It’s a bit of a double-whammy for any John Malkovich fans out there: Not one, but two snippets of news for y’all, and they’re both comic book related. The first comes, naturally enough, from Italian sports show Quelli Che il Calcio, which recently featured Malkovich as a guest.

Last week we expressed our cautious trepidation about the new A-Team film starring – amongst others – Liam Neeson as Hannibal and District 9‘s Sharlto Copley as “Howlin’ Mad” Murdoch.

Development of an Arrested Development movie is no longer… arrested! Michael Cera – presumably bored and/or racked with shame from appearing in several cackhanded comedies over the last year – has revealed to stateside magazine US Weekly that he’s been on board to appear in the planned movie.

This year’s Bafta longlist has been announced, with Brit flicks An Education and Moon proving to be strong contenders. An Education is up for best film along with a bevy of acting nominations, including Carey Mulligan for Best Actress.

The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s thrilling and hard-hitting war drama, is a master class in sustained tension as a three-strong bomb disposal squad attached to the US Army risks life and severed limb to defuse roadside IEDs. Starring Ralph Fiennes and Anthony Mackie, it’s one of the sharpest and most intelligent films concerning the War in Iraq, but it’s in no way easy viewing.

It’s not good news for fans of the webhead. After rumblings around the net seemed to suggest that trouble was brewing for the fourth instalment of the ever-popular Spider-Man franchise, it’s now been revelead that the whole project is in danger of collapsing totally and – perhaps – irrevocably.

2009 certainly brought us a few cinematic corkers, from sci-fi epic Avatar to comic-book crunching goodness from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Watchmen. But it wasn’t all wham, bam and explosions – will 2010 be a year of smarter movies? Judging this list… maybe.

The fourth in the increasingly desperate-sounding Final Destination series sees another premonition-prone twentysomething (Bobby Campo) foreseeing the death of himself and a few of his similarly hot-to-trot mates. This time, the trouble starts at a race car track, with Campo’s Nick persuading his sceptical chums to exit just before a multi-car pile up blitzes the just-vacated seats.

Produced by Sir Peter Jackson of Mordor and directed by talented newcomer Neill Blomkamp, District 9 is a smart, slick sci-fi thriller that tries to hit all the buttons and almost – almost – succeeds. The film concerns the attempts of corrupt corporation MNU’s attempts to evict the stranded aliens – derogatively referred to as “prawns” – from a slum in the centre of town to a concentration camp far away from the dismissive human populace.

Directed by conceptual artist Sam Taylor-Wood, whose previous interest in celebrity included a video portrait of David Beckham sleeping, Nowhere Boy is a biopic of John Lennon’s early life. Focusing on his pre-Beatles stardom, the film charts the complex relationship between the legendary man himself (played by Aaron Johnson), his staid and respectable Aunt Mimi (Kristen Scott-Thomas) and his free-spirited mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff).