Maybe the best way to explore the modern human condition is through black comedy. ROTTING IN THE SUN is an inventive and surprising satire on what it’s like to live now, in existences mediated by the internet.

“I’ve been here before,” starts Sam Smith’s theme for SPECTRE. And we have. SPECTRE recycles so many elements from previous Bonds in a rearrangement that is less than the sum of its parts: a seven-letter title and insight into Bond’s past like SKYFALL; a shadowy criminal organisation like QUANTUM; Bond and his love interest getting to know each other on a train like CASINO ROYALE; a high-speed boat chase down the Thames starting from the MI6 Building like WORLD.

PAPRIKA has the visual and narrative inventiveness that fans of INCEPTION think it has. It’s a joyously confusing depiction of dreams and dreamscapes that I’ll need to watch a second time to properly take in.

It’s fun to imagine the screening for Studio Ghibli executives and creative staff where they realised that Miyazaki Hayao’s ‘last’ film involves an ageing wizard who allows the world he’s created to crumble because he can’t find a worthy successor.

It would be hyperbole to blame SKYFALL for the ills of the United Kingdom after the 2015 general election. And yet…

It’s hard to avoid reading this film through a class lens whereby Matthew Broderick’s character, Dr. Steve Finch, is positioned as the reasonable one in the central conflict entirely through his middle-class status rather than through any reasonable actions.

A forgettable adaptation. Mark Gatiss’ new episodes consistently fail to capture the eerie atmosphere of the ‘70s A Ghost Story for Christmas shorts and they end up feeling awfully flat.

What stands out in David Lowery’s telling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the film’s poetic depiction of a land perched between paganism and Christianity, in that boundary space between competing ways of life: a solstice of cultures, a time—like Christmas—when the barriers between worlds are made thin.

A victim of sloppy pre-production and the AMPTP’s failure to negotiate, QUANTUM OF SOLACE was clearly not ready to be made.

Every frame of this film is burned into my brain after watching it once every two years or so since I was old enough but it remains delightful every time, joyous every time, and I well up every time during the scene of the Christmas yet-to-come where Tiny Tim (Jerry Nelson) has died.