There were some striking coincidences, often illustrating the political and social issues of the time, during the last year.

Its first week saw the release of Repulsion by Roman Polanski - convicted of an underage sex crime in the US - as the joint report by the NSPCC and Metropolitan Police on Jimmy Savile's crimes was published.

This was followed by arguably the most controversial release of the year, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, a revenge film where racists uttering "nigger" are dispatched to Boot Hill.

Then there were Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Katherine Bigelow's Zero Dark Force, released as President Obama was making his second inaugural address.

Sadly, Spielberg included an epilogue suggesting Old Abe wanted to visit Jerusalem and Bigelow gloried in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.

There were many films fighting the US war on the world from the ludicrous Olympus Has Fallen to the satire White House Down.

The first featured North Koreans capturing the White House as the US were claiming they were planning for war and the latter imagined a right-wing conspiracy to bring down a Democratic president.

There was flag-waving and fanning the flames of Islamophobia aplenty in Star Trek: The Darkness, Iron Man, World War Z and the new man of steel film resolved again to defend the "American way."

Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips, whose eponymous hero was played by Tom Hanks, was based on the trials of a real-life US merchant seaman saved from capture by Somali pirates. But despite Greengrass including footage to illustrate how the Somalis' desperation is driven by imperialism, it was still polishing up the tarnished us image.

Not that I'm suggesting anything as crude as Tinseltown and CIA collusion but we know from Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars and Alex Gibney's The Story of Wikileaks that might not be so far-fetched.

It could be, as Slavoj Zizek suggests in The Pervert's Guide To Ideology, the result of a consensus determined by the dominant ideology exemplified in cinema.

If only he could avoid the laboured Lacanian mannerisms, he might not have had to keep beating us around the head with references to the likes of John Carpenter's They Live.

French director Laurent Cantet provided some political punch in FoxFire, about a gang of girls who set up a secret society to revenge themselves on men that gradually imploded.

Upstream Colour by Shane Carruth was another film that refused to follow the rules by providing a chilling caricature of how contemporary society's need for placebos is raping the planet.

With gangsters acting out caricatures drawn from US films, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing involved one of their number recounting that the murder of two million communists was some form of catharsis.

Then we had the US's most infamous ally Israel being shopped by former heads of Shin Bet, the internal security service, who owned up to their role in the torture and assassinations of anti-zionists in The Gatekeepers.

Typically, Pedro Almodovar's I'm So Excited provided an irreverent take on September 11 2001, featuring conflicted characters in a crippled plane having to confront their fears while they're looking for a place to land.

On the home front, Ken Loach's Spirit of '45, came across as a party political broadcast to launch Left Unity as an alternative to Labour.

What was never addressed in the film was why, given the sense of growing social consciousness, every election since the end of WWII has been decided by Liberals swinging between Labour and Tory.

As ever, Loach peddles the notion of revolution from the fractious fringe rather than uniting those involved in class and democratic struggle to develop socialist consciousness.

Such was the strategy of the Chilean communists trying to unite the opposition to Pinochet's regime in the 1988 referendum as illustrated in Pablo Larrain's NO.

Likened to Loach's Kes, the best of British came in the form of The Selfish Giant by writer-director Clio Barnard. It stars Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas as two "feral" kids trying to survive the return to the Victorian conditions by those advocates of the One Nation concept.

An alternative view was provided by John Robert's The Day of Flowers, a warm-hearted comedy about a trip to Cuba by two quarrelsome sisters to bury their father's ashes in socialist soil. While recognising that the country has problems due to US sabotage and blockade, Cuban courage and ingenuity inspires them to resolve their differences.

Foreign films of note included Hu-Sun Chan's Dragon, an all-action drama about courage and hope and Andre Serge's poignant Sun Li and The Poet on the plight of immigrants, in which a Chinese cafe worker in Venice is befriended by an ageing Serbian communist poet.

Blue Is The Warmest Colour deservedly won the Cannes film festival Palme D'Or for director Abdellatif Kechiche and actors Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Sedoux.

Sold as a "lesbian love story," it was more about the problems that any couple might encounter, here manifested by their different ambitions due to class and cultural differences.

The most bizarre film of the year was Blancanieves, an imaginative take by Pablo Beger on the Grimm Brothers' Snow White, which has the heroine saved from the wicked stepmother by seven bull-fighting dwarves.

It was monochromatic, silent melodrama that would break the hearts of all but the hardened cynic.

The Patience Stone features a woman caring for her comatose husband in a warring Islamic state whose praying transforms from a confession to relating a life that if made public would have her stoned.

It's based on a Persian myth that if you pour you sins into a stone it will shatter and change your life, a metaphor for reconsidering all those restrictive taboos.

Many people bang their heads against the wall in the forlorn hope of change, sometimes realising they have to change themselves. Such tenacity is shown in Turkish director Yilmaz Erdogan's Butterfly Dream, which traces the lives of two poets struggling for personal and political liberation.

It finishes with a beautiful dialectical quote along the line of "misery is the excuse for poems and poems are the excuse for life."

It's a reminder that though we might live in an increasingly dystopian nightmare due to capitalism, we should understand that in the process of the struggle the latter produces its own gravediggers.

Erdogan's film perfectly demonstrates the culture of resistance that emerges in that struggle.

Jeff Sawtell

Another year, another 400 or so films seen, reviewed and then filed - usually in the subconscious where they deserve to fester unremembered except under hypnosis.

A couple of things are worth remembering when it comes to choosing the best or worst films of the year. Such ratings are personal rather than carved in stone and one person's masterpiece is another's nightmare.

And, while cinema is an art, Hollywood and the rest of the world have chosen to transform art into commerce.

So trash like Iron Man and Pirates of the Caribbean, along with other high-cash, low-IQ earners are what, in a commercial age, most films are really all about. As legendary - in his own mind and those of his publicists - Hollywood producer Joseph E Levine put it, "You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough."

That said, below are the 10 films released in 2013 that I would happily see again, along with the 10 I'd willingly have paid to miss.

Top Ten:

1. American Hustle
2. Before Midnight
3. Django Unchained
4. The Iceman
5. In the House
6. The Kings of Summer
7. Much Ado About Nothing
8. Nebraska
9. Philomena
10. The Way, Way Back

Ones to miss:
1. After Earth
2. The Big Wedding
3. Clouds Atlas
4. Dom Hemingway
5. A Field in England
6. Frances Ha
7. Kick-Ass 2
8. Oldboy
9. Romeo and Juliet
10. Spring Breakers

Ethan Carter