feast of horror with bite; Hannibal's back for another helping and

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T MISS THIS Red Dragon October 11 Thomas Harris has written a brilliant trilogy of meticulous, lethal modern gothic novels with Dr Hannibal Lecter as the ferociously incisive real-world demon at their core. But the business of adapting those books into movies has become a haphazard process of creative pick'n'mix, resulting in four films by four directors with two distinct visions of Lecter as well as alternative portrayals of the lead FBI characters, Will Graham and Clarice Starling.

Intellectual stylist Michael Mann was the first to filter Harris's world of haunted, morose cops and tormented, visionary killers on to the screen with Manhunter, his cold, high-tension adaptation of the novel Red Dragon in 1986. It starred Scottish actor Brian Cox as "Lecktor" - remote, inscrutable, threatening through sheer composure. But since then Jonathan Demme's smash-hit 1991 Oscar-sweeper The Silence Of The Lambs has made Anthony Hopkins the definitive Lecter, with his pantomime hissing and connoisseur cannibalism. Now, after the cheesy killer-dilettante adventures of Ridley Scott's 2001 sequel Hannibal, producer Dino De Laurentiis and team have returned to the source and remade Red Dragon. Hopkins is again the centrepiece, Ralph Fiennes is self-mythologising killer the Tooth Fairy, and edgy young method man Ed Norton is Will Graham, the head-wrecked FBI profiler who first captured the bad doctor. In script terms this is exactly the same story as Manhunter (which, to many, makes it seem as unnecessary as every other remake of a great film), but with a narrative that sticks closer to the novel and a brand new Norton v Hopkins prologue face-off sequence showing exactly how Lecter ended up in a cage.

Gratutious cash-in or not, Red Dragon should make the most of the powerhouse cast and the electric thrills of the source material, plus all the familiar fun of the horrorshow motifs from Silence Of The Lambs - Lecter's dungeon cell and iconic facemask and the hammy, campy antics of Hopkins himself. The only real worry is director Brett Ratner. The previous Lecter directors, Mann, Demme and Scott, were all artists with ideas. This film has been made by the guy who gave us The Lawnmower Man and Rush Hour.

OR indeed THIS 28 days later November 1 Oh no! London has become overrun with soulless zombies locked in a permanent state of homicidal rage! How will anyone be able to tell the difference? Aha- ha-ha! No, but seriously: this sounds like a wicked bastard of a movie. It's a lo-fi British apocalypse flick about a ragtag band of terrified, fatalistic survivors after a rabid and unstoppable hyper- aggression virus has leaked from a British research facility and wiped out the world.

The characters, led by Cillian Murphy's vaguely heroic bicycle courier, don't have a clue what happened or what to do next, and spend a lot of their time fending off the undead in a ghost-town London while eyeing each other suspiciously for signs of infection. So far, so what, you might say - this kind of end-of-world horror- siege story has been told in a million films from Night Of The Living Dead to The Thing via Charlton Heston's alpha-male freakshow The Omega Man.

But what makes 28 Days Later seem like such a potential zinger is that it's a back-to-basics genre project re-teaming director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald with wayward British hotshot novelist Alex Garland. Boyle and Macdonald are two-thirds of the team who brought you Trainspotting, the biggest British culture-impact movie of the 1990s, tripped up with the confused and annoying metaphysical rom-com A Life Less Ordinary and seriously lost their way while adapting Garland's backpacker airport novel The Beach.

Boyle, Macdonald and regular script man John Hodge were reportedly humbled, knackered and frustrated by the big-money, mass-market experience, and Garland was knocked into writer's block by the success of The Beach and his second book The Tesseract. So in an effort to concentrate their powers properly, they've all huddled together and come up with something smaller, tighter and more intense.

This is a grim future, not played for nihilistic kicks (although it will hopefully provide a few of those) and rendered with a sober, jittery realism. Shot in a nervous documentary style, it treats the virus as a plausible misfire of modern bio-weapon research. With the nights getting colder and the shadows getting longer, a smart new zombie-plague movie might be just the thing for your autumnal state of mind.

who to watch asia argento xXx, October 17 Rising young actresses - particularly in Hollywood, but also in Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Australia, wherever - usually have their early merits and potential assessed almost entirely on the basis of their looks. Not fair. But her appearance is only the most obvious of Asia Argento's natural advantages in the movie industry. (That said, it would be churlish to deny that she's sexy enough to make even your granny slap her own face and howl like a wolf.) She's also the daughter of Dario Argento, the Michelangelo of Italian art-schlock horror movies. And she's been starring in his demented classics (Demons 2, Trauma) since she was nine.

"I think father gave me life because he needed a lead actress for his films," she once said. Obviously daddy's vocation and his wet dream/sweating nightmare aesthetic have rubbed off, since Asia made her writer-director debut with her own movie Scarlet Diva a couple of years ago. By all accounts (it's frustratingly difficult to get a copy) the movie is a chaotically self-indulgent epic of raw sexual adventurism and bad-tripping drug meltdowns, but it shows a lot of promise. The New York Times found it "bewildering but curiously moving".

Argento is now raising her Hollywood profile as Yelena, the enigmatic Euro-fox who lures in Vin Diesel's pumped-up lunkhead secret agent in the loopy new action blockbuster xXx. The role doesn't require anything beyond carnal pouting, but there's no way that's the limit of Argento's ambitions.

and who else aaron eckhart Possession, October 25 Aaron Eckhart made a door-kicking dramatic entrance with his film debut In The Company Of Men five years ago. He played Chad, a boringly handsome corporate frat boy and hateful emotional fascist who concocts a viciously cruel sexual power game to devastate an unsuspecting handicapped woman from lower down the company food chain.

Contentious enough to spark screaming matches at major international film festivals - a lot of people confused the ethics of the characters with the politics of the movie itself - it established writer/director Neil LaBute as a fierce and serious film-maker and Eckhart as a vividly watchable and unselfconscious actor.

Eckhart has since morphed himself to play unrecognisably different characters in all LaBute's subsequent films (the director and actor went to the same school and worked in the same theatre company). He was a fat, floundering husband in Your Friends And Neighbours and a vile redneck car salesman in Nurse Betty. He was also the best thing about Sean Penn's sluggish drama The Pledge, where he played Jack Nicholson's pitying, disgusted police colleague. And in Erin Brockovich he made Julia Roberts's domesticated biker boyfriend something convincing and endearing.

So it is not just through nepotism that he has been cast opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in LaBute's adaptation of AS Byatt's novel Possession. Fans of the Booker-winner might be narked that the lead part of the aloof, anti-romantic scholar has been rewritten as an American, but Eckhart - funny, moving, persuasive - makes it seem like a change for the better. Next he goes sci-fi as a world-saving scientist in upcoming future-disaster movie The Core.

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