5. The Raid 2
When Gareth Evans' The Raid appeared in 2011, its effect felt like a solid punch between the eyes. With some lightning fast martial arts moves from Iko Uwais, a simple high-concept premise - about the storming of a drug lord's high-rise lair by a group of cops - and some incredibly intense, almost horror-like direction from Evans, The Raid was a truly thrilling action film.
The Raid 2 again stars Uwais - it's safe to say his former job in a call centre is now firmly behind him - who this time goes undercover in a Jakarta gang. Only time will tell whether Evans can create the same air of menacing intensity as the previous film, but with characters listed on IMDb with names like Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man, we can't wait to see how it all turns out.
4. BirdMan
Looking for an actor to play a one-time big screen superhero who's fallen out of the public eye? We're curious if Michael Keaton actually had to audition for Birdman, the new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, and we certainly wouldn't be surprised if he didn't.
Birdman, billed as a comedy, sees Keaton as Riggan Thomson, once the man who played Birdman, but now desperately trying to put on a Broadway play (in this instance, Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love). Barriers to him doing so? Ego, family, insecurity. On top of the usual stuff.
Emma Stone, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Zach Galafianakis, Naomi Watts and Amy Ryan co-star. But the wildcard here might be Iñárritu himself - it looks, on paper, like a change of tone from the man who brought us the amazing Amores Perros, and films such as 21 Grams and Babel.
If nothing else, the chance to see Keaton in a big, major lead role is comfortably enough to sell us a ticket. It's been too long...
3. Need For Speed
In most instances, movies based on videogames are shot, released and then despatched straight into the nearest cultural landfill site. But while Need For Speed is based on EA's long-running and ever-changing racing game franchise, it has a better pedigree than most. For one thing, it stars the great Aaron Paul as a street racer on a mission of vengeance across the highways of America, and he's backed up by a supporting cast which includes Dominic Cooper, Imogen Poots and Michael Keaton.
The script's by George Nolfi, who wrote Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve, and both wrote and directed The Adjustment Bureau. And while it's seldom a good idea to judge a movie by its trailer, the first promo for Need For Speed really does look exciting - and there's even a bit of drama and artistic lighting in evidence between all the requisite tyre squealings, crashes and bangs.
2. RoboCop
This much-publicised remake has plenty going against it, not least the weight of history: Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop is rightly regarded by many as being among the best films of the 1980s, with its heady cocktail of graphic violence, black comedy and corporate satire. Now, we certainly don't expect next year's Robo remake to better the original, but there's at least one reason to look forward to it with some sense of optimism: the track record of Brazilian director Jose Padilha.
If you haven't heard of him, Padhila began his career with the documentary Bus 174, which told the remarkable true story of a man who took a busload of passengers hostage and ended up in the middle of a media circus. His next two feature films, Elite Squad and its sequel The Enemy Within, mixed action and suspense with a thought-provoking account of life and death in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.
1.Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Marvel has two terrific looking films lined up for 2014, and if Captain America: The Winter Soldier picks up some of the themes we saw so well explored in the first movie, this could be a real highlight. Marvel's already been talking about the movie as a political thriller of sorts, a tease backed up by the casting of Robert Redford as the head honcho of S.H.I.E.L.D. And it's also revealed that this is the film that does a good deal of the bridging work between The Avengers and 2015's Avengers: Age Of Ultron.
We're promised a sizeable role for Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow here, and there's also room in the film for Hayley Atwell, Samuel L Jackson, Toby Jones and Cobie Smulders to make return appearances. Plus, Chris Evans in the title role of course. Meanwhile, Anthony Mackie is Sam Wilson (aka Falcon), and Frank Grillo, Emily VanCamp, Georges St-Pierre and Sebastian Stan are all onboard.
Directors Joe and Anthony Russo have the underwhelming movie Me, You And Dupree to their name, but more interestingly, a whole bunch of brilliant Community episodes. Marvel deserves credit once more for working hard to find interesting directors, and count us amongst the many excited to see what the Russos have come up with here.
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