OK. Last week I zipped through documentaries, animated films, action and horror.
This week a quick round up of the best mainstream English-speaking films and my favourite foreign language films of the year.

Films In English
And, although it seems a long time ago now, the various films nominated at last year's Oscars were actually a pretty good crop. Slumdog Millionaire, the Best Picture winner, was as good as everyone says, creating a brilliant vision of Bombay, from the cruellest slums to the wild energy and colour of its streets. With an appealing cast and dynamic direction, this was storytelling of the highest order.
Mickey Rourke, impressive in many small roles since his return to acting, got to prove his not inconsiderable worth in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, the sad tale of an aging fighter clinging to dreams of glory, while Ron Howard atoned for his bland Dan Brown adaptations by making the gripping Frost Nixon, wherein the famous Watergate interview became a veritable gladiatorial contest between a lightweight David Frost and Frank Langella's self-loathing president.
Doubt was another acting showcase, pitting Philip Seymour Hoffman's dubious priest against the buttoned down sanctimony of Meryl Streep's mother superior, while The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button amazed with its faultless special effects, all aimed at allowing Brad Pitt to age in reverse, a plot gimmick that sounded outlandish but was achieved with such style that it never detracted from the film's melancholic ruminations on memory and the passing of time.
Clever scripts were all over the place it seems. Best Original Screenplay winner In Bruges was a quirky Irish take on Tarantino-like hitmen, with Colin Farrell and Brendon Gleeson hanging out in the titular city and talking a lot. The Coen Brothers followed their Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men by throwing everyone a curveball with Burn After Reading, a comedy that did its best to wrong-foot you at every turn and a spy film without any actual spying. It also featured a side-splitting cameo from Brad Pitt.
Strangest of the comedies was, however, Synecdoche, New York, a metaphysical extravaganza from the warped mind that brought us Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The bizarre plot has Philip Seymour Hoffman's theatre director awarded a 'Living Genius” grant which he uses to mount a play that will examine his own life. So he hires an actor to play himself and, later, an actor to play the actor playing himself. And so on… It's dazzling, baffling, and surprisingly moving.
Less unusual but still groundbreaking was Michael Mann's Public Enemies, with an outrageously charismatic Johnny Depp as doomed outlaw John Dillinger. Filmed in striking high def, this may be a sign of how all movies will look one day.
And, last but not least, two offerings from Britain, both seriously downbeat. Hunger vividly examines IRA prisoner Bobby Sands' hunger strike in Maize prison while The Red Riding Trilogy is a series of three intertwining films exploring corruption in the Yorkshire Police force in the seventies and eighties. Extraordinary achievements.

World Cinema
Strange, beautiful and visionary, You, The Living came from Sweden. Possibly the strangest film I saw all year, it is composed of a series of static interlinked tableaux from a city where everything is a grey-green pastel colour. Those with a correspondingly surreal sense of humour will find it hilarious.
The Counterfeiters posed moral dilemmas a-plenty as it told the true story of Jewish prisoners forced to work as forgers for the Nazis, while The Band's Visit was a slow yet minutely observed look at tentative relations between Egypt and Israel, seen through the eyes of a touring orchestra lost and taken in by wary locals.
Palm D'Or winner The Class was the most honest, fully-rounded and intelligent film about the conflicts of modern education you could hope to see as it observed a term's teaching at a working class Parisian high school, while Ben X (not to be confused with Ben 10) was Dutch film that used striking visuals and sound editing to take you inside the world of an autistic teenager.
My two favourites from Asia were both detective films, South Korea's The Chaser, soon to be remade in America by the same folk that did The Departed, and Johnny To's Mad Detective. They show an originality and vitality so often missing from their Hollywood counterparts.
And for some mind-bending time travel action try Timecrimes, a low-budget Spanish flick that makes up in sheer ingenuity what it might lack in budget. It cant' be long before someone remakes this one too.