Review of the year

Were you transfixed by Celebrity Big Brother? Did you hate Pearl Harbor? Do you think the White Stripes are the best band in the world? Compare your views with our critics' round up of highs and lows from the past 12 months.

Film

By Jonathan Romney

Kick yourself if you missed: (and UK distribution being what it is, chances are you did) the real all-human-life-is-here film of the year,A One and a Two. Proof that the intrepid independent spirit still exists: in Britain, the terse and timely Last Resort; in the US, haunting no-budget poem George Washington. For knockabout cross-genre thrills, The Brotherhood of the Wolf. The best comeback, from tetchy, kvetchy Jean-Luc Godard in Eloge de l'Amour; and the best performances, from Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher, and Jack Nicholson , mustering his gravitas for the first time in ages in The Pledge.

Hottest new talent: Two Alejandros lead the field. A. Amenábar and A. González Iñárritu for the classic genre chills of The Others, and Amores Perros.

I laughed so much: Pearl Harbor apart, the year's best comic value wasBest in Show, especially Fred Willard's jovially dumb TV host.

Worst of the year: After a glut of fancy indigestible Euro-patisserie (Amélie, Chocolat, Malena), a stale Hershey bar delivered the final spasm withJay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

RIP: Pauline Kael, for teaching critics the art of being cantankerous. London's Lux cinema: home of independence, avant-gardism and all that doesn't fit the UK cinema scene's increasingly narrow template. It, or something like it, must rise again.

Don't miss: Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums ­ like a lifetime's worth of New Yorker cartoons. And I'm hoping a new David Fincher (The Panic Room) might liven things up a bit.

Art

By Charles Darwent

Kick yourself if you missed: Dan Flavin at the Serpentine Gallery in September; a show of neon strip-lights that turned Kensington Gardens into home movies of your own childhood.

A name to remember: Paris. Yes, that's right, the capital of France (home of the Pompidou Centre, above), hotly tipped as the next Happening Artplace now that Britannia just isn't so cool any more. See why at the ICA's French show until 20 January.

This exhibition could change the way you think: "New Labour" at the Saatchi Gallery over the summer, which explored the sudden vogue for hand-madeness in British contemporary art and may have sounded the YBAs' death-knell in the process. Irony? Factory-made aesthetics? Forget it. Saatchi has seen the future, and it's quilted.

It was truly awful: "Century City", Tate Modern's opening show in January, which tried to tap into the sure-fire market for urban chic and failed miserably. What can I say? The words "meretricious crap" spring most readily to mind.

RIP: Ernst Gombrich, meditator on hobby-horses and patron saint of art historians; David Sylvester, the man who brought home Francis Bacon; Balthus, romantic dauber, mythomane and alleged paedophile; and the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, which has spent the past 30-odd years introducing cloth-eyed Brits to the likes of Ruscha, Koons and Clemente.

Don't miss: the 1958-68 section of the Royal Academy's "Paris: Capital of the Arts" show, from 26 January. Being up to speed with the aesthetic utterances of Jean-Paul, Simone, Red Danny et al will be absolutely de rigueur if Paris really does become the new London.

Pop

By Simon Price

Kick yourself if you missed: This was the finest year for new music for half a decade. The White Stripes, three albums old but "new" to the UK, were a minimalist garage-blues phenomenon and the best live band on the planet. Other new thrills from overseas included Andrew WK's 200km/h wristband anthems, and The Moldy Peaches' absurdist nursery rhymes. The Strokes invested classic CBGBs-style alt-rock with a new fashionista cool.

Best crooner in town: Kylie Minogue's renaissance continued with her cheekily-titled Kraftwerk pastiche, "Can't Get You Out Of My Head". Single of the year.

I danced all night: Daft Punk's Discovery was hands-down Dance Album of 2001, but barely counted as "dance" at all. The Avalanches' Since I Left You, a swooning suite of samplescapes, was an honourable second. Missy's astonishing bhangra-delic "Get Ur Freak On" and Outkast's "Ms Jackson" were twin urban tracks of the year.

Get me out of here: The whole Gorillaz enterprise reeked of Shoreditch smugness, shiny cistern lids and casual racism. Worse still was the legion spawn of Limp Bizkit (notably the virtually indistinguishable Linkin Park and Papa Roach).

RIP: The obligatory answer is George Harrison, but for me, the most sadly missed is Aaliyah, the 21-year-old R&B princess who was approaching the top of her game and had just released her finest album yet.

Next! This may be the year that the New Electro Underground, so far confined to cells in Manhattan (Fischerspooner, A.R.E. Weapons), Berlin (Peaches, Gonzales) and London (Ladytron, Riviera) goes overground. If 2001 was a bass odyssey, 2002 is a bleep year.

Theatre

By Kate Bassett

Kick yourself if you missed: Robert Lepage's touring production, The Far Side of the Moon. A witty, poignant and visually stunning piece which featured mysteriously animated baby-astronauts and big ideas.

Names to remember: Ben Daniels was an unforgettably magnetic Odon von Horvath in Tales From Hollywood at the Donmar. Elizabeth Reaser proved a star-in-the-making playing a drug-addicted waif in Blackbird at the Bush. Director Rufus Norris is another hot property after his sharply honed revival at the Young Vic of Afore Night Come ­ David Rudkin's drama about ferment amongst fruit-pickers.

Top comic turn: Tom Hollander was outrageously funny in Don Juan at the Sheffield Crucible, skipping after the ladies like a naughty boy.

Gobsmockingly bad: The Pet Shop Boys' musical, Closer To Heaven, was trash, and Over The Moon ­ the West End farce with Joan Collins ­ was a sorry joke. Elsewhere, mega-silly directorial concepts included English Touring Theatre's Love's Labour's Lost with a deer-hunting scene set in a skyscraper.

RIP: A shake-up is looming as Trevor Nunn prepares to leave the National, the Donmar is losing Sam Mendes and the Almeida, Hampstead Theatre and the West Yorkshire Playhouse are also up for grabs.

Watch these spaces: The National Theatre promises a new trilogy by Stoppard; the RSC will stage Shakespeare's late plays at London's Roundhouse; Jude Law's troupe, Natural Nylon, will reside at the Young Vic; Kenneth Branagh returns to the stage (as Richard III) at the Crucible; the Almeida and Hampstead will reopen after rebuilding projects.

Television

By Thomas Sutcliffe

Kick yourself if you missed: You don't have to kick yourself very hard if you missed anything on TV because it'll be back again before long ­ but there is a charm in being taken unawares. Ricky Gervais' The Office did that ­ a dark comedy about the psychopathology of office life. Testing God, C4's series on cosmological belief, was recently cited as a benchmark product by Mark Thompson, the channel's new head, and it deserved the accolade.

Smartest dumb idea: Faking It ­ which proved that reality TV could exploit emotions other than envy, greed and malice.

Hottest talent: If schedule ubiquity is any guide Graham Norton was last year's hottest talent. Tipsters have their eye on Rob Brydon, however, whose performances in Human Remains and The Way We Live Now demonstrated that he's a real comic talent. Behind the cameras Nicola Shindler, who runs Red Productions, had a very good year with Bob and Rose on ITV and Linda Green and Clocking Off for the BBC. I also have a soft spot for Evan Davis ­ an economics expert who turns the dismal science into a pick-me-up.

Rapidly cooling talent: Richard and Judy, whose hugely ballyhooed transfer to C4 appears to have been a demographic wedge too far.

It was truly awful: A critic who complained about bad television would be like a coal-miner griping about the limited view. But there is something peculiarly depressing about good-bad programmes ­ television that self-consciously sets out to be better than television. Ken Burns's Jazz offers a good example ­ a monumentally self-satisfied and solemn enterprise which operated on me like a chemical cosh. I'm still groggy months later.

Classical

By Anna Picard

Kick yourself if you missed: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Peter Sellars's ground- and heart-breaking staging of Bach cantatas; Nikolaus Leonhoff's Hitchcockian Boulevard Solitude ; Sir Simon Rattle and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment's Fidelio; David McVicar's Lucretia.

Angel voices: Karita Mattila as Jenufa; Tom Randall in Tamerlano; Anna Caterina Antonacci's Monteverdi; Juan Diego Florez's Donizetti; The Tallis Scholars' Hispanic Masterpieces; Thomas Hampson's Mahler Songs with Mariss Jansons; Gary McGee on the phone as Don Giovanni; Lisa Milne in everything she's touched this year.

Plays like a dream: pianists Lief Ove Andsnes and Maria João Pires; violinist Maxim Vengerov; harpsichordist and fortepianist Carole Cerasi; Richard Tognetti, leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Best use of a short white stick: conductors Sir Charles Mackerras, Bernard Haitink, Emmanuelle Haïm and Mariss Jansons.

It was truly awful: Viktoria Mullova's jazz; Sally Beamish's Knotgrass Elegy; Zubin Mehta's high camp Tchaikovsky; David Pountney's non-kosher Nabucco; the giant hands in L'Anima del Filosofo; the rock in Jenufa; the fish in Parsifal.

RIP: The late, great violinist Isaac Stern.

Hot tickets for 2002: The John Adams weekend (18-20 Jan, Barbican), Werner Güra's sublime Schumann and Schubert (26 Jan, Wigmore Hall), cast two of Francesca Zambello's Don Giovanni (from 18 Feb, Royal Opera House), ENO's Lulu (opens 1 May), Weber's Euryanthe and Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide at Glyndebourne (season starts 19 May).

Dance

By Jenny Gilbert

Kick yourself if you missed: Dutch National Ballet's revival of Live, by Hans van Manen. The piece is 20 years old but remains the most successful example of video-performance art in dance.

A name to remember: George Piper Dances doesn't trip off the tongue, but it's a name worth tying a knot in your hanky for. It takes nerve to launch a brand new touring company in an already crowded field. But ex-Royal Ballet charmers Michael Nunn and Billy Trevitt ­ aka TV's Ballet Boyz ­ did it with great panache.

I was swept off my feet by: the Kirov Ballet, who just get better and better. During their four-week Covent Garden season there was just one dud in Manon, the Russians' first stab at a British ballet. Otherwise, it was brilliance piled upon brilliance. Their Balanchine was sublime, and in the classics, Uliana Lopatkina's strange, mystical, luminously poetic swan queen left some fans thinking they'd died and gone to heaven.

What a let-down: It was chiefly the hype that did it for Sylvie Guillem's Giselle . Ballet's biggest diva was the show's choreographer, star and producer ­ and clearly too grand to take advice.

RIP: Anthony Dowell, retired as director of the Royal Ballet in a haze of glory. Derek Deane left English National Ballet under a cloud. Now Christopher Bruce is to quit Rambert. The job of steering Britain's flagship dance companies through the ongoing cash crisis takes its toll.

Don't miss: Pina Bausch, queen of European tanztheater, who drops in on Sadler's Wells for four nights in January.

Radio

By Nicholas Lezard

Kick yourself if you missed: Mike Harris's radio play The Trials and Tribulations of Armitage Shanks and Corin Redgrave's monologue on Anthony Blunt breathed two kinds of new life into the form. Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on Radio 4 is consistently more fascinating than any intellectual programme has a right to be. Radio 3's Night Waves has shockingly high-calibre guests.

Most honeyed voices on the radio: Jenni Murray, Verity Sharpe, Francine Stock. Praise them with great praise and worship them like goddesses. Alan Rickman has not to my knowledge been on the radio this year so no male winner in this category.

I laughed so much: The News Quiz. Mark and Lard on Radio 1, until they have to play the ghastly Radio 1 playlist. Last week I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue broadcast its most outrageous double entendre yet, in which the gorgeous Samantha had been "fingered by the fuzz". Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis's It's Been a Bad Week (Radio 2, Saturdays 1.30pm).

It was truly awful: All Chris Moyles shows. All Ned Sherrin shows. Veg Talk. The Bored Game, sorry, Board Game. James Whale (Talk Radio) who should not be allowed a phone line, let alone a phone-in show. Classic FM. Simon Brett radio "comedies".

RIP: Sue MacGregor , not dead but no longer on Today. It is like losing a limb.

Don't miss: The John Adams concert on 20 January, Radio 3. Adams has come under fire from bigots in America; according to The New York Times, his opera The Death of Klinghoffer glamorises terrorists. Show solidarity with this genius by listening to his new piece, Guide to Strange Places.