The beautifully adorned Grand Budapest Hotel is not only home to the fastidious, foul-mouthed concierge Gustave H. and his bellboy and confidante Zero but to a myriad of other fantastic characters. This is director Wes Anderson's candy coloured ode to the art of storytelling, and his tribute to the actors he's collaborated with and strong friendships he's forged via his illustrious filmmaking career. Anderson's eighth film is a warming, welcoming and, of course, whimsical comedy caper which whizzes by at a break-neck pace and is gifted with his signature air of melancholy.

This hotel is located in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, found lodged between two countries at the precipice of war. The film begins in the 1980s where we meet the unnamed author of the titular novel (Tom Wilkinson), who explains that the story we are about to see unfold will be presented exactly as described to him back in the 60s. We are then taken back in time to meet the writer as a young man (now Jude Law) who is hearing Zero’s story first-hand in the dining hall of the Grand Budapest itself. Zero is played as an older man by F. Murray Abraham and his recollections take us back one final time, this time to the 30s where we get stuck into a murder mystery and meet Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), alongside Zero's beloved Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) who works at a small confectionary store.

So a story within a story plays out and yet this detailed, layered and sprawling narrative has a lightness of touch thanks to its great sense of humour and Anderson’s passionate hand. He places the audience, for the most part, in the thick of it with Gustave and Zero as they try not only to solve the murder of Madame D. (one of Gustave’s elderly blonde lovers - played by Tilda Swinton in glorious prosthetics, as pictured above right), but as they break out of prison, steal some art and as they go on a perilous adventure.

Anderson reaches into his vast pool of key players, including Bill Murray and Bob Balaban, who along with many others make up the Society of Cross Keys, a reliable group of international concierges who can be called up in times of need and who help out Gustave on his escapade. This loving nod pays tribute to the people who have helped Anderson along the way, yet entirely fits within the confines of this madcap yarn. Anderson has also acknowledged a debt to those directors from the golden age of Hollywood such as Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges whose energy, verve and quick wittedness he so wonderfully emulates. And Anderson’s varied canon of influences also includes Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, which explains the placing of the hotel atop a snowy mountain.

The director's trademark meticulous long shots introduce you to the hotel, the varying colours of its corridors over time (which in its 60s setting has an unsettling Kubrickian feel) and its exuberant characters. He’s once again in a reflective mood switching between time periods and aspect ratios with his usual precision. And all this is fused together by a particularly brilliant and rare comedic turn from Fiennes as Gustave (who combines belters such as “I go to bed with all my friends” with po-faced expressions). He's paired with newcomer Tony Revolori as the young Zero - who looks up to this father figure of sorts - in a winning combination.  Their relationship is depicted with both a deep solemnity at the tragedy of losses that haunt them and the brio of the British stiff upper lip, which Gustave extols with aplomb.

Willem Dafoe is once again a menace with nasty gnashers, this time more vampiric like Max Schreck, rather than being in possession of rotting cheese-dusted dentals à la Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart. He’s henchman to a moustache-twirling Adrien Brody who adds a playfully macabre edge to the proceedings.

Ultimately The Grand Budapest Hotel is cinema at its most delightful, it rattles along right up to its abrupt ending which reminds us of the power of engrossing storytelling, how we might get swept up in the rush to get to the denouement, but that we never really want great stories to end.

Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Grand Budapest Hotel

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..." thus begins Hunter S Thompson's seminal Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. And the spirit of that book and HST's surreal "gonzo" take on reality live on in this oddball "comedy adventure game set in an alternate-reality Cold War World, plagued with Corporate Espionage, CyberCrime™ and Sentient Martinis."

There are some that will tell you that they don't make movies like they used to. But even if that's true, film is an art-form that continues to thrive by moving with the times - reflecting change, reinventing itself and each year we're supplied with no shortage of outstanding cinema from across the globe. It's a fact that makes compiling the traditional end-of-year list far from a chore, and more like greedily picking your way through a banquet.

The exquisitely eclectic David O. Russell is fast becoming the go-to director for Oscar hungry actors. His last two films, 2010's The Fighter and 2012's Silver Linings Playbook, garnered their respective casts an astonishing seven Academy Awards nominations between them, including three wins. His latest, American Hustle, combines key cast members from those two films, creating an awards monolith (the New York Film Critics Circle would agree - they named it Best Picture earlier this month). But if the cast might make it seem impossibly worthy, the best thing about American Hustle is that it's pure, unadulterated fun.

Set in 1978 and vaguely based on a true-life story (known as the Abscam scandal), American Hustle starts as it means to go on by mischievously drawing attention to one of its male character’s terrible hair. In this case it's (to use the film's own words) a "rather elaborate" comb-over, and we watch as Christian Bale's Irving Rosenfeld carefully and with endearing futility maintains the illusion. Irving and his girlfriend Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) are woozily-in-love con artists. With their art knock-offs and loans scam they blissfully put the romance into grifting (and, in a memorable sequence, dry cleaning) and, although Irving is married to another (Rosalyn - Jennifer Lawrence, pictured below), the lovers are making it work.

When Sydney, in the guise of the English Lady Edith, brings in new mark Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper - sporting a tight perm, achieved with teeny tiny rollers, as pictured below) he turns out to be an undercover FBI agent and, in exchange for immunity, he recruits both Sydney and Irving to bring in four bigger fish. Richie's ambition leads him to exploit the good intentions of the mayor of Camden, New Jersey - Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner, wearing his hair in a kind of bouffant wave) - who's looking to kick-start the Atlantic City economy. The bait is that old classic, a "fake sheikh" scheme. Richie's increasingly reckless machinations cause major ball-ache for his cautious boss Stoddard Thorsen (the marvellous Louis C.K.) along with an increasingly nervous Irving, and they watch helplessly as more politicians and eventually Mafiosi are drawn into the sting.

Eric Warren Singer's original script appeared on 2010's "Black List" of the best unproduced screenplays, under the considerably more provocative title of "American Bullshit" before being picked up by David O. Russell and reworked into a broader, more comedic style. When teamed with The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook it's intended as part of a three-film evolution following characters who are attempting to reinvent themselves and reverse their fortunes.

While the men in American Hustle are busy wearing spectacularly naff hair, the women steal the show. Lawrence is a riot as Irving's crass, unstable wife whose indiscretion threatens to bring the whole enterprise crashing down ("I thought you were mysterious”, Irving moans, "But mysterious just meant depressed"). She's got a personality as precarious as her swirling ice-cream sundae up-do and snags many of the film's funniest and most fabulous moments, including a vengeful sing-along and a run-in with a brilliantly described "science oven".

Lawrence is a doll and, for my money, she can have any supporting actress award she wants - but Adams is my pick here. Her Sydney is a complex creature: smart, vampy and, with her perma-plunging necklines, proudly sexual. Yet we also see that she's tortured by doubt and this vulnerability means that she's the most thinking, feeling thing about a film that deliberately and provocatively teeters on the brink of parody. And when you get them in a room together, wow. As Sydney emerges for a pivotal business meeting on the arm of Richie (from smoke no less!) she's met by the lipsticked snarl of Rosalyn - "I know who you are" she hisses. The atmosphere between these two extraordinary women crackles and spits like incendiary electrics.

It could be argued that American Hustle is almost too colourful, that it takes too many risks for perfection to be possible, and though it's certainly a thrill when he turns up, Robert De Niro's cameo doesn't quite pop the way it should. Likewise, both Lawrence and Renner - while doing great jobs - seem a little young for their respective parts. Oh, and the plot: well, the plot is as torturously tangled as Christmas lights. But ultimately it says phooey to such trifles, for this is a ballsy beast which, as the grand patriotic title suggests, elevates the caper movie and provides both meat and mania for its glittering cast. American Hustle combines old-fashioned entertainment and glamour with visual invention and a modern eye for absurdity (yep, those hairstyles again). Right at the last, we've found the most enjoyable film of the year.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for American Hustle

Now here’s a funny thing, possums. Back in 1990 when one great Australian Dame, Joan Sutherland, gave her farewell performance, another, a certain housewife superstar from the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds, seemed closer to  retirement age. Now La Stupenda is no more, Dame Edna is a gigastar and it’s her turn to shrill a gladdie-waving goodbye to her adoring public. She doesn’t look a day older, nary a hair out of place in that immaculate lilac coiffure.

This is a strange one. Precious little happens and, in some ways, little is said in David Storey's muted chamber play from 1970. Two men named Harry and Jack – getting on in years, but keeping up appearances in jackets and ties – linger on a patio that's skirted by grass and strewn with autumn leaves. The sun is shining softly. Low-level birdsong is just audible in Amelia Sears's strongly cast production, staged in-the-round in the Arcola's intimate studio space.

Gloria is 58. Divorced 12 years earlier, she’s intent on living life. Her two children are grown up, she works in a characterless office and is open to almost anything. She’ll try cannabis, attends a class where instruction is given on releasing laughter and tackles yoga for the first time. Beyond keeping in touch with her son and daughter, her greatest efforts are directed towards her nightlife. On her own, Gloria goes to ballrooms, bars and nightclubs where she hopes to make a connection. Then, one evening, she encounters Rodolfo. His opening line is “are you always this happy?”

In a deranged world where Charlie Sheen is President of the United States, Hollywood gets a much-deserved and highly amusing roasting. Robert Rodriguez’s sequel to Machete goes straight for the jugular by mocking Hollywood's golden child, that "galaxy far, far away" film franchise - which doggedly refuses to sling its hook. Rodriguez not only flips his middle finger at reboots and outworn action clichés, he also takes jabs at US foreign policy and the controversy surrounding the Mexican border fence.

In keeping with the absurd humour of the previous film, POTUS demands that Machete (played once again by Danny Trejo) head to Mexico to solve the drug cartel problem in exchange for American citizenship. This impossible mission plays out like a Bond film but has more in common with the Austin Powers franchise. Violence and comedy go hand in hand here, with one joke after another massacring the logic of the Hollywood machine and its minimal and reductive roles for anyone outside a certain demographic. In his fight for justice and a green card, Machete comes up against evil mastermind Voz, played by the-no-longer-ubiquitous-for reasons-everyone-knows Mel Gibson, who inhabits a secret lair loaded with movie history weaponry – which sets up some of the funniest moments in the film.

Female roles are thankfully varied: Michelle Rodriguez (who, while we’re on the subject of a lack of decent roles for women in Hollywood, would be brilliant as Wonder Woman in the Justice League film when that happens) reappears in the role of Luz, who has moved from her taco truck to a warehouse as head of an underground resistance, now using technology to fight their battle. Sofia Vergara (pictured above centre) pops up as a gun-toting whorehouse madam, Amber Heard as a spy with a Miss San Antonio guise, Lady Gaga as a bad-ass bounty hunter and Vanessa Hudgens (still shedding her Disney tag) as the daughter of the head of the drug cartel.

The furiously fast-paced postmodern humour subverts the sexualisation of women in film by using and pushing it to its limits in a very cheeky way. In no way is the genre of grindhouse off limits either, with the outdated attitudes to women in many of those films taking a beating - the women get to cock their breastplated guns and deliver comical take-downs as recompense.

Considering the character of Machete first sprang to life in a manufactured trailer in Planet Terror (Rodriguez’s entry in the double feature Grindhouse, made with Quentin Tarantino), his longevity is surprising. And this stoned-faced, almost silent character isn’t quite over the hill yet - here we see him mocking Twitter (“Machete don’t tweet” he quips). Perhaps he aims at too many targets, but Rodriguez knows how important it is to laugh at himself and the inconsistencies of an industry that isn’t always representative of its viewers.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Machete Kills

Once you’d got over an initial sense of absurdity at Vinnie Jones as travel guide, to Russia and for National Geographic to boot, a certain logic kicked in: hard country, hard man. Some time after we'd lost count in Vinnie Jones: Russia’s Toughest of how often our guide had described himself as "football hard man and Hollywood tough guy”, something unfamiliar crept into view, namely an element of humility in the face of challenges that boggled the Jones imagination. Thankfully for all concerned, they were later left to those who knew how to cope with them better.

We're the Millers is a road movie which sees a group of outsiders learn how to fill traditional roles and find happiness. It's a film that flirts with rebellion but ultimately reveals itself to be boringly conformist. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber had a memorable hit with his debut Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story but, in the manner of one of that film's KOs, he falls flat on his back here.