Who needs Hollywood?

Every motorist knows the experience. He goes to a garage to retrieve his vehicle after a service and the garage says: “Do you really want your old car back? Isn’t it time for a new one?” Meaning: here is a heap of tin begging for euthanasia; any new wheels would be better wheels. After a few days’ anguish, you fill out your cheque.

So it is with cinema. Forget the past, especially 2009, and go for the future. The week sums up the year, at least for the American dream industry. After 12 months in which the top US box office performer was the brain-numbing Transformers 2, a last raft of releases worthy of the Medusa – Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Post Grad, Spread – says: “We are the end of hope. We are the last bodies on the lashed timbers, lost at sea, unrescuable even by cannibalism.”

And in Hollywood it was a cannibalistic year. The new fed on the old; seven of the top 10 movies at US multiplexes were sequels or franchise instalments (Star Trek, Ice Age, Harry Potter . . . ). Quentin Tarantino, once the man of the future, junk-binged on old war films in Inglourious Basterds. Even the year’s high-tech revolution was a regression. 3D swaggered like a bloated guest at a been-here-before banquet through 365 days of filmic flatulence, before ending with the loud noise of Avatar. (Yes, I know, I gave it four stars. But that was for the four fantastic sequences out of 40.)

‘The White Ribbon’, an eerily unforgettable peer into German history

How wonderful then to have Europe. This little moon of America orbits its mother planet and sometimes even dares to pull its tides. Hollywood is already remaking yesterday’s Euro-hit, The Lives of Others. How long before it sends a manned mission to Austria to negotiate rights for Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, that eerily unforgettable peer into German history? Or to France to discuss remakes with Jacques Audiard, director of last year’s festival super-hit The Prophet (opening January 22 in the UK), a prison drama proving that a populist format can embrace thinking themes? Or to Denmark to seek out Lars von Trier of Antichrist and learn how a low-budget metaphysical shocker from Scandinavia can provoke more excited controversy than any US release in 2009?

Even The Hurt Locker, the best American film on a serious topic, failed to cause the clamour it should. Audiences have Iraq fatigue, incorporating Iraq war-movie fatigue, and it cannot be cured even by a director (Kathryn Bigelow) and writer (Mark Boal) offering a novel, questioning, radical story about soldiers who warm to war and become its junkies and danger-addicts.

I was almost proud to be British in 2009. Here on the green and pleasant hills we built our Jerusalem: Bright Star, a marvellous movie about Keats (directed, be it said, by a New Zealander, Jane Campion); Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, a feisty film about ill-adjusted youth; Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously, a pastoral documentary whose muted, cryptic beauty was as hypnotically lower-case as its title.

Best rockumentary: a heavy metal group loses its way but not its mojo in ‘Anvil!’

There were also two Sachas. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno was a better comedy, funnier, smarter, more inventively confrontational than anything from Funnytown, USA. And a Brit, Sacha Gervasi, went to America to direct the year’s best rockumentary: Anvil!, all about a heavy metal group that lost its way but not its mojo.

Astonishingly, people still go to cinemas, though every year and especially every Christmas, when my life is overrun by grand-nephews and their news from the teen culture front, I interface with small, ingenious, user-friendly technologies for transmitting sound and image. “Here, Uncle Nigel, look at this pocket-sized i-Something that can deliver the whole of Avatar to you in 3D and surround-sound while leaving enough space for the complete works of Proust read by Sir Ian McKellen, plus Google Universe including Alphas Centauri A, B and C.”

Yes, people still go to cinemas. It must be on the same principle that they go for a walk on an ice-cold day: good for the body, good for the soul, even if hell to contemplate. I applaud those who go to public movie theatres. Catching up on missed films after a break I often go myself. It is not easy: one dies spiritually a dozen times during the commercials. Then come the trailers, which tell me too much about a forthcoming movie I don’t want spoiled. To the embarrassment of whoever is with me I often cover my eyes and ears and rock back and forth, making monotone humming noises, during trailers. It is the only way to shut out or drown out the giveaways.

Even so, a cinema is still the place to see a film. Do not, I entreat you, become DVD-dependent. Do not expect computers or iPods to give you the whoomph and wallop. And by whoomph and wallop I don’t just refer to the likes of 2010 and Avatar. Even art films are made to unspool on a wall space, not the window-space of a TV or PC or the watch-face of newer delivery gadgets. The need to pack extra punch into films destined for ever-diminishing viewing portals explains – partly at least – the action-drunk inanity, the braggart dementia, of much modern fantasy and adventure cinema.

I want a future in which technological ingenuity is not devoted solely to promoting clever but increasingly unable-to-cope viewing devices.

I want a future in which ingenuity is devoted to making cinemas more alluring – and to making movies that recognise that a cinema screen’s extra size is good for subtlety as well as showmanship. I want a future where, once lured out to see Avatar or Transformers 2, Mr and Mrs Punter can be encouraged to see Bright Star, The White Ribbon orA Prophet.

I still dream that multiplex managers will be visited by the Angel Gabriel one day, who will say: “Devote one screen in each of your theatres to art cinema and I shall promise you the untold gratitude of a planet, virgin-reborn into cultural and cinematic salvation.”

Who knows? Someone might wander out of Transformers, bored or blitzkrieg’d, and wander into The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès Varda’s beautiful memoir movie. There he or she will discover, on a screen no less large and epiphanic, that transformation is a daily, miraculous event in our lives, not something that must be celebrated only by clanking metal and multicoloured explosions.

As for this week’s films, let’s forget them. They are best forgotten. Did You Hear about the Morgans? (12A, Marc Lawrence): a witless witness-protection comedy with Hugh Grant. Post Grad (12A, Vicky Jenson): a college-leaving mirth-raiser with tears that doesn’t graduate in either field. Spread (18, David Mackenzie): in which Ashton Kutcher becomes a hustler and the trashcan of LA life is opened up – or is it the recycle bag containing American Gigolo?

No, no. Why round off a plea for more cinema-going with three reasons not to go to the cinema? Let us put the last week of 2009 to bed. Tomorrow is another year, though as a last farewell to the outgoing one here is its top 10:

● The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)

● The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch)

● Bright Star (Jane Campion)

● The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)

● sleep furiously (Gideon Koppel)

● The Class (Laurent Cantet)

● Antichrist (Lars von Trier)

● The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda)

● My Father, My Lord (David Volach)

● Anvil! (Sacha Gervasi)