This might not even be the eleventh best film of the year, but it’s fresh in my mind so it’s going here. It’s a denser, more convincing version of the Mr And Mrs Smith premise: spies in love, associated trust issues. The corporate espionage theme somehow makes it cooler than the usual CIA/NSA/MEH, and the intentionally confusing time structure is fun to unravel. It also marks itself out as a superior con flick with its ending, avoiding both the ‘smug’ and ‘makes no fucking sense’ traps most of the rest of the genre falls into.

Having said that, for those who’ve seen it, once The Thing is acquired, why does The Person put suspicion on The Other Person, and how does the latter get out of it?

Supporting Role goes to Giamatti for a spectacularly frothing take on a very Ballmer-like CEO.

I had kind of hoped that one of my favourite writers adapting one of my favourite children’s books might mean some kind of story or content would be added to it, but it still works for the same reason the book does. It knows exactly what a weird young boy wants to do, and supposes a place where it can happen for a while. The arbitrary nature of the conflict and turmoil feels a bit pointless in the new book, Egger’s novelisation of his own script, but on-screen it doesn’t especially need a point: it’s wonderful madness to watch, and the emotions are impactful even if their causes are randomised.

Every review I’ve read of this is entirely about whether it works as a kid’s movie, which misses the more important question: is it a good Wes Anderson movie? Yes! One of the best! The characteristic awkward pauses, wonky comic timing, lame heroics and quiet psychosis all work marvellously with the inherent creakiness of hand-made models, the shitty dancing and scary eating.

Supporting Role goes either to rat, for being amazing, or Michael Gambon for: “You wrote a bad song, Petey!”

Blessed with the advantage of never having read the comic, I was able to wholeheartedly enjoy this. It’s fun to see superheroes in a vaguely real world, where people are assholes and politics matter. The mask-off moment is tough to handle well with any vigilante, tougher still when he’s as vicious, gravelly-voiced and enigmatic as Rorschach. But here it’s done with a disarming lack of ceremony, and the casting of an awkward, freckly weirdo is perfect (says an awkward, freckly weirdo). More generally, that awkward freckly weirdo is perfect: when he finally gets his ‘face’ back, it’s almost a relief – he’s more terrifying without it. His quivering facial expression in the final scenes defies adequate description.

It was a traumatic year to be a kid. Four of my ten favourite films were kid’s movies with disturbing, disgusting, upsetting or inappropriate content. Coraline is about a girl seeking comfort in another dimension where she can have everything she wants if she lets them REMOVE HER EYES and REPLACE THEM WITH BUTTONS. Jesus fucking Christ. Happily, it’s disturbing in even more inspired and wonderful ways, and it’s one of the most deliciously weird films outside of the cult.

“In Britain we have a saying… It’s difficult, difficult… lemon… difficult.”

Just around the time District 9 is getting a little too dark, a little too painful and unpleasant to watch, someone flicks a switch and it transforms into a spectacular and fun action film. Some say that lets it down, for me it saves it. I have no interest in the allegory and I was about to genuinely not like this film for taking itself too seriously, and as if by magic it stopped.

I’ll just say what I said earlier in the year: I thought it was going to be primarily about madness, and I’m glad it wasn’t. I thought it wouldn’t make sense, and I’m glad it did. I thought nothing would happen, and I was glad I was wrong. It’s not a twist film; the quirk occurs early and almost casually. But it keeps dodging expectations by straying close to clichés is has no intention of treading in. That makes it feel natural rather than contrived.

A film made specifically for people who, like me, get irritated with the protagonists of zombie films for not having seen any zombie films. The protagonist of Zombieland – a World of Warcraft player – has seen some zombie films. He knows how they get you, and has geekily sensible rules for how to avoid it. There’s that, and there’s a general sense of fun: the reason zombies are such a mainstay is they combine an empty-world fantasy with an acceptable-violence one, which are two cheap and exploitative ways to have irresponsible fun without becoming morally compromised. Zombieland actually gets it, and gears its whole mood around the guilty positives.

You know when people say “I’m not ashamed to say I cried”? I’m ashamed! Of course I’m ashamed! It’s pathetic! My only excuse is that Pixar have some witchy way to key into my emotions in a matter of seconds. That didn’t trigger the waterworks, despite an early death: sad things never do. It was when, towards the very end, a private discovery puts the old guy’s whole quest in a new, happier light. They cynically stashed all that sadness in my headspace all the way back in the intro, just so they could pull the plug and immasculate me at the last minute. Twats.

I don’t actually like Star Trek very much, the original series. And this is the same characters even earlier, so not much positive bias going in. But I love this, partly for making retro sci-fi feel impactful, fantastic and exciting, but mostly because of Kirk and Spock. I never cared for the insufferably unstoppable alpha-male Kirk and the nothingy Spock. But by pitting the two as fierce rivals, they’ve revitalised both characters: Kirk’s still cocky, but he’s not always right and he doesn’t always get his way. Spock’s still dry, but there’s real steel beneath it now, and you feel like he gives a damn. [Spoiler warning] Ultimately in their struggle Kirk gets the command, and Spock gets – or rather always had – the girl. It’s a surprising twist, which is exactly why it makes the characters work: there’s no longer that dull inevitability.

Also I really like the way the phasers have a disc that swivels when switching between stun and kill.

Anyone see anything good I missed?

• I thought it was going to be primarily about madness, and I’m glad it wasn’t.
• I thought it wouldn’t make sense, and I’m glad it did.
• I thought nothing would happen, and I was glad something did.

It’s not a twist film; the quirk occurs early and almost casually. But it keeps dodging expectations by straying close to clichés is has no intention of treading in. That makes events feel natural rather than contrived, which is disarming.

Also on the positive side, it’s awesome.

Despite being an English word in front of a Belgian placename, the title manages to make this sound like ponderous French arthouse cinema. Really, they should have called it: In Fockin Bruges? Wit You?

Because it’s very much not ponderous. It’s a comedy thriller about two hitmen forced to bide their time in a quaint European city while awaiting further instructions. It’s fantastic. The funniest film I’ve seen in ages, including Wall-E and the last Futurama one.

Situational comedy apparently means unfunny, often grave situations with gags inserted forcibly into them, but In Bruges exmplifies what the term ought to mean: comedy that derives almost solely from the volatile absurdity of the situation. There’s one scene in particular where you have no idea if you’re about to witness a murder, a suicide or a manly heart-to-heart. And later, one of my favourite mid gunfight conversations between antagonists, taking the crown from the bit in Grosse Pointe Blank where Dan Aykroyd offers to sell John Cusack an ammo clip.

I think the film’s a little mean towards its short guy, and the ending felt just a tiny bit too inevitable before it happened, but the latter is more than made up for by the last line. Colin Farrell’s an unexpectedly adept comic actor, but Ralph Fiennes steals it utterly as the frothing London crimelord.

Wall-E

I didn’t believe the people telling me this was incredible, was wrong yet again. It is. Not so much for Wall-E himself, as the bizarrely affecting romance between him and Eve (or Eva, as Wall-E seems to say it). I don’t find robots cute and I almost never like romance, so the story had some serious work to do to win me over, but it accomplished it within about thirty seconds of the pair first appearing on screen together. Eve blows things up! That’s all I need to see to get invested in this love story. Some scenes just made me beam.

It’s my favourite Pixar film, beating the Incredibles partly by being about robots, and partly because I’ve always resented the message of the Incredibles. You know that central line, where the kid complains that at school they’re always being told that everyone’s special, “But that’s the same as no-one being special at all.” Oh yeah, you’re right. People who aren’t genetically superior aren’t special. And it’s about time normal people were seen for the interchangable, expendable drones they are compared to you mighty ubermen.

The Dark Knight

I enjoyed this a lot, but I did find myself sitting there thinking “Why aren’t I more invested in this? Why don’t I care?” I cared throughout Batman Begins, and that had a lot more flaws and downtime than this. I think it’s because, while they’re both ideas movies, the first film just had one idea: fear. Batman’s origin is all about fear, the plot was all about fear, and the villain was the embodiment of fear. Dark Knight is about whether people need a white knight more than a dark one, but its main feature, the Joker, doesn’t have much to do with that, so it doesn’t feel as focused.

I’ve heard a few people have mention that it feels stretched to include the two villians, usually with the caveat that they do realise it was necessary. I don’t think it strictly was: I think there could have been a movie entirely about Batman and Two Face, with the Joker just an unseen spectre in the background, teasing for a film of his own to crown the trilogy. Of course, this is the worst suggestion ever, given the circumstances regarding one of the cast necessary to enact it.

The other thing I liked about Begins was that it explained Batman to me, because I honestly didn’t know what he was about. And I thought the Dark Knight was explaining the Joker to me – because again, I’ve never felt I got him – with the line “Do I look like a man with a plan?” But then every caper he pulls is a masterpiece of proposterously convoluted planning. The bit that did paint an evocative picture of him was the best scene of the film, with the line: “I enjoy dynamite, gunpowder, gasoline. You know what they all have in common? They’re cheap.”

I give your film the worst grade imaginable: an A minus minus! Futurama will probably never be bad, but this lacked spark in exactly the way Bender’s Big Score didn’t. There’s a difference between fan service and what plays more like fan fic. The plot is entirely about a single, weak conceit that doesn’t really work as a joke, and makes no sense as a serious plot element. The drama is lazy, mean-spirited stuff that falls back on the character’s clichés, then takes them to out-of-character extremes for the sake of laughs that never come. A highly spoilerific example will appear if you hover over this image:

There Will Be Blood: I’m not sure I could say I enjoyed this. People who haven’t seen it keep asking me what it’s like. What’s it like? It’s a masterpiece. It’s an extraordinary piece of cinema, a phenomenal performance, a work of art. Did I like it? No, not really.

I’m just not that interested in cinema, or performances, or art. I was gripped all the way through, and as critics have said, what’s exciting about it is that you have no idea where it’s going. But by the end – which is macabre, surreal, comic, and utterly sick – I just thought “Oh. Nowhere, then.”

No Country For Old Men: This I did enjoy, a lot, but I still choke on my popcorn whenever someone calls it the Coens’ best. Are we talking about the same Coens? The Fargo, Lebowski, Fink, O Brother, Hudsucker Coens? Maybe there are other Coens.

Again, it’s extraordinarily cinematic and artistically beautiful in a whole set of ways I don’t care about. What I did love about its direction was the fetishistic attention to detail: the sweeping black scuff-marks on the police station floor from the cop thrashing as he choked, the burn-splatters around close-range gunshot-wounds when they’re stripped bare for treatment, the way one character’s fate is only communicated to us by whether or not another checks the soles of his shoes.

It’s also probably the most excruciatingly tense thriller I’ve ever seen – there are long scenes where you know precisely what will happen, but not precisely when, and I felt like I lost years of my heart-healthy life to each.

What I liked most about it was that it felt like how a thriller premise would play out in the real world: the major plot events are determined by brutal, random chance that doesn’t bias the hero or villain, and when a character dies, it’s not always a poetic defeat at the hands of his nemesis.

But unlike most of its fans, I didn’t think the ending was profound or interesting. I get it. I got it a while back. I got it from the title of the movie. I didn’t need the credits to roll on some absurd symbolic chin-stroking introspection to tell me what the point of the film was.

Gone Baby Gone: This absolutely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the above two, but rarely is. It’s a noir private-detective thriller starring Casey Affleck, who is a dramatically better actor than Ben in both sense of the word; and directed by Ben, who is a dramatically better director than actor, again in both senses.

It revolves around a missing child, and the length and breadth of dilemma they mine from that scenario is alarming. It culminates in a decision so tough that you’re left with no idea who you’re rooting for, even as it tears all the good guys apart. That’s the hardest part of noir to achieve: true moral ambiguity, a situation so sticky it’s no longer clear who’s doing the right thing. Gone has a resolution of sorts, but it’s so hard won that it feels sobering rather than victorious.

Charlie Wilson’s War: Very much liked this, but given that it was written by Aaron Sorkin and prominently featured Seymour Hoffman, I’d expected to love it. Hoffman is superb – a whole film about his character rather than Hanks’ would have been magnificent. I just didn’t care all that much about Wilson’s private life, or Roberts’ character’s subplot, and those took up a lot of the running time.

Knocked Up: This is the only one I did see last year, twice in fact. It’s the funniest I’ve seen in ages, and emotionally honest with it. The premise is cheap – “Ha ha what if an ugly guy got you pregnant? Lol.” – but then the film never flinches from the awkward, unhappy consequences of that.

It pays for that poster by having to tackle a really hard question: what do you do if it’s not working out but there’s a kid? And it doesn’t dodge it by having them magically turn out to be soulmates or by killing off the baby (you laugh, but it’s been done). It actually gives an answer, comes out and says “This unhappy compromise is slightly less unhappy than the other unhappy compromises.”

Also, lol. Jack and Jill – the network executives who alternately congratulate and neurotically demean Katherine Heigl’s character – are worth the ticket price alone. And the weird, slight-too-friendly relationship between Seth Rogen’s character and Paul Rudd’s – the only real soul-mates of the film – just gets funnier and funnier. There’s also a lot of good relationship philosophy, meditations on chairs, a fantastic performance from a kid, and the seriousness of Steve Martin vehicles. In fact, quotes:

“Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn’t last 22 minutes. It lasts forever.”

“Oh, Matthew Fox? The Lost guy? You know what’s interesting about him?”
“What?”
“NOTHING.”

“Where do babies come from?”
“Where do you think they come from?”
“Well. I think a stork, he umm, he drops it down and then, and then, a hole goes in your body and there’s blood everywhere, coming out of your head and then you push your belly button and then your butt falls off and then you hold your butt and you have to dig and you find the little baby.”
“That’s exactly right.”

Dan In Real Life: I don’t even know why I saw this, the best I’d heard was that it wasn’t as bad as it might seem. That’s true; it’s wonderful.

It’s so damn hard to make me care about a character, let alone root for them, but Dan (Steve Carrell) treads a tightrope between pathetic victim and jerk that just about keeps him clear of either – a rare feat.

Each time it builds excruciating emotional tension, it doesn’t so much diffuse it with humour as release it in a controlled explosion. I’m sure most of the things I laughed weren’t funny at all, the script just has an uncanny knack for poking me in the ribs when I’m most vulnerable.

Like Knocked Up, it takes a really tricky mess of plot points and doesn’t shy away from picking a line of best-fit through them, but its unflinching acceptance of the consequences of that doesn’t hold up all the way to the end. There’s just one, brief, tired old trope for resolving a love triangle that they roll out towards the end to keep everyone happy, and it does marr the otherwise impressive awkwardness of the whole ordeal.

Bee Movie: What the hell? Why did everyone tell me this sucked? I caught this on a plane, because one person of five had told me it was ‘okay’. It was great! I laughed ten times more than I did during Ratatouille, none of the characters were anything like as annoying, and it was actually rather original. There’s a bit where Jerry Seinfeld bee flies repeatedly into the same pane of glass about ten times before stopping, looking at it for the first time and muttering, “Oh that is just diabolical.”

Enchanted: I really thought I would loathe this, and I didn’t. It’s about a Disney princess who comes to life, so you can imagine what else was on the plane that I ended up watching it. But it’s sort of almost halfway charming. All I’d seen before was a clip of that awful “That’s How You Know” song on the Oscars, which Once rightly pounded into the dust and snatched the award from. But when that number actually came around in the film, with the slightly absurd way it starts, and the reggae buskers – I tried not to smile and was unsuccessful.