Of all the festive institutions, the Christmas No 1 holds a special place in my heart. I was one of those kids who, over the month of December, would carefully plot which CD single I’d be pledging my allegiance to (usually not the ultimate winner, apart from that one year Gary Jules’s cover of “Mad World”, from the Donnie Darko soundtrack, fluked it).

The singer-songwriter Jesse Malin opens one of his songs with a monologue about a trip to Russia. Fresh out of a relationship, and invited by the gypsy punk troupe Gogol Bordello to open their tour of the country, he looked forward to seeing Red Square and spending time in a different world. He was disappointed, however, when the first things he saw there were a McDonald’s, a Starbucks and a Subway.

What a year for great British institutions. Sixty years of Elizabeth II, 50 years of James Bond, and a half-century of the Rolling Stones. To recycle an even older cliche, we will never see the like of any of them again.

If the subtitle - The Life and Near Death Story of Patty Schemel - didn't make it clear enough, Hit So Hard was never going to be your average "rockumentary". At about eight minutes in, before the titular drummer properly establishes us in the 1990s US grunge scene that forms much of the backdrop to her story, Schemel is already speaking openly and frankly about the addictions to alcohol and drugs that cost the lives of friends, her role in a platinum-selling rock band and very nearly her own life.

Julien Temple’s directing career has been struck seemingly stone-dead twice. After working with Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols on The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (1979), then again after the flop big-budget British jazz musical Absolute Beginners (1986), he was made a notorious cinema untouchable in the UK. Exiled in Hollywood, he fell back on his parallel life as a landmark pop video auteur.

We got to the beach around the 10-minute mark. Or “semi-naked suburbia”, as Michael Palin called it. And started patrolling the sands for rounded Brazilian rumps (female). Apparently only adolescent boys do this sort of thing, and television cameramen. A local scholar explained the terms deployed to describe the various body types. The melon, the guitar, the ... you don’t want to know. Palin certainly didn’t look as if he did.

It has never been easier to get sucked into a warm, simplistic sensibility which portrays every rich capitalist businessman as corrupt and amoral, but you spend 90 minutes watching Donald Trump in action and you start to wonder. If Trump didn't exist you suspect Martin Amis would invent him. He would probably call his caricature of a dastardly US business tycoon Donald Shit.

If you asked a bunch of foreigners to describe the British, I bet one of the phrases most frequently used would be “a nation of dog lovers”, so it was no surprise to discover that film-maker's Vanessa Engle's latest bulletin about the British and the way they live (shown as part of the excellent Wonderland strand) was about this nation's love affair with canines.

Argentine Celina Murga’s two feature films to date, Ana and the Others and A Week Alone, mark her out as one of the most original voices in a country chock full of talent.  Those films are concerned with individuals – respectively, a young woman and a group of children – in search of an identity, in a society that is giving them little direction. Her first documentary, Escuela normal, investigates this question at source.

Even now, as revelation after revelation about what really went on backstage at Television Centre in the 1970s play out in the tabloids, there seems something almost wholesome about the heyday of the televised beauty pageant. Compared to the daily barrage of heavily sexualised images we are bombarded with from the moment we wake as consumers of contemporary culture - bare arses before the watershed, fake orgasms selling shampoo, Kate Middleton’s tits on the evening news - the swimsuits the contenders paraded up and down in looked positively demure.