For those not going out to celebrate, you can still party with Harry and Sally, play cards with Jack Lemmon and make merry hell at the Overlook Hotel

At the end of any especially troublesome year it’s always good to revisit The Apartment, Billy Wilder’s brilliantly bleak comedy of office politics and festive bad cheer. It memorably ends on the stroke of midnight as heartsick Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) abandons a drunken new year’s party to be with hapless, jobless CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) instead. Is The Apartment suggesting that Kubelik and Baxter then live happily ever after? Probably not, because I’ve never been convinced that these two lovers are going to stay the course. They’re too mismatched and desperate; their wounds are still too fresh. What the ending gives us is the next best thing: a sudden sense of hope and freedom, with everything packed in boxes except for a bottle, two glasses and a deck of cards. Nothing to lose and nowhere to go. “Shut up and deal.” A clean break, a fresh start. Xan Brooks

Journalist Don Ng’s debut feature raises interesting questions about the asylum experience – but his film is too sentimental and superficial to truly answer them

This is a film made with the best of intentions – and it has some good insights into the loneliness and isolation of seeking asylum in the UK. But there are a few too many sentimental moments to properly work as social-realism, or anything close to convincing drama, which is disappointing given its creator, Don Ng, is a journalist-turned-director making his feature debut. It’s set in London, where Bosco (a sensitive performance by Yiu-Sing Lam) has arrived from Hong Kong fleeing the government’s crackdown on political freedom, though he doesn’t really talk much about the situation back home.

Bosco is sent to live with other asylum seekers on a military base while his application is processed. Some of the best scenes turn out to be gentle observations of his sense of dislocation: walking around the local corner shop, for example, with its aisles of unfamiliar food. At a bus stop he meets Yasmin (Tsz Wing Kitty Yu), another asylum seeker, who writes letters to her student doctor boyfriend in Hong Kong, in prison for giving first aid to anti-government protesters. Bosco and Yasmin hang out together, though it’s obvious that for him the friendship feels like something more.