HOLLYWOOD IS dusting down those retired genres and sending them back to work. Not least of the movie granddads is the western, with no fewer than five variations heading our way soon, four of them in time for Oscar recognition next February.

Kevin Costner is on the hunt for that long-lost Dances With Wolves glory, directing and starring in Open Range, a traditional western of noble cattlemen fighting a corrupt sheriff across the vast plains of the Midwest. Robert Duvall and Annette Bening co-star.

Ron Howard was going to remake the historical classic The Alamo, but fell out with Disney over his desire to display the famous battle between Texans and Mexicans shredded innards and all. Instead, the native Texan John Lee Hancock (The Rookie) is directing Billy Bob Thornton, Jason Patric and Dennis Quaid, with a softer approach to guts and glory.

Howard, meanwhile, is sticking with the Old West with The Missing, based on the novel The Last Ride by Thomas Eidson. Here Cate Blanchett must turn for help from her estranged grandfather Tommy Lee Jones (who has gone native) when her daughter is kidnapped by Apaches. The film is due next summer.

EPIC MOMENTS

TOM CRUISE travels to 19th-century Japan in The Last Samurai. Touching upon the monumental battle scenes and visual splendour of Kurosawa’s movies, Cruise plays an American fighting to save the dying nobility of the samurai.

Talking of megastars, Russell Crowe heads up the sea-faring epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, based on the hugely popular Napoleonic naval tales of Patrick O’Brian. Shot in the Titanic studio in Baja, Mexico, the huge film is in the capable hands of Peter Weir.

King Arthur proves evergreen, with Clive Owen taking the lead in a version set at the time that the Roman Empire begins to crumble. Older still and bigger is the growing resuscitation of the ancient epic with Troy, the re-imagining of Homer’s Iliad. Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom and Sean Bean head the cast. The German director Wolfgang Petersen is currently shooting in Malta for a cool $180 million. The German underwear model Diane Kruger is Helen.

Oliver Stone and the Irish star Colin Farrell have won the race to bring the all-conquering king of Macedon Alexander to the screen next year. Baz Luhrmann’s version, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman (as his mother!), has been delayed until 2005.

GIRLS ALOUD

WITH ALL the talk of the diminishing number of women’s roles in big movies, it is encouraging to note some very strong female-led films coming soon.

Jane Campion ventures to different territory with In the Cut with Meg Ryan, a serial-killer story based upon the shocking book by Susanna Moore. Cate Blanchett stars as Veronica Guerin, the Irish journalist who strove to expose the drug lords of Dublin at the cost of her own life. Surprisingly, it is from the stable of the bombastic producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Julia Roberts inspires a class of college girls (including Kirsten Dunst and Maggie Gyllenhaal) Dead Poets-style in Mona Lisa Smile. Meanwhile, the most bankable female around, Reese Witherspoon, refizzes her bubbly platinum routine in Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde, before starring as Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. And there’s another outing for Charlie’s Angels (Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore) with the suffix Full Throttle and a comeback for Demi Moore as the bad gal.

TECHNICAL TERMS

PUSHING BACK the boundaries of the film-making process itself, (for good or ill) both Robert Zemeckis’s Polar Express (sort of starring with Tom Hanks) and future-gazing thriller The World of Tomorrow (starring Jude Law) have dispensed with traditional sets. The backgrounds and many of the foregrounds will be created on computers.

George Lucas faces growing ambivalence toward his final chapter in the Star Wars series, Episode III, which will see the creation of Darth Vader as we know him. After the disappointments of Episodes I and II, he has got his work cut out.

LOVE AND LAUGHTER

TO MAKE you laugh, the gross-out Farrelly brothers have fused Matt Damon to Greg Kinnear for the Siamese-twin comedy Stuck on You. Rumours abound of cameos from Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino joined at the head.

Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger hope to recapture the heady 1960s chemistry of those Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedies with Down With Love. Plus, the Coens, whose yearly output is averaging that of Woody Allen, deliver their homage to the Hepburn/Tracy motormouthed sex-comedies with Intolerable Cruelty, pitching George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones against one another as divorce lawyers. Also in the Coen pipeline is a remake of the Ealing classic The Ladykillers with Tom Hanks.

On the hip movie front, the big news is the return of Quentin Tarantino with his “chopsockey, grindhouse spectacular” (his description) Kill Bill, with Uma Thurman. The wacko screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry, has Jim Carrey on the run in his own brain.

BACK IN BLIGHTY

ON THE home front, a gulf has appeared between the perennial strugglers and Working Title’s steady, successful output. Such stalwarts as Danny Boyle (Millionaires), Mike Hodges (the revenge thriller I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead) and Peter Greenaway (the star-studded The Tulse Luper Suitcases) are all hoping to break through the malaise, while Working Title has Orlando Bloom in the milkman comedy The Calcium Kid, Hugh Grant and Liam Neeson starring in Richard Curtis’s directorial debut Love Actually (a Short Cuts-style romantic comedy), a sequel to Kevin and Perry (Go Large) and a $50 million version of Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds under way.

There’s a bit of indecision in the James Bond camp, with talk of waiting until the Bondian-sounding year of 2007 for his next adventure, although there are concerns that Pierce Brosnan is eager to get going on what could be his last turn as the spy. There is certainly more momentum for a stand-alone Jinx film, based around Halle Berry’s character from Die Another Day.

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