Coming soon: 40 unmissable movies

As the ageless, charmless heroes of the ‘Twilight’ series slink back into the shadows, a gap has opened up in the good-looking romantic vampire market. But it’s something of a surprise that said vacuum should be filled by Jim Jarmusch, director of ‘Mystery Train’ and ‘Ghost Dog’, and all-round bequiffed hipster terrible of American indie cinema. Maybe he’s strapped for cash – or maybe ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ is something a little spicier and more leftfield than the simple ‘undead love story’ tag suggests (for the record, we reckon it’s probably the latter).

Tom Hiddleston plays an underground musician (no, we can’t quite picture it either) who reunites with his undying lover, Jarmusch regular Tilda Swinton, several centuries into their affair. The film has been shot in Detroit, Tangier and Hamburg, which suggests a high level of old-world industrial chic and tasteful decay, and Mia Wasikowska, Anton Yelchin and John Hurt round out the cast. We wait with bated breath, and pointed teeth.

‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ is out in 2013.

It’s taken a frustratingly long time for Don Coscarelli’s return to feature filmmaking to reach British screens, but it should finally happen in 2013. Coscarelli is the writer-director who, along with Sam Raimi, kickstarted American indie cinema’s DIY horror boom with 1979’s ‘Phantasm’, followed that movie up with three ludicrously entertaining sequels, and returned to prominence in 2002 with the classic Elvis-vs-the-Mummy horror-comedy ‘Bubba Ho-Tep’.

‘John Dies at the End’, adapted from the popular novel by David Wong, is Coscarelli’s most ambitious movie to date, combining wild stoner comedy, paranoid psychedelic fantasies, action and horror into an indescribable brew. Paul Giamatti stars as Arnie Blondestone, the reporter whose investigations into a new hallucinogenic street drug called soy sauce brings him into conflict with ancient (and potentially alien) forces.

‘John Dies at the End’ is out on Mar 22 2013.

It feels as though Marc Forster’s big-budget adaptation of Max ‘son of Mel’ Brooks’s bestselling reportage novel about a futuristic zombie war has been shuffling towards release for several years now, without actually getting any closer. Rumours of extensive reshoots and rewrites by writers including ‘Cabin in the Woods’ scribe Drew Goddard’ have left ‘World War Z’ looking like a movie in trouble, never mind the populist subject matter and the presence of Brad Pitt. But then the first trailer broke, and most of those doubts were swept away.

Forster’s stated ambition was to create a horror movie on the scale of a global adventure, a zombie flick for the multiplexes rather than the video bin. And while his thunder has been slightly stolen by TV’s impressive ‘The Walking Dead’, the sheer scope of ‘World War Z’ should leave all others in the shade: the trailer features armies of corpses, swarming over epic international landmarks. Whether the movie can ultimately transcend its problematic, piecemeal production remains to be seen – but we’re keen to find out.

‘World War Z’ is (hopefully) out on Jun 21 2013.

Writer-director Ben Wheatley seems to be trying out for the ‘hardest working man in British film’ award. With his recent horror-comedy ‘Sightseers’ only just leaving cinemas, he’s already deep into post-production on the follow-up, ‘A Field in England’. Wheatley has spoken widely about his new film, which he shot in black and white in only two weeks last summer.

It’s a horror movie set during the English civil war, which sees a group of soldiers fleeing a battle and finding themselves in a remote house with a mysterious alchemist and a bumper crop of suspicious looking mushrooms… The breakout supporting actor from ‘Kill List’, Michael Smiley, will be joined by oddball British TV comics Julian Barratt and Reece Shearsmith for what promises to be a memorably off-kilter slice of old-fashioned psychedelic nastiness from our most interesting working filmmaker.

‘A Field in England’ is out in 2013.