We've already been casting a revisionary eye over Lord Lucan, the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination and the Profumo affair. Last year Sheridan Smith portrayed Mrs Ronnie Biggs for ITV, but what took them so long to get around to the Great Train Robbery itself? Just hours too long for the real Ronnie Biggs, as it happened.

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

There’s a wonderful moment in Bruce Reynolds’s autobiography when he describes what became of his mate, a fellow train robber who had fled to Canada but was hunted down by the enigmatic Tommy Butler. Four and a half years after the Great Train Robbery in which crooks made off with £2.6million, Detective Chief Superintendent Butler had come to arrest Charlie Wilson and was knocking on his door.

Though greeted ambivalently when it made its debut at the end of 2012, Ripper Street has looked increasingly like TV's undervalued secret weapon as it has surged purposefully through this second series. Maybe the title was misjudged, suggesting it was just another gruesome and mist-shrouded Victorian murder mystery. Turns out it was much more than that.

Special Dialogue is a frothy, lunchtime news-and-chat programme on Indonesia's national television channel. One day – not a special day – its bubbly female anchor hosted three older men. One was called Anwar Congo. She smilingly introduces them by saying “Anwar and his friends developed a new, more efficient system for exterminating communists. It was more humane, less sadistic and avoided excessive violence.” It’s one chilling moment amongst many in a powerful film.

Tarantino calls Big Bad Wolves “the best film of the year”. With its Reservoir Dogs-style scenes of mutilation that are never quite as awful as you fear, a thick streak of brutal black comedy, and a twisting plot in a confined setting, Israeli writer-directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado could almost have designed their second feature to appeal to Quentin.

Reactions to Only God Forgives are going to be defined by expectations. Its star, Ryan Gosling, is an all-purpose arts polymath equally at home with music and film, who has directed and written as well as acted. Its director, the Danish-born Nicolas Winding Refn, has no problems with pushing genres beyond their limits despite working within America’s film industry. Gosling was in Refn’s 2011 film Drive, and their follow-up might have been expected to develop that film’s approach by once again hyper-stylising the familiar.

Whether you’re partial to Highsmith or Hitchcock, or both, there’s something deliciously exciting about the prospect of Strangers on a Train. Much of that anticipation lies in the intriguing question of which side of the material this adaptation will fall – with book or film, two very different animals – and curiosity as to the staging. "Hitch" has rather spoiled us for visuals. Or has he?

Dom Hemingway (Jude Law) is addicted to his own voice, whether he’s soliloquising about his cock, his safe-cracking, his hangover, or telling the psychotic Russian gangster whose houseguest he is how much he wants to fuck his girlfriend. His ornately foul-mouthed verbosity exhausts even himself as he explodes through life, punching, bragging, drinking, drugging and self-destructing, skin puffy, teeth stained, face scarred, gut flabby and eyes staring with fierce confusion, constantly startled by the latest disaster he’s inexplicably ploughed into. “I’m a cunt!” Dom keeps realising.

And he is. He’s a piece of work, the most entertaining and least pretty work Jude Law has done on film. You’d be terrified if you found him leaning next to you at the bar, like lit TNT. Dom isn’t nice, likeable, relatable or excusable, and 90 minutes in his company, which is 90% of what this film amounts to, is an uneven ride. But blimey it’s fun.

American writer/director Richard Shepard has gorgeous form in sullying matinee idols, giving Pierce Brosnan his best role as a boozy, whoring, shaky-fingered hitman in The Matador (2005). That was a better film because Brosnan was a more naturally sardonic fit for a vain, handsome man going to seed (he’d already happily undercut his image in The Tailor of Panama).

The Matador also had a more tensely involving plot than Shepard remembers to write here. Dom simply gets out of jail after keeping silent for 12 years on his heist accomplices, during which time his wife has died of cancer. His loyal retainer Dickie (Richard E. Grant) takes him straight to the pub (where the smoking ban is unilaterally revoked), then on to the south of France estate of Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir), the gangster he’s stayed silent for. A fitting reward is given then cruelly dashed from his grasp (an epic coke and booze binge is a contributing factor), and Dom finds himself back on the south London streets, begging for forgiveness from a daughter and grandson he’s barely known, and work from Lestor (Jumayn Hunter, pictured below left), the son of an old rival, now running a crime empire that wheezing Dom, with his pre-digital skills, needs humbling scraps from.

The sentimental family subplot feels wheeled in from a very different film. Redemption isn’t Dom’s style. Like Bichir’s sheathed, polite threat as Fontaine and the childishly resentful Lestor, Law’s outlandish mockney creation suggests the cartoonish work of a more talented Guy Ritchie, not Shepard’s British crime character models, the more unnervingly convincing Sexy Beast and The Hit.

The film’s real emotional counterweight is Richard E. Grant’s Dickie, the 10% and maybe much more that isn’t just about Dom. Dressed in superfly fashion from the Seventies, when he last felt on top, and blatantly, beautifully channelling Withnail, Dickie’s loyal love for Dom, and childish delight when he seems set to head-butt the odds and win the day, is perfect. Everything else is a long, wild riff by Shepard and Law, worth hearing at least once.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Dom Hemingway