Enter the next generation of comic-book movies. Kick-Ass is truly a brilliant and original take on a sorely overdone franchise, but if you’re looking for a laugh-a-minute flick you’ve come to the wrong place. Kick-Ass is not for the faint of heart, with humour as black as coal and violence to rival the goriest of horrors. However, it could be that it’s all the better for its darkness. Though its pretty impossible to avoid the hundreds of stars thrown in Kick-Ass’s direction, we tried our very hardest to come to it with an open mind. And we’re glad we did.

So we’re off to watch Kick Ass on Monday, and we reckon it’s only fair that we give you the low-down on what the critics are saying about it so far, before we give our own (infinitely superior) opinion.

You know what we enjoy doing? Going to the future. We also enjoy going back to the future, but we gotten into copyright problems with that before. The point is, we’ve risked life and limb to discover what films are hitting our screens in upcoming weeks. Don’t ask us how we’ve done it. All we’ll say is that the Wikipedia Towers of the future are a terrifying and overly bear-guarded place. So, should you save our pennies for an upcoming epic, or splurge like there’s no tomorrow on the flicks out now? We’ve got the answers right here.

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.

Matthew Vaughn’s upcoming adaptation of the Mark Millar comic Kick-Ass has been picked up for UK distribution by Universal – which is damn good news as far as we’re cocerned. Vaughn, who previously produced Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, and directed 2004’s well-received Layer Cake, has been plagued with difficulties in finding a UK distributor for the film.