The King’s Speech, the George VI biopic starring Colin Firth, has picked up a healthy 8 nominations for this year’s British Independent Film Awards.

Being wealthy and famous, living life to the full, having lots of sex, going to the doctors and discovering you have a malignant tumour on your breast. It happens. Love Life is an award-winning Dutch movie about an adventurous couple that decide who the hell they are when cancer enters their lives.

In the run up to what would have been Princess Diana’s 50th birthday, not one, but two films are set to be released with Keira Knightley and Charlize Theron both cast as the lady who captured the nation’s hearts.

At one point, drug smuggler Howard Marks was believed to control ten percent of the world trade in hashish. Following a long spell in jail, he wrote a best-selling memoir of his experiences as a twentieth-century pirate – and as if he needed to seem more devil-may-care and elegantly weathered, he’s now being played by legendary waster Rhys Ifans. Mr Nice is enormous fun that you don’t even need to be stoned to enjoy.

Confucius is a grand, sweeping epic about China’s most famous philosopher – played by the legendary Chow Yun Fat. If lush cinematography and breathtaking spectacle are your thing, we have 3 Confucius DVDs to give away! Competition ends 8 November 2010.

The Runaways were the goddesses of the Riot Grrrl movement, and charting their extraordinary journey from suburban insignificance to global stardom was always going to be a challenge. Happily, this sensitively crafted and superbly cast film more than does justice to their extraordinary legacy.

If you thrilled to the charming bumblings of M Hulot and gazed spellbound at the visual feast of Belleville Rendez-vous, then brace yourself. Based on a Jacques Tati script adapted by director Sylvain Chomet, The Illusionist has the best of both directors’ vision.

No more travesties like Alice in Wonderland 3D! Tim Burton is set to produce Big Eyes and direct The Addams Family. Both films will be lovingly scripted by the writers of Ed Wood…

As a biopic, Gainsbourg utterly fails to deliver. Fortunately, a biopic is exactly what it isn’t. Offering a stylised and stylish insight into one of France’s great cultural icons, this film is unmissable.

Because apparently the Spitting Image biopics weren’t quite enough… Meryl Street, first lady of Hollywood, is currently in talks to take on the Iron Lady herself – Margaret Thatcher. A new film is being planned centering around our first and only female Prime Minister and the trials and tribulations she faced in the lead up to the Falklands War.