“It is better,” said the essayist and moralist Joseph Joubert, “to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.” In the spirit of such a great man that we just found out about on Wikipedia, we present you, gentle reader, with the first in what may well be a series of debates on the state of modern film.

After months of speculation, debate, rumours and one of the most aggressive cinematic marketing pushes of recent memory, Avatar received its premiere last night in London. Despite a flurry of non-disclosure agreements being signed left, right and centre the press just couldn’t wait.

You may well find yourself groaning numerous times as you read through this no-news, as there’s absolutely nothing enticing, exciting, or even mildly amusing about any aspect of it. It’s just one of those things that’ll make you lose faith in humanity that teensy little bit more. Who says you get nothing for free online?

Looks like the villains for the hotly anticipated Spider-Man 4 have managed to leak online. Movieline has reported that we’re to be treated to a feathered duo knocking heads with the webslinger sometime in 2011. Since the end of the disappointingly messy Spider-Man 3, rumours have been flying about concerning which of his menagerie of villains would be popping up next.

On December 11th, The Lovely Bones gets a limited release Stateside, with the full shebang rolling out a whole month later on the 15th. Over in the land of Blightly, we’ll get our fill of Peter Jackson’s latest a full six weeks later on January 29th, pretty much last in the world release queue. Not that we should feel maligned – the release date has been endlessly shunted about (it was originally slated for March 2008), ostensibly to ensure The Lovely Bones a spot on the Oscars shortlist.

The gore-splattered sequel to 2005’s The Descent, which provided some genuine chills and the fuzzy feeling you get from a British film doing well, sadly isn’t quite up to the high standard set by the original.

There’s generally only one type of Christmas film, or at the very least, a very identifiable type of film that always seems to get a festive release, year after year…

Say what you like about the state of British film at the moment, there’s one thing that us plucky Brits do that makes the envy of the world, and that’s our TV comedy. From Monty Python to The Office, our self-deprecating humour has been shipped out, remade, lauded and appropriated everywhere from the Americas to the Antipodes. And one of the standout comedies of the last few years, courtesy of those marvellous chaps at E4, was Damon Beesley and Iain Morris’s sixth form anguish-a-thon The Inbetweeners.

The actor Richard Todd, best remembered for his role as Wing Commander Guy Gibson in the classic 1955 wartime drama The Dam Busters, had died peacefully at his Lincolnshire home.

It’s been left up to Disney to challenge our hackneyed beliefs by presenting us with a bunch of spies that take the form of… wait for it, you’ll love it… Guinea pigs! Yeah, those infanticidal, hooting, air-sniffing pigs. As spies. It’s a one-note joke that’s taken to the extreme – Pixar would’ve made an idea like that into a witty ten minute short. Here, it’s 90 minutes long, and generally one ninth as entertaining, too.