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In 2010, we were certain that the Facebook movie would be a critical hit. In 2011, we put our money on manly dramas like The Descendants and The Tree of Life. Sure, we don’t always call the winners (Sucker Punch -- what were we thinking?), but if our odds on forecasting the best movies were any better, we’d be Vegas bookies.

Well, here we are again, in 2012, looking forward to yet another year of movies in which a dead president is brought back to life, an oversexed spy makes a comeback, a rich dude won’t let go of his cape, and a bunch of fairies and dwarfs loot the box office.


Here are 10 reasons 2012 will be a great year for movies.

No.10 Skyfall

Lips are sealed when it comes to the 23rd Bond movie, and the plot details are as guarded as MI6 headquarters. What we do know is that Daniel Craig returns with his gritty, witty, new-era version of 007, picking up on his crusade against the villainous Quantum group and their far-reaching tentacles. In this installment of the reinvented series, Bond’s loyalty to M (Judi Dench) will be strained after her past opens up some dirty secrets. 007’s latest adventure is directed by Sam Mendes, who should bring some class to this affair, and it also stars Javier Bardem as Bond’s latest nemesis. Let’s hope he brings that cattle gun from No Country for Old Men.


No.9 Prometheus

When we caught up with Ridley Scott during preproduction for his Alien prequel, the director was grappling with timelines. Was Alien set in 2090? If so, will the prequel be set in 2050? If so, does the time between then and now make sense for the technology he is about to depict? The movie Scott was working on became Prometheus, and we’ll have to wait and see if his latest return to science fiction is, in fact, a prequel to his monumental space monster classic or a whole new beast altogether. As of right now, it sounds like a bit of both. Whether or not HR Giger’s rib-cracking creature makes a cameo, Prometheus is one film to wait for, with the Blade Runner director steering the ship and a cast that includes “it” guy Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron and Noomi Rapace.


No.8 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Get ready to dust off that old wizard hat and unleash the overenthusiastic 12-year-old boy inside you. After what seemed to be a decade in preproduction hell, The Hobbit is finally hitting theatres in 2012 with the first of two parts. Peter Jackson launched his career with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and he’s hoping to bring back some of the same magic in this adaptation of J.R.R Tolkien’s classic. Jackson brings back the dwarves, dragons and those little guys with big hearts, and he also brings back cast members Cate Blanchett, Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis ("my precioussss").


No.7 Cogan's Trade

In The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, writer/director Andrew Dominik delivered a lucid deconstruction of Western mythology and men’s obsessions with gunslingers. Dominik is at it again with yet another movie taking aim at badass antiheroes. Brad Pitt stars as Jackie Cogan, a Beantown mob enforcer investigating the robbery of a high-stakes poker game. Look forward to Pitt breaking kneecaps in this crime comedy that also stars a Goodfella (Ray Liotta), a Soprano (James Gandolfini) and other notable actors like Mark Ruffalo, Richard Jenkins, Javier Bardem, Sam Rockwell, and Casey Affleck. That’s a mean-looking ensemble.


No.6 Lincoln

The 16th president of the United States goes from the back of your penny to the big screen. Historical biopics aren’t usually our thing -- leave that stuffy fare to our parents and Oscar voters -- but we’ll make an exception when you have Daniel Day-Lewis portraying Abraham Lincoln in a movie directed by Steven “The Beard” Spielberg. The Schindler’s List director seems to have found new life with recent movies like War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin, and he is the ideal choice to take on this account of Lincoln’s efforts to abolish slavery and end the Civil War. Let’s hope Daniel Day-Lewis works in a little There Will Be Blood into his performance: “Four score and seven years ago, I drank your milkshake!”


No.5 The Dark Knight Rises

We probably don’t need to tell you much about this follow-up to one of the biggest, baddest blockbusters ever. Despite some incoherent storytelling and cheap melodrama, The Dark Knight delivered as a gritty, high-octane adventure (not to mention an allegory for the War on Terror) that redefined the landscape of comic book movies and made Bruce Wayne money at the box office. Christian Bale suits up once again as the caped crusader, this time going to battle against Tom Hardy’s Bane, who, as Nolan says in Empire Magazine, will be cracking heads and “ripping out spinal columns.” Also in the mix are the stunning Marion Cotillard, the exquisite Juno Temple and Anne Hathaway (one of the most talented actresses today) donning dominatrix gear as Catwoman. With gals like these, The Dark Knight Rises will easily be the sexiest installment in the trilogy.


No.4 Gangster Squad

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a tough-as-nails mob tale from the golden era. So Gangster Squad will be a welcome return to the days of guys and dolls, with ballsy stars like Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, and Emma Stone in the lead roles. Gosling plays a cop assigned to keep Sunset Boulevard clean by boxing out Sean Penn’s celebrity L.A. crime boss, Mickey Cohen. Penn’s performance alone should make this worthwhile, though the Tommy guns and fashionable threads won’t hurt. Call it the prequel to L.A. Confidential, and if Gangster Squad is worth an ounce of that earlier neo-noir masterpiece, then we’ll be seeing this movie on a lot more lists a year from now.


No.3 Cosmopolis

Author Don DeLillo has his finger on the pulse of contemporary society and modern masculinity. If you haven’t read White Noise, make that your new objective. Yet no one has ever attempted a movie on the cynical, postmodern novelist’s work -- until now. David Cronenberg adapts DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, a Ulysses-esque journey in which a young stock-market millionaire (Twilight’s Robert Pattison) crosses Manhattan in a bulletproof limo to get a haircut on a bizarre day filled with lunatics, oversexed women and financial woes. This one’s sure to be a dystopian classic for the recession era.


No.2 Gravity

Director Alfonso Cuaron kicked off the millennium with one of the last great guy movies (Y Tu Mama Tambien, 2001), then made the best Harry Potter film (Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004) and then delivered a masterful dystopian drama (Children of Men, 2006). But for the last five years, it seems that one of the most talented directors today got lost in space. That’s kind of true. Cuaron’s ambitious sci-fi project, Gravity, had met with a meteor shower of casting problems, with stars like Angelina Jolie, Robert Downey Jr. and Natalie Portman using the movie like a revolving door -- in and out they went. Cuaron’s space thriller finally found its cast with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney playing astronauts trying to survive a trip home after a satellite explosion wipes out the rest of their crew. According to Cuaron’s pal Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), the team consulted with both David Fincher and James Cameron for the film’s “insane” and “mind-blowing” special effects. Look out for Cuaron’s spectacular visuals. Look out for innovative cinema. Look out for one of the manliest men of our generation, George Clooney -- in 3D!


No.1 Django Unchained

Call it Quentin Tarantino’s antithesis to Spielberg’s Lincoln. After scribbling all over WWII history with Inglourious Basterds, the winking maestro of bloody, postmodern madness returns with a new take on both slavery and that manliest of genres, the Western. Jamie Foxx saddles up with a six-shooter as Django, a slave who teams up with Christoph Waltz’s bounty hunter to free his wife (Kerry Washington) from captivity and take revenge on Leonardo DiCaprio’s plantation owner. The star-studded cast also includes Tarantino regular Samuel L. Jackson, Sacha Baron Cohen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Death Proof’s Kurt Russell. With Tarantino cracking the whip and actors who are game for his brand of self-referential banter, Django Unchained is sure to be a pulpy, inglourious and controversial ride through the wild, wild West.