From Sinners to F1 to Highest 2 Lowest, Guardian writers pick the scenes that stuck with them the most this year

Spoilers ahead

Disclosure: I covered auto racing for years and still follow Formula One skeptically. I definitely went into F1: The Movie knowing what I was in for, an answer to the hypothetical: what if the bougiest sport on God’s green earth was turned into a western? But you can’t help going along for the ride once Brad Pitt starts filling the frame with his blue-eyed winks, wry smiles and Butch Cassidy swagger. I should’ve been more indignant about this martinet sport making a literal hero out of the biggest rogue on the grid. But I left disbelief in parc fermé as Pitt’s Sonny Hayes bumped and nicked his way to the season finale at Abu Dhabi to much consternation before his wingman (Damson Idris) takes up the ticky tactics at Yas Marina circuit and winds up sacrificing himself and producer Lewis Hamilton (not again!) to help Sonny win his first race and thwart a hostile takeover of their fragile team. And when the lights went up at my desolate midday screening, it was just me still on the edge of my seat and my disbelief still firmly off track. Andrew Lawrence

The actor has been doing it all to sell his 50s-set ping-pong epic but, as a year of A-list flops shows, there’s no formula for guaranteed success

On 15 November, without prior announcement, one of the defining comedies of the year was posted to Timothée Chalamet’s Instagram account. Captioned only “video93884728.mp4”, the 18-minute video at first appeared to be a leaked Zoom call in which the Oscar-nominated actor pitched marketing ideas for the movie Marty Supreme to bemused staff at the indie production house A24. It might take a few minutes, and at least one shock interjection of “schwap!” from the very serious-seeming star, to realize that it’s a joke. Well, sort of – the meta video, in which an egomaniacal Chalamet proposes they “highlight international cooperation” by painting both the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower a “very specific shade orange”, satirizes the tedium of movie marketing desperate to get people in seats, while also introducing a harebrained marketing strategy that’s unabashedly thirsty to get people in seats.

The “leak” heralded an unconventional and extremely committed press campaign for Josh Safdie’s 50s-set ping-pong epic that has turned movie marketing – so often formulaic, cloying or apathetic – into eye-catching performance art. “Movie marketing is trying to be passive, trying to be chic,” Chalamet says in the video, for which he wrote the script. “We’re not trying to be chic.”