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

Reiner’s own films reshaped modern comedy and drama with their intelligence, empathy and range. But through his company, Castle Rock, he paved the way for Seinfeld, Sorkin and many more

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As a film-maker, Rob Reiner championed humour, civility and intelligence – qualities you suppose would be out of step with the Hollywood of the 1980s where he made his name, and in the 1990s where he scored a series of extraordinary, far-reaching successes. Reiner had a family interest in the workings of on-screen comedy: his father Carl had played a key role on Sid Caesar’s TV shows, which themselves were revolutionary, and helped birth a new generation of screen comics by directing Steve Martin’s film debut The Jerk. Rob had become a household name as Meathead, the liberal foil to Carroll O’Connor’s bigoted Archie Bunker in 70s sitcom All in the Family (the equivalent to Mike Rawlins v Warren Mitchell in the British original, Till Death Us Do Part). But it was as a director and producer that he really made his impact felt.

In 1984, Reiner released This Is Spinal Tap, a “mockumentary” about a fictitious heavy metal band from the UK that rewrote the rules on what comedy could do. It sent up rock’n’roll behaviour and codified its cliches (with Reiner himself doing a hilarious parody of Martin Scorsese’s hosting role in The Last Waltz) and gave us zingers that haven’t lost their comedy power more than 30 years on: “The numbers all go to 11”, “it’s such a fine line between stupid, and er … clever.” Its deployment of improvised comedy was revolutionary for a Hollywood feature, and while Reiner wasn’t the first to use the fake-documentary techniques for comedic purposes (that goes back at least to Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run), it hugely popularised the mockumentary style; subsequent efforts include Bob Roberts, Fear of a Black Hat, Drop Dead Gorgeous and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. All these owe Tap a huge debt – as well as the microgenre of star Christopher Guest’s improv-mockumentaries: Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. Almost incidentally, Spinal Tap became a sort-of-real band, with tours, record releases and a follow-up feature (Spinal Tap II: The End Continues), in which the presence of music industry titans Paul McCartney and Elton John demonstrated the high regard in which the original was held.