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Worried that the Writers Guild of America strike is going to impact the quality of movies next year? Relieve your fears with this list of finished scripts that have yet to be made: the hottest unproduced screenplays of 2007.

I like the sound of I Want To F— Your Sister:

Lawyer-turned-screenwriter Melissa Stack’s high-concept comedic spec screenplay about “a young man goes to great lengths to protect his younger sister from guys just like him.”

It's probably going to have to see a name change before it actually becomes a finished film though. There are some classier ideas on the list too if you're into that sort of thing.

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Marks out of ten: 300

Ok, for a change I'm going to take a break from my usual love-it-or-loath-it style and give you a mixed review. I enjoyed this film, but it wasn't as good as it could have been. It had everything I knew it would have but none of what I hoped it would have.

300 is a ball of solid testosterone marinated in adrenalin and wrapped in a loin cloth. It's a style-fest, a gore-fest and a comic book on the screen. Every part of it looks beautiful: every beheading, impaling, stabbing, slicing, swing of a sword or hurling of a spear is crafted into a piece of art visible for one twenty-fourth of a second. Like its predecessor, Sin City, you could take any given frame from this film and hang it on your wall. Just don't let any children or the faint of heart see it. There will be blood.

If that doesn't sound appealing then you're not going to like 300. There's not much more to it than that. There are no characters to get behind unless you get caught up in Leonidas's sub-Gladiator quality bellowings about honour and glory. The parts that aren't directly about putting sharpened bits of metal in people seem to have been fairly dubbed the "bathroom breaks".

But then, if you're not all about hardened men's men kicking ass so hard the Persians are still feeling it 2500 years later, then what are you watching this for? You won't feel anything when any character dies. You won't get dragged into caring about the people of Sparta. But you might just be so pumped full of adrenalin that you punch a hobo on your way out of the cinema. (Note: Don't do that.)

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Via the fantastic Used FAQs, the TV Guide Oscar FAQ, including:

Question: Can I become a seat-filler for the Oscar ceremony?

Answer: Only if the Academy knows you and thinks you're worthy. A couple hundred well-dressed men and women are utilized every year to fill in for celebrities and other guests who leave their prime seats during commercial breaks; the idea is that empty seats don't look good on camera. But because the job is a delicate one — you've got to look like you belong, be fast and diplomatic, and know enough not to bother the stars — it goes only to people the Academy can trust. Years ago, an outside company handled the seat-fillers and annually sifted through thousands of applications; these days, it's handled internally.

Is it lame that this answer effectively dashes one of my long-held dreams?

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May 22, 2008. That's my 25^th birthday plans sorted then.

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I've been living a lie. All of these entries I keep writing about movies, all the news and reviews, they're all a sham. I'm not a proper film fan, for two unavoidable reasons: I've never seen The Godfather and I haven't seen Rocky.

Thankfully our culture is riddled with the elements of cultural osmosis. I've seen enough parodies, references and sundry derivatives to have an idea of what these icons represent to the people who have got up off their asses (or in the case of iconic films, I guess got down on their asses) and watched them. This is what I have gleaned about Rocky:

A flawed protagonist with a simple life and simple ideals, driven by a deep desire and his true love for another, trains, prepares, and puts his heart and soul into a fight. He does his absolute best. And by the end, it doesn't matter if the judges say he won or lost the fight, because that's not what it's about. It's about being all you can be, whatever that is. It's about being proud to be who you are. And it's about the crowd, both in the movie watching the fight and in the cinema watching the film, knowing that they're watching someone special.

At least, that's what I think Rocky is about. It's what Rocky Balboa is about.

I'm reserved about saying this so early, but potentially film of the year for me.

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I'm really excited about 2007, for reasons that include: getting a job, moving out, continuing in the nice social groove I've had going on for the last half of 2006. Those are personal things, and I don't expect you to share my excitement about them (unless I end up working, living or socialising with you). But you can join my excitement about the movies coming out this year. Here's a list of just some of the movies that I'm looking forward to in the next 12 months (in no particular order):

• Rocky Balboa
• Bobby
• The Number 23
• Shrek 3
• Spider-Man 3
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
• Sin City 2 (possibly delayed until next year)
• Transformers
• The Simpsons
• Live Free or Die Hard
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• 300
• Grindhouse
• Hot Fuzz
• Blades of Glory
• My Name is Bruce
• Zodiac
• Ghost Rider
• The Bourne Ultimatum
• Babel

Okay I better stop before you lose interest. But that's 20 films that I'm already looking forward to at the start of the year, and there will no doubt be ones that I don't here about until closer to their release.

Am I missing anything glaring?

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I was expecting The Chronicles of Narnia minus all the overbearing Christian allegory. Instead, Pan's Labyrinth is more like Schindler's List with fairies. And in Spanish. Rather than use the real world of 1940s Spain as a launching point for a child's journey into the fantastic, à la Narnia, Labyrinth is mostly set in reality with only brief forays into the Labyrinth. That reality, with Franco's fascists hunting freedom fighters in the woods, is far scarier than anything in a fairytale. Even in farytales like these, which are much closer in style to the Grimms' than to Disney.

That this film is the product of the same mind that inflicted Mimic and Blade II on the world is astounding. It's a masterpiece, in the literal sense. Undoubtedly the highlight of Del Toro's career (okay, so I haven't seen Hellboy but I think it's a safe bet), and a confident prediction for at least a nomination in the foreign film category at this year's Oscars.

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This list was far more difficult to choose than last year's. Not least because I visited the cinema almost twice as many times in 2006 than in 2005. Since I've adopted the habit of reviewing (poorly) every movie I see in the cinema, it was easy to compile the list of eligible films:

1. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
2. Syriana
3. Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
4. Mission: Impossible II
5. Slither
6. Brick
7. X-Men: The Last Stand
8. Hard Candy
9. Thank You For Smoking
10. Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest
11. Superman Returns
12. Cars
13. Snakes on a Plane
14. A Scanner Darkly
15. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kasakhstan
16. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
17. Clerks II
18. An Inconvenient Truth
19. The Last Kiss
20. The Prestige
21. Casino Royale
22. The Host
23. Stranger Than Fiction

Of those 23 movies, only one completely sucked. Seven failed to live up to my expectations. Five exceeded my expectations wildly. Two more lived up to unreasonably high hopes. Two of them I saw twice. One has already made my DVD collection. I bought the book of another. Eight deserve to be on a top movies of the year list, but only five can make it.

5. Brick

This one came out of nowhere, from a writer and director I'd never heard of and with a practically unknown cast. Another month I might not have even bothered to read the short review of this in Empire that initially prompted me to check it out. This is the first movie of the year to make it to my DVD collection.

4. An Inconvenient Truth

I described this as the most important movie of the year, and I stand by that. I actually considered excluding this from the list on the grounds that it simply can't be compared to the other films whose purpose is to entertain, not to educate or rally support for a cause. But in the end, it was shown in a cinema, so it counts.

3. Clerks II

This probably had the hardest job to do out of any movie this year. It had to live up to the standards of Kevin Smith's Jersey Trilogy. It did. That alone guaranteed its place here. A different year and it might have been #1.

2. The Prestige

I'm still not certain that this shouldn't be in the top spot. I didn't write much of anything about it the first time around, and I won't do so now, because I honestly don't trust my own ability to express how great a film this is.

1. Casino Royale

Quite simply the best Bond film ever. Better than Goldfinger. This is not only a great movie, but it is a promise of more great movies to come. After Die Another Day the franchise needed rescuing. In 2006, it got it.

Now, anyone want to bet on Spider-Man 3 making the list this year?

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"Adaptation for the strip-mall cineplex."

Of course I haven't actually seen Adaptation yet (it's on its way from Screenclick) but that summary sounds about right from what I know. My own, less erudite but possibly more accessible, judgement is that Stranger Than Fiction is a fantastic premise in search of a story to do it justice. It's worth seeing, and it has some delightful moments (Ferrell's reaction to hearing about his imminent death is hilarious), but it really doesn't live up to its promise.

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