Dan in Real Life and Charlie Wilson's War

Single, love-starved characters in Hollywood romantic comedies should count their blessings. Despite all the misfortunes and humiliations that litter the path to enduring happiness - catching extremities in a zip, falling for their comatose fiancé's brother - these desperate singletons invariably snag Mr or Ms Right by the end credits, and seal the deal with a polished one-liner. And when they wake the next morning and look in the mirror, it's Kate Hudson or Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock or Hugh Grant staring dreamily back at them. Life certainly sucks.

A morass of smut and nerdish wish-fulfilment

Critics and audiences were unanimous in their enthusiasm for Judd Apatow's Knocked Up. Its combination of screwball and crudity hit a nationwide nerve and slobbish slacker Seth Rogan's on-off romance with chic journalist Katherine Heigl, after she becomes pregnant following a drunken one-night stand, became the year's water cooler movie.

Sequel year

Pictures come and go - but we'll always have Paris, writes DAVID PARKINSON in his review of 2007 There were signs in 2007 that Hollywood is getting bored with making films that appeal primarily to adolescent minds. The trouble is, spectacle still sells and the studios can't afford to stop churning out comic-book romps like Spider-Man 3, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Beowulf that give audiences a periodic fix of SFX. Indeed, such is the fear of not making a profit that Tinseltown indulged in a summer of 'threequels', with Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End, Shrek the Third, Rush Hour 3 and Ocean's Thirteen all competing for the same box-office buck. Yet, of this desperate band, only The Bourne Ultimatum, pictured, succeeded in pleasing both punters and pundits.

Closing the Ring, Don't Touch the Axe and El Violin

Richard Attenborough is 84 and Jacques Rivette will be 80 in March. Each has had an incalculable influence on cinema in his respective country and both are still making pictures with an enthusiasm that is enviable in the extreme. But while Rivette continues to explore the boundaries of his medium, Lord Dickie is content to tell tales in an old-fashioned manner that owes more to matinee melodrama than cinematic ingenuity.

	Return of the St Trinian's schoolgirl horrors
	Girls just wanna have fun in Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson's revival of the naughty hockey stick-wielding minxes of St Trinian's, immortalised in the cartoons of Ronald Searle.
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Enchanted and Bee Movie

Every Christmas, there are certain films which perfectly embody the festive spirit. Whether it's a small boy flying through the air with an animated snowman, Alastair Sim's Scrooge realising the error of his ways, Bing Crosby dreaming of a White Christmas or Jimmy Stewart learning to value family life (with some prompting from an angel called Clarence), cinema has the power to create a warm, fuzzy glow to stave off the winter chill.

You Kill Me, He was a Quiet Man, Les Chansons d'Amour, The Saragossa Manuscript

Two films this week centre on men with guns. Neither quite works. Yet each has a quirky ingenuity that makes it watchable if never compelling and both boast strong performances by their seemingly mismatched romantic leads.

The Killing of John Lennon, Hotel Harabati and KM31

Forty-five years to the month since they first charted with Love Me Do, The Beatles retain a fascination that extends way beyond film critics born in the same building as one of them. This year alone has seen the release of DVDs containing previously unseen footage, an anthology of Paul McCartney's greatest hits and an audiovisual souvenir of the Ecce Cor Meum piece he composed for Magdalen College Choir. But easily the most compelling outings have been The US vs John Lennon - David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's account of Lennon's battle to secure his Green Card in the face of Richard Nixon's implacable opposition - and Andrew Piddington's disturbing docudrama, The Killing of John Lennon.

The Golden Compass

After months of rumour and counter-rumour about a spiralling budget ($150-200m) and drastic changes to the screenplay, not to mention calls for a boycott of the film by the Catholic League, The Golden Compass is finally here. With little competition at the box office before Christmas, Chris Weitz's visually stunning adaptation of Northern Lights by the Oxford-based novelist Philip Pullman - the first part of the His Dark Materials saga - should prove irresistible to family audiences.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

If Brad Pitt (pictured) lassos his first ever Oscar nomination as Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal of the eponymous outlaw in Andrew Dominik's handsome new Jesse James biopic, it will be at the expense of an even better performance in the cumbersomely titled The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Co-star Casey Affleck, as Ford, blows Pitt off screen with a performance of such intensity that it takes your breath away.

Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute and other new releases

With all the fuss over Sleuth last week, it would be easy to overlook the fact that Kenneth Branagh has a another feature on release today. Indeed, the man once hailed as the finest actor of his generation is rapidly becoming known primarily for his work behind the camera. But The Magic Flute concludes a rather sorry trilogy of misfiring remakes that began earlier in the year with As You Like It. With a screenplay by Stephen Fry, this relocation of Mozart's 1791 opera to the Great War is the best of the bunch. But, unfortunately, this is rather faint praise.

	I Do, Wristcutters: A Love Story, 4:30 and Man in the Chair
	A runaway hit in its native France, Eric Lartigau's I Do is the kind of Gallic confection that Hollywood studios used to remake at the drop of a chapeau. However, the transatlantic trade has slowed of late and it's possible to watch this slick, if highly predictable, romp without that nagging dread at the back of the mind as to who would be cast in a Stateside version.

Jude Law and Michael Caine in Sleuth

Released in 1972, Joseph Mankiewicz's tense and serpentine thriller Sleuth, adapted by Anthony Shaffer from his own stage play, pitted Sir Laurence Olivier against Michael Caine in a titanic battle of nerve and deception. Set largely within a claustrophobic country manor, the film relied on ambiguous dialogue to stoke the tension. Both actors reaped Oscar nominations for their magnetic performances.

Anna M, The Wayward Cloud and I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

An exceptional performance by Isabelle Carré as a spurned lover with a pathological talent for deceiving herself and others is the highlight of Michel Spinosa's Anna M. Rarely has cinematic psychosis been presented with such raw sensibility and unnerving potency and one dreads to think how a Hollywood remake might turn out - especially as the story lapses into stalker melodrama about halfway through.

	American Gangster and Brick Lane
	During decades of social, economic and racial turmoil, the world's greatest superpower has consistently lost the battle against drugs. In 1971, President Nixon declared: "America's public enemy number one, in the United States, is drugs." At the time, it was estimated that one third of American troops fighting in Vietnam were experimenting with heroin and opium.

Lions for Lambs

During the Second World War, cinema was a powerful weapon for Britain and Germany in the battle for the hearts and minds of the public. A weekly trip to the local picture house became a simple yet effective way to disseminate propaganda to the masses; bolstering morale and carefully shaping public opinion, thereby ensuring a united effort in the face of adversity. In the modern age, with the advent of the internet and 24-hour news, cinema has become reactive rather than proactive. It is a powerful medium to criticise the upper echelons of power who dictate policy, sending young men and women off to war in the name of freedom and democracy.

	The Witnesses, Blame it On Fidel, IN Memory of Myself, Heima and Air Guitar Ntion
	With films like Z, The Confession and The Siege to his credit, Constantin Costa-Gavras was the titan of 1970s political cinema and his daughter Julie has clearly drawn on her recollections of the times, as well as Domitilla Calamai's novel, for her directorial debut, Blame It on Fidel.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON, MANUFACTURING DISSENT, LAGERFIELD CONFIDENTIAL AND NEVER APOLOGIZE

There's a documentary feel to the current cinema release schedule, with the pick of the bunch being David Sington's wonderful memoir of the Apollo space programme, In the Shadow of the Moon. Anyone with fond memories of the BBC's coverage of the moonshots - complete with its Kubrick-inspired use of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra and the enthusiastic insights of the peerless James Burke - will enjoy wallowing in this shamelessly awed tribute to the 24 men who travelled to the moon and the 12 who actually set foot upon it.

ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE

When Gwyneth Paltrow sobbed her little heart out as she accepted the 1999 Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, a more deserving winner sat serenely in the audience, smiling politely for the cameras. Cate Blanchett should have been standing at the podium for her extraordinary portrayal of Elizabeth I in Shekhar Kapur's sweeping historical drama. It was an electrifying performance, revealing the steeliness and vulnerability of a young woman who inherited a country silently at war with itself. Reuniting with Kapur for a belated sequel, the statuesque Australian actress may yet claim her Oscar as the strident Virgin Queen.

Sicko — a powerful polemic on US health

Since his award-winning 1989 debut feature Roger & Me, a scathing account of the closure of the General Motors plant in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has been gleefully raising the hackles of the political establishment.

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