From sand worms to singing witches, 2024 has been a dramatic year for cinema. There have been tales of scheming priests, Russian oligarchs, tennis love triangles, 60s music revolutionaries, looted African artefacts and refugees on the Polish Border. There were also some high profile disasters, from legendary director Francis Ford Coppola's experimental flop Megalopolis to the despised Joker musical.

Cinema might be more important than ever today. As countries across the world continue to polarise and the internet is strewn with misinformation, watching films can be comforting. It provides a collective experience. It can also help us to learn about others. Critic Robert Ebert once described a film as a "machine that generates empathy". If he is right, perhaps we should watch more.

Here are five of the year's best offerings to stream over Christmas.

1. Weird world. Alice Rohrwacher's enchanting La Chimera follows a British treasure hunter (Josh O'Connor) in rural Italy. Although set in the 1980s, the film has a fairytale atmosphere. Rohrwacher conjures up a picaresqueRelating to a type of story in which the main character travels from place to place and has a series of adventures., pungent world of tomb raiding, crumbling palaces and doomed romance. The film is full of enigmasPeople or things that are mysterious or difficult to understand.. It shows that life can be stranger than it seems. And it asks questions about who has the right to historical treasures.¹

2. Fuzzy feeling. Jane Schoenbrunn's I Saw the TV Glow tells the story of two isolated teenagers who bond over a fictional 90s TV show. From that premise it grows stranger and stranger, as reality and fiction blur. The film offers a thoughtful exploration of youth, with echoes to the difficulties faced by LGBT teens. As Film Stories says: "It captures the almost indescribable feeling of being young, awkward, overwhelmed by the looming spectre of adulthood."²

3. Summertime sadness. Janet Planet is a quiet, often funny drama about a summer in the life of the 11-year-old Lacy and her mother Janet. Lacy watches her mother as she rekindles old friendships from her days living in a hippie commune. Written and directed by the award-winning playwright Annie Baker, Janet Planet has a remarkable subtlety. It shows the complexities of the relationship between parents and children, and how they shift and evolve.³

4. Shaggy dog tale. One of the year's quirkiest and most delightful films, Robot Dreams is an almost wordless Spanish-French animation about the friendship between a robot and a dog in 1980s New York City. It is full of inventive comedic sequences. But for all its whimsyPlayfully quaint or fanciful behaviour or humour., Robot Dreams has a powerful emotional core. It teaches us about how relationships change and evolve over time.⁴

5. Sucker punch. It could not sound cosier. The Iranian film My Favourite Cake shows an elderly widow inviting an old widower to her apartment so that she can bake him a cake. Yet this is a very subversiveSeeking to disrupt a long established system. film. Its heroine Mahin drinks alcohol and dances with a man, which is banned in Iran. Directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha have been arrested for making it. The heartwarming story is also an act of resistance.⁵

Can movies make us better people?

Yes: Films teach us about the world. And more than any other art form, film allows us to see closely the lives of others. It can teach us to respect and empathise with a variety of people.

No: We often leave the cinema filled with thoughts about injustice, or cruelty or the darkness inside humanity. But those thoughts rarely stay with us for very long before we move onto the next thing.

Or... They might make us better. But they can also make us worse - think of the criminals inspired by on-screen villains, or the selfish bankers who take Wolf of Wall Street as a model.