2005 was a year of mediocrities. There were a dozen or so very good films and hardly any genuinely awful ones.

Drawing up the 10 best list was easy - Wallace And Gromit is the only film I regret leaving off it. Drawing up the 10 worst list was tough. There was no Fat Slags or House Of The Dead this year. The notorious Uwe Boll"s latest offering, Alone In The Dark went straight to DVD.

Most films were somewhere in between, not good enough to get excited about but not exactly bad either. "Blah" might be the word I"m looking for. It"s the first year for a long time I"ve questioned whether I should go to the cinema so much. Not that I"d ever give it up completely but I see more than anyone I know - on average 2 or 3 films a week and I"ve been wondering if I should maybe find something else to do for a couple of those hours.

It"s not so much the lack of great films that bothered me as the lack of fun. There were so few guilty pleasures this year that I haven"t even bothered making a list. Everything seemed second hand, predictable. There were an awful lot of sequels, remakes and films based on television series, popular novels, video games and comic books. Originality seems to have well and truly gone out the window.

The reason for this is economics. Major films these days cost so much money that they have to be marketable and the most reliable marketing tool is a recognisible brand name (Harry Potter, Batman, Doom, Dukes Of Hazzard, The Producers). Unfortunately the failure of the few costly films based on original scripts (if you can call The Island and Stealth original) has only made matters worse.

Noel Megahey's Top 5 DVDs of 2007

While the major studios have been putting their energy into competing with each other over which blockbusters they can release to sway the Home Theatre viewing public towards one High Definition format or the other, the smaller labels have been getting on with pumping out an incredible selection of specialist and World Cinema Standard Definition releases in 2007. If the output of Classic, Independent and World Cinema on regular DVD releases maintains this standard of quality and sheer range in 2008, I for one will not be in too much of a rush to enter the High Definition format war.

This year has again seen an abundance of high quality releases from the larger independents in the UK filling in many gaps in the catalogues of important directors, often in box-set collections. Optimum with the entire Studio Canal catalogue at their disposal, contributed in the biggest way with numerous boxset releases, of which the Luis Bu uel Collection is perhaps the most notable. Artificial Eye rounded-off a solid if unadventurous year with long-awaited Kaurism ki and Fassbinder collections. The BFI however have really shone with outstanding editions of important films from Derek Jarman (The Angelic Conversation, Wittgenstein and Caravaggio), Jan  vankmajer and Mikio Naruse – the company taking their rightful place as the UK equivalent of the Criterion Collection, often surpassing the eminent US label in the quality of their releases and abundance of worthwhile extra features. For my money however, it is Tartan who has been the best distributor in 2007, with a tremendous diversity of adventurous cult, horror, Asian, international, classic and left-of-centre independent cinema releases. More importantly, they have significantly improved the quality of their transfers, gathered useful extra features and packaged their DVD sets very attractively indeed. Occasional problems still remain with their PAL conversion of Asian NTSC masters, but even here the process is much improved, rarely causing any significant problems. In particular, Tartan’s collections of their Jodorowsky, Ozu, Eisenstein and Pasolini sets have been most impressive.