2012 is over. Gone forever. Never coming back. Based on our staff picks for the best features of 2012, it was far from a bad year. We had all kinds of good-to-great films, and we’d be lucky to have another year like it. Considering what we’ll see this year, 2013 could match 2012, as we’re getting movies from Martin Scorsese, Danny Boyle, Sofia Coppola, Edgar Wright, Jonathan Glazer,Steven Soderbergh, Park Chan Wook, and, most exciting of all, Adam McKay.

Plenty of pictures to get excited over this year, and, to the start the year off, we have about 5 to build some anticipation over. Here they are:

Opens January 11th

The news of Gangster Squad being pushed to January was disappointing for many reasons, but mainly because it looked like the kind of fun period gangster movie we don’t see often enough. And who better to go old school than Josh Brolin and Sean Penn? Nostalgia aside, what’s most exciting is Ruben Fleischer, the director behind Zombieland and the overlooked 30 Minutes or Less, is exploring new territory.

It’d be great to see the energy he brought to those films in this take on intense, antique crime.

Opens January 18th

What a terrifying short film. Monster filmmaker extraordinaire Guillermo del Toro seems to agree, as he’s helped turn it into a feature-length movie. Based on the film’s trailer, the horror of that short seems to have translated well to the big screen. Best of all, the audience at last month’s Butt-Numb-a-Thon seemed to be Mama fans, and if you can get that crowd on your side, you’ve got something good.

Opens January 18th

Arnold Schwarzenegger is finally starring in a movie again… and he’s being overshadowed by Kim Ji-Woon, one of the best action directors around. If The Last Stand is even half the movie that The Good, the Bad, the Weird and I Saw The Devil are, then Arnold will finally be “back” in a big way. In Kim, he’s picked a perfect sparring partner.

Opens January 18th

Per the film’s IMDB description, Broken City follows, “An ex-cop trailing the wife of New York City’s mayor finds himself immersed in a larger scandal,” and if that doesn’t sound like a Mark Wahlberg movie the world needs, I don’t know what does. The trailer for Broken City was the run-of-the-mill Wahlberg stuff, but with Allen Hughes (Book of Eli, From Hell, Menace II Society), maybe we’ll get more than the usual Wahlberg “What’s going on, ya guys?” thriller.

Opens January 25th and now on VOD

By no stretch of the imagination is Don Coscarelli’s film for everyone, but the audience it was made for will surely eat it up. John Dies at the End is a small, daring kind of movie. It’s low-budget shows, but that’s a part of the movie’s charm. There’s a handmade quality to the effects, even the digital ones, and they make for a nice, goofy, disgusting B-movie world which, if a success, we’ll see more of in the future.

Honorable Mention: Movie 43 (those kind of films tend to be hit and miss, but there’s great talent involved.) and Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters (It is produced by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell after all…)