Look back on the movies of 2013 and one thing becomes clear: this has been a year of grandstand performances.
The global box office was again dominated by Marvel Comics - last year it was The Avengers that topped the charts with more than US$1.5 billion, this year Iron Man 3, taking US$1.2 billion - but it wasn't all about superheroes. The top 10 most lucrative films include Alfonso Cuarón's space saga Gravity, an eye-popping 3-D experience powered by a terrific turn from Sandra Bullock as a stranded astronaut fighting to survive.
If spending your days attached to wires to replicate zero-gravity requires fortitude, who knows what it took for the two actresses who made Blue is the Warmest Colour - for me the best non-English language film of the year.
A sensation at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux are stunning in this tale of two young French girls who fall in love and lust. The sex scenes aside, it's heart-on-sleeve stuff, full of the giddy passions and jealousies that being in a relationship can bring.
Other wonderful female performances come from Greta Gerwig as the hapless hipster in Noah Baumbach's utterly charming Frances Ha; Juliette Binoche as the asylum-committed artist in Bruno Dumont's Camille Claudel 1915; and Cate Blanchett - surely a favourite for next year's Oscars - in Woody Allen's wonderful study of mental breakdown, Blue Jasmine.
Women didn't have it all their way, though - from Michael Douglas' dazzling turn as pianist Liberace in Behind the Candelabra to Tony Servillo's sizzler as the dejected socialite in Paolo Sorrentino's The Grand Beauty. I would also wave a flag for Ben Foster and his stunning disappearing act as author William S. Burroughs in the beat-lit film Kill Your Darlings.
But my choice for film of the year is J.C. Chandor's All is Lost (to be released in Hong Kong in early 2014), thanks to the outstanding performance by the 77-year-old Robert Redford, who plays an unnamed sailor battling to save his sinking yacht. There's barely any dialogue or back-story - making Cuarón's similar-toned survival tale clumsy by comparison. It's hard to imagine a Hollywood studio ever making a film as daring as this again.
Talking of daring, after All is Lost and Blue is the Warmest Colour, my third best film of the year is also my favourite British movie: the wonderfully idiosyncratic A Field in England. Directed by Ben Wheatley, already a critical darling after his horror-tinged efforts Kill List and Sightseers, this left-field film set during the English civil war makes those works look mainstream with its tale of soldiers who accidentally consume magic mushrooms as they escape from battle.
But if I can give an overall prize, it'll go to the tenacious Alex Gibney. Following his clerical sex abuse documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, he unveiled another two films in 2013: We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks and The Armstrong Lie. Dealing with, respectively, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, these studies of two men obsessed with rewriting their own histories were utterly compelling - perhaps the best two performances of the year.
James Mottram
To judge from this year's box office results, action-packed blockbusters not only rule but appear to be the only game in town. And this verdict applies to films made in Hong Kong as well as elsewhere.
The results show, again, that Hong Kong cinemagoers are most willing to shell out for Hollywood fare. Local director Dante Lam Chiu-yin's Unbeatable makes it to the number four slot on the overall list - but its HK$44,631,344 box office doesn't even amount to half of chart-topper Iron Man 3's HK$106,389,801 total take.
But as the critics' lists remind us, filmmakers around the world are making movies in different genres - and while some of these works won't get a general release in Hong Kong, a considerable number do get screened here, even if only at film festivals or on limited releases. During Oscar season and the Hong Kong International Film Festival, for example, local filmgoers can check out many worthy works that fall on the art house rather than the blockbuster side of the equation.
Even at the height of the summer blockbuster season, quieter fare is available, including my favourite of the 200 or so films I viewed this year.
Yuya Ishii's The Great Passage centres on a shy young man who finds his calling as a dictionary editor. An intelligent drama suffused with gentle humour, it's Japan's nominee for the 2014 Oscar for best foreign-language film - a major achievement given other Japanese releases this year include Hirokazu Koreeda's Cannes Jury Prize-winning Like Father, Like Son, Yoji Yamada's masterful Ozu homage, Tokyo Family, and anime doyen Hayao Miyazaki's final feature film, The Wind Rises.
In 2013, Europe was again the source of many art-house films that were more critics' delight than blockbusters. Among those that caught my eye - and touched my heart - were two French-Belgian co-productions: Benjamin Renner, Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar's animated Ernest and Celestine, and Jacques Audiard's live-action Rust and Bone.
Still, it's Danish director Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt that gets my vote as second favourite film of the year. A heartbreaking depiction of how unwarranted accusations of indecent behaviour can turn an innocent man's life into a living hell, it's made all the more devastating by a bravura performance from lead actor Mads Mikkelsen.
Not so long ago, Hong Kong cinema was known as Hollywood East - in part because its annual output rivalled that of the American film industry. If our film industry has any claim to that title now it's because it, too, has a largely commercial emphasis that often results in filmmakers opting to make big-budget (by Asian standards) films featuring plenty of explosive action.
But action, as director Adam Wong Sau-ping ably shows in The Way We Dance, can also come in the form of dance. And in bringing together street dance and tai chi, he and his team have created a heady brew of moves - and a delightful film brimming with talent, energy and life that easily is my favourite local film of the year.
Yvonne Teh
Although surprises are in short supply at the top of the 2013 Hong Kong box office list, pleasure can still be found in unexpected places.
In 2012, all four of Hollywood's top grossers on the equivalent list were comic book adaptations. Similarly, this year's five best-selling foreign films in Hong Kong are all part of lucrative franchises - or, in the case of the Brad Pitt-starring zombie flick World War Z, a soon-to-be franchise.
Still, among the sequels that have been flooding our cinemas this year, one stands out for embracing the complexity and capriciousness of life: Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, my favourite English-language film of the year.
The follow-up to 1995's Before Sunrise and 2004's Before Sunset again focuses on the two flawed protagonists played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy; this time, the setting is Greece nine years after Before Sunset and the couple have twin daughters. This relationship drama is a conversation piece for the ages. For once, I can't wait for the next addition to a series.
The alternately blissful and tumultuous facets of modern love have long been a staple of gay and lesbian-themed cinema, but 2013 will almost certainly be remembered as a bumper year in the relatively puritanical market of Hong Kong. From US indie film Keep the Lights On to French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways, from Steven Soderbergh's Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra to French director Alain Guiraudie's erotic murder mystery Stranger by the Lake, viewers were spoiled by exemplary quality when it came to heart-wrenching romances of epic emotions and, well, durations.
And the best of them all is arguably Abdellatif Kechiche's three-hour lesbian romance Blue is the Warmest Colour. The Cannes Palme d'Or winner is a coming-of-age film that intensely and meticulously charts the euphoria of first love, as well as the visceral pain of growing apart.
Another critically acclaimed coming-of-age drama that won at Cannes, Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo has pleasantly surprised viewers with its story of a young boy and his family's maid. This feature debut - which has also won multiple Golden Horse awards in Taipei - demonstrates humanity in a way reminiscent of the late Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang De-chang's classics.
Together with Koreeda's nature-versus-nurture drama Like Father, Like Son and Tsai Ming-liang's possible swan song, the near-abstract and utterly transfixing Stray Dogs, the year has witnessed a range of masterful family portraits by art-house favourites.
Finally, my film of the year is not in the fictional category: Joshua Oppenheimer's harrowing documentary The Act of Killing has garnered widespread recognition around the world, but has so far been viewable locally only at March's Hong Kong International Film Festival and, of all places, Osage Gallery's series of free-admission, daily screenings from May to July.
This instant classic goes deep into the distorted psyche of Indonesian gangsters-turned-death squad members who sadistically murdered more than one million people in the 1960s. An incredibly delicate blend of reality and surrealism, it manages to shock and amuse, disturb and reassure, confound and enlighten its audience - sometimes all at once.
Edmund Lee
Box office champions in Hong Kong:
HONG KONG MOVIES
1. Unbeatable - HK$44,631,344
2. Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons - HK$28,401,227
3. The White Storm - HK$23,979,221*
4. The Grandmaster - HK$21,292,885
5. Out of Inferno - HK$20,333,828
FOREIGN FILMS
1. Iron Man 3 - HK$106,389,801
2. Monsters University - HK$77,407,664
3. World War Z - HK$42,602,911
4. Thor: The Dark World - HK$36,675,250
5. Man of Steel - HK$33,328,214
*Still showing as of December 27
Figures from the HK Motion Picture Industry Association and the HK Theatres Association, up until December 18; excludes numbers for films released on December 19 and later