First Jews, then outlaws, now Muppets. Christoph Waltz really likes to hunt things.

It looks like John Carter is going to fall fast and land hard at the box office. Costing a cool $250 mill’ to make, based on a cherised collection of sci-fi novels, featuring the most sophisticated CGI Disney could afford and being the live action debut of director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E plus writing credits on the Toy Story trilogy), John Carter looked like a shoe-in to be one of the year’s toppermost earners. Right now it looks like breaking even worldwide would be a hopeful return. Which got us thinking….

This week saw the first teaser trailer for the last instalment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, and we here at Best For Film were…well, there was a feeling that we’d seen it all before. The gloomy Gotham-scape, mumbled dialogue, lots of shadows and buildings and shiny digital compositions. It’s slick, and it’ll probably turn out to be a good end to a so-far great trilogy, but a tiny part of us was thinking: “It’s not as good as Memento, is it?”. Still, Nolan isn’t the first indie director to be lured in by the lights and financial muscle of Hollywood, as this handy list will attest to.

Since the dawn of cinema, it has become the standard for any successful novel to make the transition from text to film. This is something that many purists distain saying that it taints the original and eventually make it obsolete (despite the fact that a successful movie will, in almost all cases, raise sales on the original novel). Literary critique aside it has to be said that some of the best movies ever made are adaptations of novels, and as such we have compiled a top ten list of the best adaptations from Sci-Fi/ Fantasy literature to film.

This week’s cheat sheet takes the imposing form of cinematic iconoclast and sometime magician Orson Welles. Where do you start with a man famous for doing just about everything? Well, let us show you…

Citizen Kane: It continually tops the “Best Film Ever” polls and is a byword for cinematic greatness. But are the plaudits exaggerated, and is there anything there for the modern moviegoer? Jon Cooper explains why for once, the hype might be justified…