Paddy Considine’s ferocious feature film debut as writer-director sees astonishing performances from actors Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman beat at the centre of its angry heart.

The very first Top 10 list of 2011 arrives with a look at the best films to be based on or inspired by British television comedy shows. From Ricky Gervais to Simon Pegg to Ronnie Barker and the Monty Python team, Top 10 films to be inspired by British TV comedy looks at television and films from the late 1960s to the modern day.

This is cinema’s version of contraception. Tom Shankland’s yuletide thriller pits some nasty, blood-thirsty pre-teens against their parents in an English countryside setting.

Paul Andrew Williams, writer-director of London To Brighton and The Cottage, goes behind the camera for another one of his screenplays in this taut, stylised home invasion thriller. Cherry Tree Lane is similar in set-up to The Strangers and the brilliant French film Them, but has more in common with Eden Lake and Harry Brown in how its contemporary setting accentuates feelings of a broken society divided by class.

Daniel Stephens takes a look back at Alfonso Cuaron’s powerful, dystopian sci-fi starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine.

Carey Mulligan is delightful in Brit coming-of-age drama An Education. It’s London, 1961. Jenny is stuck between childhood and adulthood. She excels at school and has a real chance of being accepted at the elite Oxford University. At home she sings to French music against her father’s better wishes and dreams of visiting mainland Europe in the hope of discovering what she believes is the free-wheeling and care-free culture she is imprisoned from at home…

Michael Caine proves age won’t hold him back in Daniel Barber’s tale of urban decay in modern British cities. Caine plays Harry Brown, an elderly ex-military widower living in a downtrodden housing complex somewhere in London. His wife has recently died and he still mourns the death of his only daughter. He only has Leonard (David Bradley), his best friend, to confide in, often meeting him at the local pub to play chess and put the world to rights. But violence is escalating in the neighbourhood and Leonard begins to carry a large knife for protection. When Leonard is driven to retribution after youths put a fire bomb through his letterbox, he is murdered, leaving Harry all alone on the estate.

UK readers should head on over to the BBC iPlayer page to view the first two (of three) 1 hour documentaries on horror cinema presented by League of Gentleman actor/writer Mark Gatiss. This brilliant series looks at horror cinema since the early part of century right through to the classic American period of the 1960s and 1970s with each programme focusing on a particular time period.