Simon Dillon chooses his absolute favourites

Best Bit - Matthew McConaughey views over 20 years of missed video messages after a brief spot of planetary explanation. A genuine emotional sucker punch.

3. Nightcrawler - Jake Gyllenhaal excels as a Travis Bickle-esque purveyor of lurid news footage. A blackly comic, brilliantly scathing satire of both a fearmongering US news media and modern corporate culture.

Best Bit - Gyllenhaal lectures his hapless assistant on key skills and performance reviews whilst tampering with the scene of an accident to get a better shot. Dark but hilarious.

2. Gone Girl - David Fincher's superb thriller features a potentially Oscar winning, career best performance from Rosamund Pike. Adapting her own novel, Gillian Flynn delivers an incisive, darkly comic dissection of a marriage in meltdown.

Best Bit - The mid-point revelation, including the infamous "cool girl" speech. Very uncomfortable viewing, for all the right reasons.

1. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies - Once again Middle-earth proves as irresistible as the One Ring. I know some viewers didn't respond as well to Peter Jackson's second Middle-earth adaptation, but I have enjoyed them immensely - enough to put this at the number one spot for the third year running.

Best Bit - Thorin's farewell to Bilbo, which proved every bit as poignant and heartbreaking as it is in the book.

So that's it for another year, although as ever one could argue this list is a little premature as I have yet to see Angelina Jolie's Unbroken and Tim Burton's new film, Big Eyes.

2015 could be a potentially cracking year for big budget movies, with the long awaited Jupiter Ascending finally hitting screens this February. From then one mega-blockbuster will follow another, as Avengers: Age of Ultron, Antman, Jurassic World, Pan, Pixar's Inside Out, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, the new James Bond film Spectre, Terminator: Genisys and Star Wars: The Force Awakens all compete for our attention.

Before that plenty of heavyweight potential awards fare is still to be released, including The Theory of Everything, Foxcatcher, A Most Violent Year and Inherent Vice. In fact, 2015's best films roster could prove an even tougher exercise than this year's proved.