All hail 'The Master', 3-D and nostalgia trips

You can almost hear the pop of champagne corks. This was a banner year for Hollywood, with the US box office heading towards a record-breaking US$10.8 billion haul. And it's thanks, largely, to the superhero.

This western cinema year has proved to be as marvellously and profitably elastic as spandex, led by a reboot (The Amazing Spider-Man), a trilogy concluder (The Dark Knight Rises) and, top of the pile, Joss Whedon's The Avengers, assembling Marvel's numerous heroes into one super movie.

Thankfully, 2012 wasn't all comic-clad. In Europe, Michael Haneke confirmed his pre-eminent status when Amour - a searing study of old age and illness - won him Cannes' Palme d'Or, the second of his career. However, my favourite non-English language movie this year is Miguel Gomes' Tabu. A daring, dotty, two-part love story, set in modern-day Lisbon and mid-century Mozambique, it blends gambling, voodoo, sad crocodiles and a Portuguese version of Be My Baby into a breathtaking black-and-white poem to the past.

In Britain, the year was all about James Bond. The 50th anniversary since 007 first appeared on screens in Dr No was celebrated in style - with exhibitions, documentaries and, of course, Skyfall. Sam Mendes' splendid work both embraces the spy franchise's distinguished heritage and looks to the future - and has become the biggest film of all time at the British box office, eclipsing Avatar (£94.03 million). At the time of writing, Skyfall looks set to become the first film to break the £100 million barrier in Britain.

For me, however, the best British film of the year is not Bond, but Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio. Following on from his critically acclaimed Katalin Varga (2009), this tale of a mild-mannered sound engineer (Toby Jones) who travels to Italy in the late 1970s to work on a low-grade horror movie confirms Strickland as a genuine talent. More surreal than scary, it pays tribute to the dying art of analogue sound recording in an era where digital has taken precedence.

My film of the year, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, also feels like a last hurrah. Shot in 65mm, Anderson's wilful perversity in using a format last deployed by Kenneth Branagh on his 1996 Hamlet is just one of its myriad joys. Inspired by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, this tale of two men in post-war America - spiritual leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his wayward disciple, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) - saw Anderson working at a level no other director came close to this year.

There are other strong contenders from the US - many of Anderson's peers have also produced fine works, including David O. Russell (with mental health rom-com Silver Linings Playbook), Alexander Payne (The Descendants) and Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom). But The Master stretches far beyond the reach of any of these, not least because with the return of Phoenix, who hasn't made a movie since 2008's Two Lovers, it contains one of the most magnetic turns this year: watching him on screen is like observing a caged animal at times.