Charlie Wilson's War
Every now and then, a film comes along that has Oscar written all over it. If you were to look at CVs of those involved in Charlie Wilson's War, you'd know that putting money on this little outfit to pick up a slew of golden men in a couple of months' time is likely to be one of the safest bets you've ever made.
Top of the bill, as the titular Charlie Wilson, is none other than Tom Hanks - the Academy's favourite star for well over a decade now, with two Oscars and another three nominations under his belt.
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Veteran director Sidney Lumet, best known for the Al Pacino-starring 1970s classics Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, has had a rather hit-and-miss time of it in his six decades-long career. Starting out at the dawn of the television era, he made his impressive feature film directorial debut - gaining himself the first of five Oscar nominations in the process - in 1957's superb courtroom drama 12 Angry Men, before going on to helm the varied but much-loved likes of Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), Fail-Safe (1964), Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Network (1976). Then he fell into a bit of a rut in the 1980s and 90s.
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
A sequel to a dire action/horror movie - especially one based on a computer game - is normally cause to flee for the hills. Ever since the Bob Hoskins-starring Super Mario Brothers nearly killed the careers of all involved way back in 1993, computer game movies have had a truly abysmal history.
Remember the Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Street Fighter? The tedious attempt to do justice to the classic game Doom?
No Country For Old Men
Everyone loves the Coen Brothers, surely? Over the last two decades, the oddball pair have produced some of the weirdest and most wonderful movies ever to have come out of America - quirky yet accessible, and always with a streak of deliciously black humour running throughout.
The Coens have given us that modern icon, Jeff Bridges' White Russian-supping bowling layabout The Dude in their biggest hit, The Big Lebowski.
In the Valley of Elah
Films about the psychological aftermath of war have a long and generally speaking highly distinguished history. Yet, when the war in Vietnam - similarly unpopular to those in Iraq and Afghanistan - was still raging, Hollywood seemed to have cold feet about tackling the actual blood and guts of the conflict. Apocalypse Now has gone beyond mere classic status to become a defining movie in the history of cinema, but it was also the first film to go into production about the Vietnam War itself. Yet, it was only released in 1979; four years after the war had ignominiously come to an end.
Sweeney Todd
Love him for his quirky visual style or hate him for his apparently deliberate appeal to that subsection of the teenage market that dresses in black all the time, mostly while writing dire poetry about death and unrequited love, Tim Burton is undoubtedly one of the more interesting and individual of mainstream Hollywood directors. Somehow always able to create films that look like no others - even with his occasional misses, like the ill-judged "reimagining" of Planet of the Apes - Burton's movies have a style all their own, and that should always be cause for celebration.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
1997's Elizabeth, dealing with the early years of Queen Elizabeth I and her difficult passage to the throne, was a glorious example of the most lavish kind of period drama. Plush sets, a big-name cast, incredible costumes, and a central performance from a then-nearly unknown Cate Blanchett, who was robbed of an Oscar - Best Actress that year instead went to Gwyneth Paltrow for her turn in the so-so Elizabethan romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love, prompting a memorable bout of acceptance speech hysterics.
Lions for Lambs
Say what you like about Tom Cruise, he certainly knows how to pick his films. He may well have had a falling out with Paramount after his bizarre, Scientology and love-inspired behaviour in the run-up to his wedding last year, but love him or loathe him he's one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood - and you don't get to that level of fame by appearing in bad films. Unless, of course, they're bad films that are likely to make a huge amount of money - like Days of Thunder, Legend or the last couple of Mission: Impossible movies.
Beowulf
In the wake of the massive success of The Lord of the Rings, little wonder that Hollywood's been scrabbling around for other fantasy epics to bring to the big screen, now that the technology is finally good enough to create the kind of strange creatures with which such legendary settings abound. 2005's adaptation of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - and its forthcoming sequel Prince Caspian - was an obvious choice, so similar are the two books, thanks to their authors' friendship.
American Gangster
OK, so the last team-up between director Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, last year's film adaptation of A Year in Provence that was A Good Year, may have been critically panned and largely ignored by cinemagoers.
Yes, Scott's outing before that, 2005's historical epic Kingdom of Heaven, was likewise slated and shunned. And yes, his film before that, the Nic Cage-starring Matchstick Men, made little real impact.
Sleuth
What is it with doing remakes of classic Michael Caine films? Haven't they learned by now? We've had the glossy but utterly facile Jude Law-starring remake of Alfie, which singularly managed to remove any of the easy cool and charm from that wonderfully misogynistic character, and ripped out the deep sense of melancholy at the heart of the original film in the process. We've had the truly abysmal, almost sacrilegious remake of the glorious Get Carter, with Sylvester Stallone making Caine's cold-heartedly distraught mob killer on a revenge trip into an overweight and pathetically mumbling joke.
The Darjeeling Limited
The fifth film by oddball director Wes Anderson - he of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic fame - was always going to be much anticipated.
Anderson's films have a wonderful tendency to be both decidedly quirky and gloriously affecting comic character studies quite unlike anything being churned out by anyone else in the Hollywood mainstream.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
One of the most anticipated films of the autumn, The Assassination of Jesse James has nonetheless been a long time in coming - nearly as long as its title, in fact.
Originally set for a 2006 release, with filming completed more than two years ago, despite rave reviews from test screenings for the central performances of Brad Pitt (as James) and Ben's little brother Casey Affleck (as Ford), the fact that the film is a Western seems to have given the studio a number of concerns.
Fred Claus
One of the major benefits of the spread of the internet and the boom in movie piracy has been that the big American studios have finally begun to release their films world-wide at approximately the same time. Whereas in the bad old days us poor consumers from the UK market would end up getting Christmas movies in February or March, the studios following their old pattern of staggering European releases until a good three months after the American box office had had its fill, or even have to wait until the following Christmas, those nasty pirates have forced the studios' hands.
The Kingdom
Thanks to the generally pro-Britain approach of the United States in the early years of the Second World War, Hollywood began producing movies about the war long before America even entered the conflict - all staunchly pro-Allies.
It wasn't until the mid 1960s that any Second World War films began to emerge that were even vaguely critical of any Allied soldiers, or that dared to suggest that, well, maybe it wasn't quite as simple as "all Germans and Japanese are evil" as the movies seemed to make out.
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