Review of the year: Cinema

If there is a theme linking the stand-out films of this year, it must be uneasy companionship. The ties that bind came under strain in locations as distant as the streets of Dublin and the vineyards of Santa Barbara, and whether in a buddy movie, an ill-starred romance or a claymation epic, we got to know the perils and fleeting pleasures of staying loyal.

Fatih Akin's blistering drama Head-On begins as unpromisingly as a movie ever did - two failed suicides meet in a Hamburg hospital - but proceeds to trace a burgeoning rapport between a dishevelled beer-bum (Birol Unel) and a Turkish woman (Sibel Kekilli) who wants to escape the surveillance of her fundamentalist family. Swirling beneath its grungy pessimism is a powerful story of love across a racial and cultural chasm.

Sideways came out in January to a critical fanfare, but I've since noticed a backlash - no longer the vintage comedy we thought, but instead a load of ignoble rot. It seems that Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church as the faded roués on a week of wine-bibbing and golf were considered neither likeable nor even pardonable. For me it remains a glory, a poignant portrait of failure and unexpectedly enduring friendship.

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Another tragicomedy of middle age, Broken Flowers, saw Bill Murray as a melancholy Don Juan who embarks on a cross-country trip to find out which of his ex-girlfriends is the mother of his putative 19-year-old son. Murray's phiz has become something of a homage to catatonia, but the impression of regret he conveys is more moving for being so blithely concealed. Sharon Stone and Jessica Lange offer wonderful support.

France knows all about fractious relationships, and the heady bravura of Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped deals with the way a young Parisian desperado (Romain Duris) almost combusts under the pressure of his double life. He's in deep with his father's business of racketeering and slum evictions, but he also feels the reawakened possibilities of a musical gift bequeathed to him by his concert pianist mother. Duris recalls the ferrety handsomeness of Jean-Louis Trintignant, and his intensity makes us care keenly about his choice. As one critic put it: "Is it too late to be Rachmaninov instead of Rachman?" I wish I'd written that.

François Ozon has not yet recaptured the magisterial cool of Under the Sand, and his latest, 5x2, the story of a failed marriage told in reverse, didn't quite live up to its billing. But it had one of the performances of the year, from Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi as the vulnerable and baffled wife.

Apart from Sideways, there were two other fantastic odd-couple movies. Adam & Paul was almost entirely ignored, and, being a day in the life of two Dublin deadbeats looking to score heroin, it's probably not surprising. The spirit of Waiting for Godot loitered about Lenny Abrahamson's film, and it's perhaps the funniest, saddest, least judgemental movie about junkies since Drugstore Cowboy.

A more easily loveable duo were found in Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, another inventive, blissfully daft adventure involving the inventor and his faithful pooch. Nick Park and his team at Aardman are one of few things to celebrate in British film this year; the others were Saul Dibb's Bullet Boy, a grimly mesmerising story from Hackney's mean high-rises, and Annie Griffin's scabrous Edinburgh comedy Festival, which scored off the graph for bad taste.

The year's best laughs were to be had in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, a sex comedy that managed to be outrageously lewd and completely innocent at the same time. For an adrenalin jag I would recommend two mid-air thrillers, Red Eye and Flight Plan, preposterously plotted both, yet expertly tapping into our fear of flying post-September 11.

I end where I began, with a German masterpiece - Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel's momentous account of Adolf Hitler and his staff in their final days beneath Berlin, as witnessed by his favourite secretary, Frau Junge. As for troubled relationships, what else was at the film's heart but a nation's hideous romance with its Führer?

The Five Best

Head-On

Downfall

The Beat That My Heart Skipped

Sideways

Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit