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.

Hold on to your ten-gallon hats and strap on your spurs (actually don’t, some things really are best left to the privacy of your own home), because Paramount’s planning to revamp the western genre in a big way.

“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.

It’s a dream so crazy that even the infamous Man of La Mancha would be impressed. Cinema’s favourite dreamer Terry Gilliam is forging ahead with his abandoned project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which was abandoned in 2000 after a series of truly unfortunate events.

As our economy spirals into the abyss of recession with no hope of returning to good health any time soon, everyone is cutting their budget.It’s the perfect time for Hollywood directors to start economising too. Not on film quality, but on choice of protagonists. Where they can’t afford the original A-lister, there’s a number of cheaper alternatives for them to choose from.

Terry Gilliam’s nonsensical fantasy is a stunning sight to behold, but the spectre of Heath Ledger’s death during filming, and his below-par performance, is a hard thing to escape.

All it took was one weedy little wizard-nerd to make children’s book adaptations the new Hollywood holy grail. Suddenly, studios are scrambling over each other in their quest to create the coolest, most visually stunning, and (most importantly) highest-grossing new book-turned-film. But is this new trend really making kids the kings of the big screen? Or is it just creating a bunch of overly-thought-out tat that’s too advanced for kids, too weird for adults?

Iggy Pop. You may know him as the lead singer of The Stooges, David Bowies’s Berlin boy, or the rather frightening topless puppet from the swiftcover car insurance adverts. What a life he’s had! Which makes it all the more of a shame that he has now pulled the plug on a film biopic. Why, Iggy, why?

There are rumors floating around that the sexiest pirate on earth Jack Sparrow, will be making a return to our screens in a fourth instalment of Pirates of the Caribbean…