The 1980s revival roles on, whether you want it to or not! And so here is the latest phase; a big screen adaptation of teamtime tv series.

The A Team is one of three heavyweight action team-ups to emerge this summer. The first saw Watchmen’s Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) team up with the Human Torch (Chris Evans) and Stringer Bell from HBO’s The Wire (Idris Elba) in The Losers. The third will see Sylvester Stallone call on every action star in existence to make The Expendables.

The A Team certainly had the biggest budget and did not lack of an engaging cast. Liam Neeson is rarely poor, while Bradley Cooper and Sharlto Copley both made their names in unexpected hits last summer, and seemed good fits for their respective roles as ‘the Faceman’ and ‘Howling Mad’ Murdock. The only question mark seemed to hang over Quintin ‘Rampage’ Jackson, a professional cage fighter, who stepped into Mr T’s big boots as B.A. Baracus.

Yet despite this, unless The Expendables is dreadful, The A Team looks set to lose this triple-threat fire-fight.

The cast all do reasonable jobs, but only Patrick Wilson’s sleazeball CIA bad guy really excels. The action is often indecipherable and smothered in obvious CGI. The plot makes a modicum of sense, but that really doesn’t make up for the fact that the film lacks the charm of the TV series. All that’s left is a sub-Michael Bay explosion-fest littered with blockbuster clichés.

It would be unfair to describe The A Team as bad; everything is executed with a certain efficiency, but the whole affair seemed very lacklustre, lacking in any real inspiration.

It’s also quite inconsistent. The original show was always a family show; a little cartoonish, but warm-hearted and fun. The film, at times, touches on this spirit, yet then drops it. It’s as though the filmmakers vacillated between keeping that light atmosphere and trying re-imagine the concept as a gritty, realistic affair.

Considering its underperformance at the US box office, it seems unlikely a new franchise has been born and, on this evidence, that’s probably not a bad thing.

It’s a little bit startling to realise that it’s been fifteen years since the release of the original Toy Story.

Now Pixar, the reigning and undisputed CG animation champions, have released the third in the series, and it feels like the toys have never been away.

Toy Story 2 gave us a brief glimpse of the toys life post-childhood and it didn’t take a genius to work out that would be explored more in this third, and most probably, final instalment.

A warning to any adult entering a screening of this film: You Will Cry!

The atmosphere is thick and melancholy from the word go, as we find Woody, Buzz and their few surviving friends shut away in a chest, about to make one last desperate play for their owner Andy’s attention. He’s soon away to college and their future is uncertain.

However, thankfully, the film is still jam-packed with adventure and avoids becoming a morose meditation on decay that might scar young tots as easily as entertaining them.

Finding themselves in a day-care centre, the film soon switches gears and picks up speed under the framework of a prison breakout. The inevitability of growing up forms a constant backdrop that gives the movie an undercurrent of last-chance desperation and this really comes through in a garbage-pile finale that resembles a vision of hell.

Yet, despite all this, there are laughs aplenty, thrills for the kids and rye jokes for the adults.

The visuals are as eye-catching as ever, enhanced very nicely in 3D, a format that has not yet won my heart; but just as in all Pixar films, that isn’t the point. The heart of these films is beautiful – what other studio would portray a damaged and understandably angry villain in a so-called kids’ film? Or create such a heartfelt rumination on mortality? And still make a rip-roaring spectacle to delight young and old? I can’t think of one.

If there is anything to complain about, it’s perhaps that we’ve seen this all before, but to be perfectly honest, Woody and co are still some of the most watchable characters around.

After stopping Arnold from getting to the chopper, they’ve had to put up with some fairly poor assignments – Battling Danny Glover and Gary Busey in Predator 2 was a significant step down and getting upstaged by Aliens wasn’t half as much fun as it should have been.

However, the luck of the Predator has changed.

Along has come Robert Rodriguez, and armed with a spec script written in 1994 he’s put the invisible big-game hunters firmly back in charge.

Predators very deliberately goes back to the basics of the 1987 original, dropping a group of heavily-armed hard nuts into the jungle and then picking them off one by one.

Lead by Adrien Brody’s gravely-voiced, wiry mercenary, a disparate group of scary people – and Topher Grace – are parachuted into the alien rainforest and then hunted for sport.

Entertainment is the number one priority here and in some respects the only thing that really sets this apart from Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is the superior talent both in front of and behind the camera.

The story is fairly standard, but good, even though nothing particularly revelatory happens. Yet it’s the action and suspense that really pulls this beast along and both are light years ahead of not only the AVP films, but also most of the pale pretenders to the sci-fi horror throne.

Rodriguez, who only writes and produces (Hungarian up-and-comer Nimród Antal calls the directorial shots), has said he wanted the sequel to do for the Predators, what Aliens did for the Alien franchise. Sadly this hasn’t quite happened; the natural escalation just isn’t there.

Neither has it really matched Predator. Brody is a good enough actor to convince as an extremely hard mercenary – he’s certainly put on the muscle – but he lacks Arnold’s charismatic screen presence and struggles to carry the film.

And while the mismatched killers are fun – especially Walton Goggins’s death-row con, armed only with a prison shank, and Louis Ozawa Changchien’s silent Yakuza enforcer – sadly no one really shines.

Still, it’s good to see the Predators back on top.

Nearly a decade ago Dreamworks made the first serious challenge to Pixar’s dominance of computer-generated animation.

Shrek challenged the established fairytale archetypes and then built on it with a sequel that delighted adult and child alike.

But with 2007′s bloated Shrek the Third, the series swapped charm for pointless celebrity guest voices and witless pop-culture references that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the risible Epic or Date Movie.

So it’s hardly surprising that Shrek Forever After should be greeted with a degree of trepidation.

Sadly it doesn’t quite manage to bottle the lightning of the hugely entertaining first and second outings – but thankfully it does represent a massive leap forward from 2007’s cinematic clunker.

The Dreamworks team seem very conscious of the drawbacks of the last instalment and have seemingly bent over backwards to take the film back to basics.

Aside from the central protagonists, the celebrity cameos are out – new villain Rumpelstiltskin is, rather brilliantly, voiced by storyboard artist Walt Dorhm.

And with its alternate universe setting, the main characters are taken back to their roots, while the plot itself is a relatively free-flowing and uncomplicated affair.

Effectively it puts Shrek back to the start of the first film. Tired of his new domestic existence, he makes an ill-advised deal with Rumpelstiltskin that wipes out his existence and makes Far, Far Away a very different place.

He has one day to win his life back, to gain the friendship of Donkey and a now very chunky Puss-in-Boots and, most importantly, woo Princess Fiona all over again.

This makes for a solid story overall and, while Donkey is effectively the same character he was in the original, there are nice alternate versions of Puss and Fiona to engage the interest-antennas.

But the problem is that that original spark has gone and ultimately leaves this film feeling like a low-key coda that merely sets out to bandage over the wound left by Shrek the Third. It’s definitely worth your 90mins, but it’s not the antidote to what’s so far been a pretty dire run of blockbusters.

In Get Him to the Greek, Russell Brand gets his first crack at a leading role in a Hollywood movie.

He plays Aldous Snow, a strutting, singing, drug-snorting personification of British rock-star clichés, who previously enjoyed a strut-on part in 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall. In many ways Snow is a thinly veiled version of Brand’s own persona, but the character really harks back to the British rock-gods of old.

Joining him is live-action Cartman, sorry Jonah Hill, playing Aaron Green, a young idealistic label lackey, who happens upon the idea of reviving Snow’s career, which has since faltered thanks to his ill-advised attempt at a worthy single, the cringe-bringing ‘African Child’.

The plot is simple enough. Green has seventy-two hours to get Snow from London to the Greek Theatre in LA. What follows is a drink and drug fuelled odyssey, which sees Green attempt to help Snow pick through the wreckage of his life and career.

Perhaps the laughs aren’t quite as thick-on-the-ground as they should be, but the film surely does have a heart and Brand really demonstrates that there is more to him than gimmickry, as he weaves a portrayal that is as charismatic in its excess as it is moving in its pathos.

Hill also does a good job, coming across as amiable and likeable, while serving as a solid straight-man to Brand.

Rose Byrne puts in a good turn playing Snow’s vapid ex-squeeze, Jackie Q, which is quite an atypical role for her. Colm Meaney is nicely slimy as Snow’s father, but stealing the most limelight is Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs as the head of the record company.

I find that Combs’s turn reminds me a little of Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder. It’s an unexpected cameo and should be the funniest role on screen. However, Combs, like Cruise, seems to really lack a sense of the comedic and instead plays the role with savage intensity. While amusing, the result often comes across more demented than funny.

Get Him to the Greek is good fun and well worth a watch, but can’t quite live up to rock-parody classics like Spinal Tap.