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Cool. I profoundly don't care. That movie made me angry to watch. Actively angry. I yelled at the screen after the credits rolled. I will not be watching it again by choice.

Jurassic World, which was easily the worst film I've seen this year - and I saw 50 Shades of Grey. F. Inside Out, forming the back half of a double feature with the previous film, lifted my spirits quite a lot by delivering one of the greatest emotional payoffs I've ever seen in a film. A...

Ex Machina. The most feminist film I've seen in an incredibly long time, but it's insidiously so - it'll worm its way into the minds of those resistant to such audacious concepts as "women are people too" so subtly that they may in fact mistake its incredibly feminist central idea for something...

Big Eyes. This film is at the same time a return to form for Burton, as well as an apparent admission that for the past few years, maybe he's been making films not because of some core emotional truth that speaks to him, but because people like them. This is a film about the dueling desires of...

Gone Girl. The movie ended an hour ago. My chest still hurts. I'm still shaking. A

The Maze Runner. Full disclosure: the director of this film is a friend of mine. I really, really enjoyed this film. It's a bit cheesy, it's overly portentous at times, and it weirdly prides itself on its somewhat obtuse worldbuilding that leaves far more questions than answers (admittedly in...

2001: A Space Odyssey Being a self-respecting film student, I had already seen this film many a time - it's one of my favorites. But I recently got the once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this movie in a proper theater, with the rarely-seen Premiere Cut that adds 20 minutes to the film. It was...

Boyhood. This is the best movie of the year. It might even be the best movie ever made. Linklater's epic 12 year story of a boy growing up is one of the most moving experiences I've ever had in a theater. I see myself in Mason, and yet I see in Mason things I never did. I identify with a lot...

Guardians of the Galaxy. A. A+. A+++++++.

X-Men: Days of Future Past This movie so utterly embodies the storytelling style of its source medium. It is a comic book movie through and through, feeling like a giant crossover event (because it is), affecting radical changes to established continuity, and laying the groundwork for events to...

Godzilla. Gareth Edwards is an accomplished director, but here he restrains himself from fully indulging in the absurd premise of his film. He buys into the (false) critical narrative that a human character is a necessary anchor for a film like this, and spends much of his time chronicling the...

Inside Llewyn Davis. This is one of the best Coen brothers films and one of the best films of 2013. It's outstanding in every way. Beautifully shot with wonderfully washed out colors to create a spellbinding black-and-white-with-color effect. Fantastic music, both diegetic folk songs and...

The Wolf of Wall Street. This is Scorsese's best film since Goodfellas. It has so much bite for a film that has - you know what I'm going to leave it here as this movie is so absurdly inappropriate and obscene that I can't really make the point that needs to be made while skirting the...

Captain Phillips. I love Tom Hanks, and I generally like Paul Greengrass. He did good things with the Bourne films and great things with United 93. This film, however, was far better than what he has done before. Hanks delivers an incredibly performance that just gets better as the film goes...

American Hustle. Easily one of the better films of the year, I don't remember having as much fun at the movies in a long time. It's not the most spectacular film, but it's got a great cast playing great characters, and I loved just being able to sit in and watch them talk to each other, lie to...

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug A I mean, I could rationalize that grade for a bunch of reasons. But I'm not going to. I just love spending time in Middle-earth, okay?

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I was not at all a fan of the original film. It was terribly paced, it paid only lip service to some genuinely interesting ideas and themes in favor of delving into a silly love triangle plot, and the cinematography was outright offensively bad. Not even...

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity. Four stars out of four. This film was stellar. It was a potent disaster piece that reminds us all why we, as a species, have been so fascinated with space throughout our history.

Pacific Rim. Four out of four stars. I could tear this movie to shreds for many reasons: an often absurd plot, flat characters, shoddy pacing, blatant Chekhov's Guns making the plot kitschy and predictable at every turn... But I don't want to. Because the truth is, I enjoyed this film on a...

Man of Steel. One star out of four. While there is a lot that I could say about this movie - very, very little of it positive - perhaps the biggest thing I have to say can be summed up rather simply as: "Why should I care?" The movie utterly failed on a number of levels, but most egregiously it...

Star Trek Into Darkness I'm a moderate fan of Star Trek - not enough to call myself a Trekkie, but enough to call myself a Star Trek fan - and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by this film. The curse of the odd numbered installments is clearly over, because this film is a...

Iron Man 3. A horrendous film. Between the dreadful villain swap at the end of the second act, the lack of necessary character development for either villain, the lack of a clear motive or even reasoning behind any of the events of the film, characters with missing and unresolved emotional...

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey gets an enthusiastic four stars out of four, for wonderfully managing to capture the whimsical tone of the novel while still managing to create a thoroughly engaging and exciting adventure film, with all its meandering and wandering.

I'ma be an overachiever and give a few capsule reviews for the past three or four that I've watched. Most recently I watched Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. While I had seen it in theaters, I decided to give it a second watch in the hopes of improving my opinion of it. Disappointingly, my...