You will cry primal tears by the end of The Impossible, a family disaster drama by director Juan Antonio Bayona - because we can’t handle its overpowering truth. A delver of emotion, Bayona (The Orphanage) bases this spectacular drama on Sergio G Sánchez’s clear if sometimes curious script; the story itself comes from Maria Belon’s tale of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand.

Assured, warm and comfy, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut Quartet is a tasteful farce of froths and strops. Hoffman’s always wanted to direct and it’s not like he hasn’t tried.

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" TS Eliot’s line could well stand as an epitaph to Jacqui and David Morris’s troublingly thoughtful film about British photographer Don McCullin, whose haunting images of conflict across the world over half a century have defined our perception of modern warfare (though his range of subjects goes far beyond that).

“Knowing Clara Bow brought you down socially”. Although one of the biggest and most bankable film stars of the Twenties, luminous fan-favourite Clara Bow wasn’t so treasured by the Hollywood elite. She didn’t hide her affairs. She turned up for dinner in a swimsuit. Her father was an alcoholic and banned from sets. She revealed her deprived background to the press, undermining the myth that stars sprang fully formed from the Elysian Fields. When it came to assessing the silent era in his seminal book The Parade's Gone By, film historian Kevin Brownlow didn’t mention her.

“It’s always the quiet places where the mad shit happens,” observes Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) in Northern Irish director Jon Wright’s creature feature. And, credit where it’s due, the mirthfully monikered Grabbers presents us with some classically mad shit. Set on the fictional Erin Island - a fishing village off the coast of Ireland - Grabbers is Wright’s second feature after 2009’s Tormented.

If 2012 is to have a cinematic legacy, it may just be remembered as the year big-screen time travel came of age. While Rian Johnson’s pulpy noir Looper explored the moral and spiritual implications of a world in which decade-hopping has become the norm, first-time director Colin Trevorrow hones in on the concept’s core emotion. Our universal longing to go back, to recover, to alter the past, is both what makes time travel such an enduringly popular trope, and what sustains Trevorrow’s particular offbeat, quietly joyous take.

It’s always the second-rate fiction which makes first-rate films, because there’s nothing to lose but plot. Midnight’s Children, lest anyone be allowed to forget, is first-rate fiction. It has won the Booker, the Booker of Bookers and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes and is listed somewhere or other as one of the Great Books of the 20th Century. That year you missed the broadcast it probably won Miss World. The novel has been sitting around on the runway awaiting adaptation since the late 1990s, when production in Sri Lanka was pulled at the last minute.

Fans of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels are spitting feathers that their fictional hero is being played by Tom Cruise. This is not least because in the books, Reacher is a hulking fellow built like a giant redwood with fists the size of dustbins (he's six foot five and 250 pounds). And probably not a Scientologist. Tom is 5'7" and weighs practically nothing.

Cinemagoers with an aversion to musicals need not fear, as in Pitch Perfect most of the singing is in a sane context, rather than its characters breaking into lavish routines in the street. After the fun but exhaustingly naff Rock of Ages, this comes as something of a relief. And if its chart pop mash-ups and campus antics seem squarely targeted at the teenage and twenty-something market, Pitch Perfect broadens its appeal shrewdly with some cross-generational acerbic and offbeat humour.

A film for those who see the festive period as a never-ending trudge from bar to bed via a shedload of booze, Terry Zwigoff’s delightfully deviant offering from 2003 gives us a trash-talking, beer-slugging Father Christmas, unimprovably played by Billy Bob Thornton. This chaotic Santa becomes the unlikely guardian of a troubled child. Wildly funny and oddly cheering, Bad Santa puts the crass in Christmas.