Julie Christie ushered in the swinging sixties as Liz, the girl whom Billy (Tom Courtenay) loves but isn’t man enough to accompany to London in Billy Liar (1963); director John Schlesinger introduced her swinging her bag as she bounces along a Bradford street. Christie does exactly the same in London when Schlesinger introduces her as the grown-up Diana Scott in Darling (1965), now restored and re-released on DVD and Blu-ray for its 50th anniversary. (The original trailer is the disc’s sole extra.)

Nothing pinpoints the Oscars' absurdity more than the absences of Mike Leigh’s masterpiece as Best Film candidate, of Timothy Spall from the Best Actor list - New York and London critics as well as Cannes made some amends – and even of Marion Bailey, Leigh’s partner, from the nominations for Best Supporting Actress. Spall fulfils the promise of his King Lear moment in Secrets and Lies as the artist described by Leigh as a "complex, curmudgeonly, convoluted character".

Continuing on from yesterday where great British comedy sat alongside Turkish slow cinema in our countdown of the best films from 13-6, here are our top five films of 2014. Another diverse selection which celebrates ambitious and immersive storytelling, technical prowess and breathtaking sights.

5. Inside Llewyn Davis (dirs. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen)

In 2014 theartsdesk film team presents their picks of the year with a list of 13 diverse titles from great homegrown and international directors. Thirteen is the number of theartsdesk film critics who voted in our end-of-year poll so we have compiled our list so each of our wonderful writers can act as a champion for one of their personal picks. Sci-fi, comedy and thrillers feature alongside slow cinema and experimental arthouse, showing off a range of tastes. 

In his director’s interview for Goltzius and the Pelican Company Peter Greenaway describes the public profiles that his films have achieved over the years, dividing them into an effective A and B list. He counts his 1982 The Draughtsman's Contract as his most approachable work, while acknowledging that its follow-up A Zed & Two Noughts was greeted by a really savage critical and popular reaction (though the director himself thinks it’s his best film).

The British romcom is in crisis. Once a pretty reliable source of charm and laughs, these films channelled the spirit of the UK's reliably brilliant sitcoms through the silver screen. Our romantic comedies can be great because we hold no truck with cheesy romance; moments that could be mawkish are undercut by self-deprecation, calamity and even politics. See Hugh Grant's bumbling speech in Four Weddings, the polemical Brassed Off, or Shaun of the Dead which gave us romance with added zombies.

However, recent efforts The Decoy Bride, Not Another Happy Ending, I Give It a Year and About Time have been plain disappointments or mixed bags. Into this climate of prevailing mediocrity comes Cuban Fury - a film with energy, good gags, no time for sentimentality and talent to burn. And still...

Cuban Fury is a film in which a fat chap dances his way into his hot boss's heart and has all the surprises and subtlety that suggests. Nick Frost plays Bruce Garrett, whose childhood history as a champion salsa dancer, bullied into discarding his passion, is unpacked in the time it takes to rattle through the opening credits. We join Bruce in his late thirties to find him overweight, stuck in a romantic rut and working at a firm specialising in industrial machinery. His colleagues are the amusingly indifferent Helen (an underused Alexandra Roach) and the sociopathically obnoxious Drew (Chris O'Dowd).

Bruce's spirits are lifted by the arrival of new manager Julia (Rashida Jones, pictured right) - and when he finds out she salsas, well then it's back on with the dancing shoes. Ian McShane is interestingly cast as a curmudgeonly dance teacher with whom Bruce reconnects, with Olivia Colman reliably lovely as Bruce's excitable sister and Kayvan Novak camping it up as a fellow salsa enthusiast.

Sitcom director James Griffiths's feature debut takes its cue from the energy and visual humour of Edgar Wright but - though his film zips along and is further enlivened by its dance sequences, including a bizarre and entertaining car park dance-off - visually it feels highly derivative, like a poor relation of the aforementioned's Cornetto trilogy. Jon Brown (Misfits and Fresh Meat), who pens the script, proves himself a competent gags man but the plot is hugely predictable, rushed and sometimes illogical (the unprepared-for final dance competition had me slapping my head).

In addition, one of the most frustrating aspects of Cuban Fury is that it moans about how beautiful women are too superficial to find men like Bruce desirable, but fails to acknowledge that, for a long time at least, Bruce has based his infatuation with Julia solely on her looks. And that's what it comes across as, an infatuation - there isn't much in the way of getting to know her, so when Bruce for example compiles a mix-tape, or turns up at Julia's flat it looks extremely creepy and you'll be willing her to get the funk out of there.

This is a story told from a male protagonist's perspective, granted, but it's still a shame that the female lead wasn't allowed much of a personality, especially given Jones' effervescent charm (see Parks and Recreation and the self-penned Celeste & Jesse Forever - much better platforms for her considerable comedic gift). But if Griffiths's first film is significantly flawed, it's far from awful with the likeable cast papering over some pretty hefty cracks to keep things predominantly amusing. Cuban Fury is undemanding, toe-tapping fluff which just about passes muster as an evening's entertainment and which works best (and only) if you savour the gags and switch your brain to unquestioning acceptance for the remainder. Meanwhile the wait continues for the next great British romcom.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Cuban Fury

Le Week-End is the third film written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell to probe late-flowering lust. So empathetically do the duo depict Anne Reid's character in The Mother (2003), Peter O'Toole's in Venus (2006), and now those played by Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent that the unofficial trilogy constitutes a revolt against the cultural hegemony of teen movies.

Energy is this season’s dirty word. The big six fix prices from their ivory towers beyond the national borders, and wouldn’t dream of turning up in person to take a fearful wigging from a Commons Select Committee. In the old days, it was all a bit different. Energy came overwhelming from coal, mined domestically by a huge workforce. So central to British life was coal that, when the industry was nationalised in 1947, the National Coal Board took what now seems a remarkable decision to set up a film unit and show the results in up to 800 cinemas.

Former video artist Clio Barnard's second feature - which took Cannes 2013 by storm with its stark and striking humanity - takes inspiration and its title from the Oscar Wilde fairytale. However that's not the film's only, or most significant, influence: The Selfish Giant is, by its director's own admission, a response to the continuing, corrosive impact of Thatcherism, an ideology that put selfishness ahead of societal needs and pushed millions to the margins.

One of the joys of autumn is the seasonal return to films about - and intended for - grown-ups, and movies don't come much more crisply and buoyantly adult than Le Week-End, at once the latest and best from the director/writer team of Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi. The abundant wisdom of the pair's third screen collaboration within 10 years surely reflects the growing awareness that comes with age of the derailments, large and small, that lie scattered along life's way.

But whereas one might expect a gathering dourness from this excavation of marital fissures as they are laid bare during a Birmingham couple's anniversary weekend in France, the film benefits from a glancing whimsy that is itself definably Gallic: it's as if the very presence of Paris has put a spring in everyone's step (a condition to which Woody Allen of late would clearly relate), leaving its blissful trio of stars to do the rest. And, zut alors, do they ever.  

Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan (pictured right with the film's third lead, Jeff Goldblum) are expertly matched as a couple who have barely settled into their Eurostar seats before the cracks in their conjugal union are beginning to show. Nick (Broadbent) is financially fretful, sexually unfulfilled, and browbeaten. He is also deeply smitten with Meg (Duncan), his coolly analytical spouse who jokes about being "tri-polar" and accuses her husband of 30 years of chewing his food like an "old horse at a trough". Will these few days away mark time for the pair at whatever cost to a family back home who are intermittently referenced via phone calls and the like? 

Maybe but just as possibly not, given the intermingling of opposites that for some while, one senses, has kept this marriage on track. "You can't not love and hate the same person," Nick decides, some time before he twice praises Meg as "hot" only to add the words "but cold" immediately after. The film is startlingly alert to the Janus-faced qualities of desire and desperation, and its neatly structured narrative gets a fillip from the introduction of a spry, wry Jeff Goldblum in prime form as Morgan, an old Cambridge pal of Nick's who has effected his own escape to Paris with a much younger, and pregnant, wife.

Is Morgan living any man's midlife dream? Once again, the film is too smart to answer decisively beyond building to a dinner party (with Goldblum, pictured left) that culminates in a monologue from Nick that looks set to become an acting class staple - though good luck to anyone attempting to better the haunted sense of self that Broadbent brings to every second of a superlative performance. His grasping cry of "don't do that" ranks in power with the "please don't" that accompanies the climax of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, as befits a film steeped in a full-blooded awareness of the theatre that is in no way stagey (the central pair are seen visiting Beckett's grave, while Broadbent's work puts one in mind on occasion of a celluloid Vanya.)  

Duncan is every bit as remarkable as the comparatively self-contained Meg, a tougher role in that this spoken embodiment of "melting ice" threatens to lob sympathy firmly in Nick's court: to that extent, one can tell that this is a movie made by men. On the other hand, it's difficult not to share Meg's exasperation at Nick's multiple deceptions, and Duncan's silken severity seems just the right complement to Broadbent's open-faced bewilderment mixed with alarm. Some might assume there to be no exit for this couple, to cite a Frenchman who goes unacknowledged here. But as an hommage-laden final scene suggests, lacerations can perhaps give way to levity as well. Here's betting that Nick and Meg trade in their return train ticket for many an aperitif at the Café de Flore.

Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Le Week-End