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Was 2007 a good year for British cinema? BBC reviewed five different genres and assessed the hits and misses of the year...

Comedy
In a year when Judd Apatow's highly calibrated comedies conquered the world, British comedies generally felt like they were knocked off and super-bad. Still, if you wanted your comedy to be a success at the box office, there were just two magic words you needed to include on the poster: 'Simon' and 'Pegg'. Hot Fuzz, Pegg's second collaboration with Edgar Wright, took a staggering £20.9million at the UK box office. Perhaps even more impressive though was the return on Run, Fat Boy, Run, which grossed £11million – and just think how much it could have taken if it was actually funny.

Otherwise there was little to laugh about for British comedies. Mitchell and Webb's quirky brand of humour failed to make the transition to the big screen in Magicians, while Catherine Tate found audiences weren't bovvered by her starring role in Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution. Too often, Brit-coms felt like they were simply trying to please everybody and followed a tried and tested route – there was nothing organic about the allotment pic Grow Your Own by the time it reached the big screen, and I Want Candy and Death At A Funeral failed to find the mainstream audiences they were craving.

Perhaps the biggest victims of the bland approach were Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger, whose romantic comedy Sparkle lacked the wit and charm of their previous pic The Lawless Heart. The exception to the rule was the risk-taking Hallam Foe. Suicide, incest, voyeurism... only David Mackenzie would have the chutzpah to make what was in effect a teen comedy for adults. And here's a career suggestion to Jamie Bell: only make films where you're the eponymous star.

Documentary
First the bad news: documentaries do not make money at the box office. In a year when even Michael Moore's Sicko caught a cold at UK cinemas (grossing just over £350,000), a slew of great British documentaries attracted strong reviews but few actual punters. As well as excellent festival documentaries (such as Garbage Warrior; Blindsight; We Are Together; Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go), there were also some fantastic theatrical releases, almost all featuring male protagonists (mirroring fiction cinema or the tastes of distributors/bookers perhaps).

Blue Blood and In The Hands Of The Gods were two sides of the same coin – compelling stories about groups of men with ambitions and dreams, only incidentally about sport. Stevan Riley's Blue Blood featured a disparate group of Oxford students training for the annual Varsity boxing match, while Ben and Gabe Turner's In The Hands Of The Gods followed five working-class freestyle footballers on a quest to meet Diego Maradona in Buenos Aires. These two documentaries alone provided more laughs than most of the scripted comedies of 2007.

Julien Temple followed Glastonbury with the worthy Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, featuring a wealth of archive footage on the Clash legend, while Donal MacIntyre's A Very British Gangster followed an altogether shadier figure: the charismatic Manchester career criminal Dominic Noonan. If men like Noonan were in the gutter, we were also looking at the stars with In The Shadow Of The Moon, a wonderful documentary about the astronauts who walked on the moon. The reclusive Neil Armstrong may have been conspicuous by his absence but there wasn't much else missing here: amazing NASA archive footage and interviews with men made of The Right Stuff.

Campaigning documentaries were also prominent: Marc and Nick Francis' coffee doc Black Gold was the cinematic equivalent of a triple espresso, opening many western eyes to underhand practices in the coffee trade. An equally impassioned message was delivered by Chris Atkins in Taking Liberties, an unashamedly one-sided look at Labour's attempts to curtail civil liberties in the past decade.

Drama
To these eyes there were two outstanding British movies in 2007, and both of them were dramas: Atonement and Control. Joe Wright's follow-up to Pride & Prejudice was as good an adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel as you could hope for – moving, romantic, surprising, and a masterclass in imaginative filmmaking. Of course, the chattering classes were obsessed with the long Steadicam tracking shot on the beach at Dunkirk – was it showing off or showing a cinematic eye based on necessity? We'd opt for the latter.

Anton Corbijn couldn't be accused of showing off with Control, and he was rewarded for the decision to sink almost £1.5million of his own money into the production. The film has taken £1.1million at the box office and is a wonderful showcase for both Sam Riley (playing Ian Curtis) and Toby Kebbell, the latter as scene-stealing band manager Rob Gretton. Matt Greenhalgh's script was far funnier than any film about the lead singer of Joy Division had any right to be.

Control was shot largely in Nottingham, which is of course the playground of Brit auteur Shane Meadows. He enjoyed the biggest success of his career with the 80s-set skinhead drama This Is England. The Falklands War element felt bolted on, but the emotional heart of the film was spot-on: Thomas Turgoose and Stephen Graham were pitch perfect as the fledgling skinhead and volatile fascist. Shane Meadows could perhaps be accused of constantly retelling the same story (kid gets seduced by dark stranger before seeing error of his ways), but hell it works pretty well for Martin Scorsese so why chance a winning formula?

Another newcomer delivering a great performance was Matthew Beard, who held his own with acting heavyweight Jim Broadbent in the otherwise disappointing And When Did You Last See Your Father?. And Tannishtha Chatterjee shone in Sarah Gavron's understated but lyrical and beautiful Brick Lane.

Atonement's James McAvoy was at the heart of two other box office successes – Becoming Jane and The Last King Of Scotland. Both were inspired by real events: the former the reputed love of Jane Austen's life; the latter about the Brit who became General Idi Amin's confidante in 70s Uganda.

If Kevin Macdonald's gripping thriller played fast and loose with the facts, it was nothing compared to Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age, which felt like it had taken all of its historical information from a recently hacked page on Wikipedia - taking liberties, 16th century style.

Some established directors produced their best work in years: Nick Broomfield's Ghosts was a haunting recreation of the Morecambe Bay tragedy, and Michael Winterbottom also drew on real life for his powerful drama A Mighty Heart. Some critics blanched at Angelina Jolie's performance, but others didn't trip up on the Hollywood star's baggage. We admired Winterbottom's ability to make a gripping Pakistani police procedural with Hollywood coin and his own working methods intact.

Richard Eyre's Notes On A Scandal was blessed with a sharp Patrick Marber script and wonderfully acidic turn by Dame Judi Dench, while Roger Michell's Venus showed old men (particularly Peter O'Toole) behaving badly to darkly humorous effect. Finally, Martha Fiennes' Chromophobia was far better than we had been led to believe; Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It far worse.

Genre (Action, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller)
Contrary to popular belief, the term British action movie is not an oxymoron. It's a hard act to pull off, though, as proved by this year's efforts. Nick Love's Outlaw dealt with the thorny issue of vigilantism, but ultimately pulled its punches and proved a backwards step from his excellent 2005 pic The Business. Similarly, Rise Of The Footsoldier and Straightheads were misguided ventures that seemed more interested in glorifying violence rather than actually dissecting it.

Surprisingly, British horror was missing in action from UK cinemas this year, with the zombie sequel 28 Weeks Later the only serious entry in the genre. Given the large number of no-budget Brit horror films being made, we can only guess there's a groaning shelf somewhere in Soho. Although it wasn't a huge departure from the original, 28 Weeks Later was still a slick horror pic full of effective set-pieces and atmospheric shots of London's Docklands.

Producer Andrew Macdonald was also behind the Brit sci-fi pic – now there IS an oxymoron – Sunshine. Directed with trademark flair by Danny Boyle, the film proved that you can make a great Hollywood studio movie in the UK – but that without a big star you won't get a big audience. The only other sf-ish pic to be released was disaster pic Flood, which picked one of the wettest summers ever to make a damp squib at the box office.

Perhaps the most unlikely sight of the year was Viggo Mortensen rolling around naked with two Russian hitmen in Eastern Promises (rumours that a similar scene featuring Dame Judi Dench was cut from Notes On A Scandal are just malicious gossip). Mortensen was a revelation and delivered arguably the best performance of the year in a British film. While Eastern Promises took over £2million at the UK box office, another thriller showing promise fared considerably less well: Sugarhouse was the first movie to be produced and released by Slingshot, but struggled to make any kind of impact at the summer box office. Although Andy Serkis' council estate henchman chewed more scenery than King Kong, Sugarhouse was memorable for Ashley Walters' bravura turn as a two-bit chancer. Outback thriller Gone was a rare box office flop for Working Title, but even though the film went down a well-trodden path, director Ringan Ledwidge did enough to suggest he could be one to watch in future years.

Family
If you're going to make a successful family film, you'd better have deep pockets – firstly to make the film, and then to market the hell out of it. Working Title struck paydirt with Mr Bean's Holiday, which grossed £22.1million in the UK alone (it also took over $30million in the States). Producer-turned-director Matthew Vaughn also enjoyed international success with his Neil Gaiman adaptation Stardust, which was the surprise hit of the autumn in the UK (£14.3million and still rising).

No doubt who the most successful British director of 2007 was, though: TV director David Yates (State Of Play) was the unlikely choice to direct Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, but the film took almost £50million in the UK and earned Yates another stint in the director's chair for Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. At a time when over two-thirds of all production money spent in the UK came from Hollywood – and when the budgets for indigenous movies actually fell - we can expect more Brit directors to follow suit in the years to come.