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Kim Hollis: What movies did you watch over the holiday movie season, and what are your thoughts?

Jay Barney: I took my son to see the two kid friendliest options, Wreck-It Ralph and Rise of the Guardians. Frankly, I was a little disappointed that there were not more options for kids going into the holiday season. I recognize there was a little bit of a glut during the Halloween part of the calendar, but for any family that did not want to take there youngsters to see the Hobbit, there just was not much out there.

We did go and see Lincoln, and I was shocked by how much I enjoyed the film. I might be the only person in America to say this, but when I initially saw the shots of Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, I didn't think it was going to go very well. I know he is a talented actor, but my first reaction was actually quiet negative. That said, I was really impressed by what they were able to do, and it did not take me long to start seeing him as the 16th president. The film was good, his acting was great.

Aside from that, I have to admit that I am already looking three months down the road, getting excited for the late spring releases that lead into the summer movie season. Iron Man 3, Star Trek, here we come.

Edwin Davies: I finally caught up with Killing Them Softly, which rocketed into my Top 10 of the year with little problem. I'm a huge fan of both Andrew Dominik's previous films - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in particular, since I think it's one of the finest American films of the last 20 years - and I'd been eagerly anticipating his latest for over a year. He did not disappoint. It's a tense and uncomfortable crime thriller with a lot to say, perhaps too much, about modern America, and its attempts to equate small-time murders with the banking bail out will put off anyone who doesn't like getting politics in their gangster films, but it worked beautifully for me. One of these days Dominik is going to make a film that more than six people go to see and he'll be rightly recognized as the tremendous artist he is.

I also watched Silver Linings Playbook, which was basically two separate films - one a comedy-drama about two desperately unhappy people connecting through a shared interest, the other an energetic dance contest movie - both of which I liked a lot, but the way they were combined really rubbed me up the wrong way. It's not the idea of mixing the two per se, more the way in which they try to ramp up the stakes in the third act which struck me as so clumsy and hamfisted that it spoiled the whole experience for me. It's a perfectly okay movie made up of great parts that don't quite fit together well enough.

Finally, I watched Django Unchained and it overtook Searching for Sugar Man to become my favorite film of 2012. I loved every ridiculous, audacious and indulgent moment of it and it's stuck with me for the better part of two weeks. I have no illusions about how it's going to do at The Oscars (i.e. horribly, but maybe Christoph Waltz will win) but i don't think that enters Tarantino's head when he makes films. He makes whatever crazy thing he wants to and every just kind of falls into line behind.

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