2012 in Film: Seven review of the Year Such a question was also posed closer to home, once Harry Potter was finally put to bed, late in 2011. Yet the British industry appeared in renewed good health - a diagnosis confirmed when Skyfall overtook Avatar to become the biggest ever film at the UK box office. Having Daniel Craig appear during the London 2012 opening ceremony was felicitous PR, though the Olympian spirit also empowered Julien Temple's superbly energetic collage London: The Modern Babylon, and two films emerging from the East End: Dexter Fletcher's overlooked Wild Bill and the cheeky Cockneys vs Zombies (which sent the undead shuffling after Richard Briers). Farther afield, there were masters at work. From Turkey came Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's searching police procedural; from South Africa, the arresting Beauty, a queer Vertigo; and from Russia, Aleksandr Sokurov's one-of-a-kind Faust. The Hungarian great Béla Tarr bowed out with The Turin Horse, an apocalypse in slow motion. Yet, it was a quiet year for French cinema, the much-lauded Amour and Holy Motors striking me as respectively bullying and baffling. The year's real highlights, though, came in non-fiction. This was the best year for documentary in living memory: as the mainstream lurched towards the fantastical, these films formed a vital countermovement nudging us back in the direction of actuality. Sometimes the appeal was narrative verve (Bart Layton's The Imposter, better told than 99 per cent of this year's studio output), often it was pure spectacle (Wagner's Dream, illustrating Robert Lepage's attempts to stage the Ring cycle at New York's Metropolitan Opera). And occasionally it was downright nosiness, as with Lauren Greenfield's standout The Queen of Versailles, which aped reality TV in its study of America's "1 Percent" - until the recession bit, and it became a very different story. So strong was the documentary field that one could pick double-bills of favourites, like the summer hit Searching for Sugar Man and its shadow-movie Lawrence of Belgravia, cocking a joint-snook at the Cowell-iverse and canonising music's continued, confounding ability to evade those structures the record industry would place around it. Elsewhere, two hugely moving art-world profiles - Marina Abramovic: the Artist is Present and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry - showcased invention courage and craft enough to power a thousand movies. This, at last, was the kind of heroism one longed to see more of in mainstream cinema. And it was real.