The best films of 2012: Philip French's choice

The year was dominated by franchises. They provided the multiplexes with a dangerously disproportionate part of box-office takings and were given disproportionate attention by the press. Two came to an end with The Dark Knight Rises and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2; two were revived by Prometheus, prequel to Alien, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The biggest franchise, of course, is the Bond-wagon. Now 50 years old, it was given the royal seal of approval at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in preparation for Skyfall, 007's 23rd outing and the second-best Bond to date.

The year's best fiction films were extremely good: varied in subject matter and with a nice geographic spread. Two of my favourite 2012 movies didn't quite make the top 10 cut, both wry American romantic comedies: Liberal Arts (Josh Radnor) and David O Russell's Silver Linings Playbook. But generally, with Ben Wheatley's Sightseers a major exception, comedy was thin on the ground. Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator was not the devastatingly bold satire it set out to be, and a succession of terrible wedding movies (among them The Hangover Part II and A Few Best Men) could put an end to matrimony. Ang Lee's Life of Pi was the only film genuinely enhanced by 3D, and interestingly the year's best animated film, Tim Burton's Frankenweenie, rejected CGI and returned to the old-fashioned, labour-intensive stop-motion model technique.

Once again, feature-length documentaries provided instruction, stimulation, provocation and entertainment of a kind the genre rarely did in my distant youth. Among my favourites were Lauren Greenfield's The Queen of Versailles, a hilarious account of the vulgar rich confronting austerity in Florida; Nostalgia for the Light, the Chilean Patricio Guzmán's painful and public meditation on time and memory; Julien Temple's hypnotic portrait of London: The Modern Babylon; and Bart Layton's The Imposter, the multi-layered story of a French conman.

But above all one man, admittedly a rather large one, towered over the year: Alfred Hitchcock. Thirty-two years after his death, his films (all but a single lost silent picture) are very much with us, and they're inseparable from his complex, often troublesome personality. The BFI put on the biggest Hitchcock retrospective ever staged. Several books have been added to the 70-plus about him, including Nicola Upson's period whodunit Fear In the Sunlight in which Hitch is seen in pre-production on Young and Innocent in mid-1930s Portmeirion. Two new movies centre on Hitchcock and his wife Alma at work in Hollywood, with Anthony Hopkins and Toby Jones impersonating the master in respectively Hitchcock (about the production of Psycho, to be released here in February) and The Girl (his perverse persecution of Tippi Hedren during the making of The Birds and Marnie, on BBC2 on Boxing Day). Most importantly, in the latest poll of international critics held every 10 years by Sight & Sound to determine the greatest films of all time, Hitchcock's Vertigo was the runaway winner.

Top 10

(In no particular order)

Amour (directed by Michael Haneke)

Argo (Ben Affleck)

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland)

Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik)

Holy Motors (Leos Carax)

Life of Pi (Ang Lee)

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi)

Best performance

Emmanuelle Riva/Jean-Louis Trintignant in Amour

Best screenplay

Chris Terrio for Argo

Turkey

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Stephen Daldry)