My highlight was the sudden, last-gasp chance to see Mark Rylance as Johnny Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, on its unexpected return to the West End. A cheap weekday matinee ticket found me in the front row, Rylance looming over me from the high stage, spewing alcohol; an unsteady, limping Lord of Misrule and, if he only could pull himself together, of a new Peasant’s Revolt against the unjust times we’re suffering. It seemed unbelievable he’d go through the whole thing again that night.

One of film’s most inspiring artists, Walt Disney, once said, “Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” With the seemingly anachronistic The Artist, French director Michel Hazanavicius proves this to be as true as ever - even in this technologically adventurous age with its all too frequent bombastic sound. Hazanavicius boldly strips cinema back to its wordless, monochrome days and, boy, does the end result sparkle.

We have, thankfully, long since moved beyond the point where there's any need to delineate or categorise works of art according to gender. However, looking back at 2011 it's hard to escape the conclusion that the most compelling music emerged from the mouths and minds of women.

Although now a major figure on the world stage, Aung San Suu Kyi began as a reluctant dissident and figure of protest against the military regime of her native Burma. Recent months have seen her finally released from house arrest and set to play a considerable role in the future politics of her benighted country. Such latest developments are beyond the scope of Luc Besson’s film The Lady.

And what a year it was! Comedy was king on stages around town, while a variety of Shakespeare royals -- Richard III à deux courtesy Kevin Spacey and the lesser-known but far more electrifying Richard Clothier, Richard II in the memorably tremulous figure of Eddie Redmayne (pictured above) - kept the Bard alive, and how.

The surprises linger longest. The things you’re not prepared for, the things of which you’ve got little foreknowledge. Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes was amazing, and she was equally astonishing live, too. Fleet Foxes's Helplessness Blues was more than a consolidation on their debut and The War On Drugs’s Slave Ambient was a masterpiece. But you already knew to keep an eye on these three. Things arriving by stealth had the greatest impact.

We’ve been here already: with Stieg Larsson’s three posthumous Millennium books and the Swedish films based on them; and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In and its scrupulous, instant US remake. Though Hollywood assimilates global talent, American audiences won’t, it seems, sit through foreign-made or, worse, foreign-language films.

2011 was a year when the wheels of global history cranked noticeably forward, the news always full of images that will be in school text books within a decade. It was also the year when, for most of us, “a bit peeved” became “utterly livid” that greedy, over-privileged vermin had gambled and lost all our money and were clearly getting away with it, unhindered.

Fifteen years after its debut edition, the fourth instalment of the Tom Cruise MI franchise is louder, higher, noisier and even more ludicrous. However, there are saving graces. Simon Pegg, playing the gadget-nerd Benji Dunn (pictured below), is given a surprising amount of scope to throw in episodes of tension-relieving farce, while Jeremy Renner brings both grit and wit as the secret service bodyguard William Brandt who finds himself roped into Cruise's crew.