Seuss seems to be a darling of Hollywood these days, being one of the most adapted children's writers of the past decade. The Lorax is the latest adaptation, bringing to life one of the good doctor's more iconic characters from one of his more message-heavy books.

There can be no better popcorn flick for military fans than Act of Valor, an action film that was written and produced with the help of the US Navy SEALS and starring quite a few of them. It's a standard special-ops-on-a-mission story but done right, with everything as realistic as possible so you can identify all the military hardware as well as the tactics employed.

If you need a scare in the cinema, you might want to consider The Devil Inside, where a young woman comes to terms with her demon-possessed mother by making a documentary film about her. The frights come from its demonic possession tale mixing with the Blair Witch-style found footage documentary approach.

Till next week,

Vernon Chan