There is never an oversupply of classy costume dramas but this year there were two. Audience favourite The King's Speech was not only serious-minded, it was fun - taking full advantage of the playful character of the Duchess of York and a surprisingly sexy approach to speech therapy.
Jane Eyre lacked the jokes but gave us full-blown emotional trauma, which for all Jane Eyre nuts is perfectly blissful.
Making a documentary about how you are seeing a Kiwi boy without your Chinese parents' knowledge of it is one way of introducing them to their new son-in-law. To then fictionalise the story and make a full-fledged romantic comedy is really pushing family relationships.
Fortunately for director Roseanne Liang, her parents have long ago forgiven her. For the audience of My Wedding and Other Secrets, we got a delightful reminder that you do not have to be Katherine Heigl to have a complicated romance.
Normally, once I have seen a film, that is it - I never want to see it again. Super 8 is one of the exceptions because it is just so beautifully crafted.
This is one of those rare cinematic worlds where every character is fully fleshed and, in their own minds, the hero of the narrative. It makes a standard kids-chasing-an-alien-monster plot into something rich and vivid.
Who would have predicted watching the wild young Johnny Depp that he would end up a staple of children's movies. Even more astonishingly, he seems scarcely less wild now. His not-so-inner weirdness was unleashed once again in Rango, a cartoon where no-one looked adorable.
It might have hurt the merchandise sales but gave us grit with laughs, always a winning combination.
Romance is the most mocked of the genres but the hardest to do because when you run out of ideas, you cannot just throw in an explosion to liven things up, a winning strategy everywhere else.
One Day played with the "but without your glasses, you're beautiful" cliche, having Anne Hathaway ugly up for the first half as she mooned over glamour boy Jim Sturgess. It also had the gimmick of only seeing them on the same day each year but, by carefully ordering the sequences, it worked.
Mostly, gross-out comedy is a game for the lads.
With Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig decided that she was up for the challenge. She certainly came through with shenanigans in a bridal shop that, once seen, are impossible to forget.
That they were also funny made this worth seeing, as well as groundbreaking - but they have to share the honour because The Hangover Part II came out bigger and almost as good, which meant that it out-grossed all the other naughty boys with gags to spare for Part III.
Every once in a while, there comes a film that is so manically visual you just stop caring if any of it makes the remotest sense.
Sucker Punch is also the best-named movie of the year because it never stopped punching us between the eyes with increasingly elaborate sets, costumes and CGI. You could take any still from this movie and spend a happy hour luxuriating in the detail.
This is a bit of trick one because it is not Twilight: Breaking Dawn - Part 1. Maybe in a few years I will be writing as enthusiastically about Robert Pattinson as I currently do about Johnny Depp, but, on the evidence of Water for Elephants, I doubt it.
Maybe one day he will stop smirking and learn to act.
Meanwhile, he does display a rare talent in finding something even less appealing than the consummation of Edward and Bella's love - cruelty to animals.
- Christine Powley
