So... 'Thor: The Dark World'. It's a complete mess. It hops around between three different tones – buddy comedy, undercooked romance, and lightweight action - that aren’t well joined-together. Its action is sloppily directed, and it seems to have been edited together with loose string and cellotape, with vital shots and sometimes whole scenes clarifying where and when we are in the story simply missing and robbing much of the most supposedly thrilling sequences of a great deal of suspense and tension. The villain cuts a great profile but has no motive besides a nihilistic streak that even he doesn’t seem to believe in, and it features quite possibly the poorest treatment of female characters in any Marvel movie yet. There are four of them with speaking parts, and in no especial order they are - a damsel who does nothing but require saving, a sufferer of a noble death to motivate our male hero, a jealous rival over the affection of said hero whom the movie sets up and then forgets about entirely… and Darcy. And only idiots like Darcy. And yet... And yet, it's actually good. In the broad strokes at least, it's REALLY good, and I...

So... 'Anchorman 2'. 'Anchorman 2' is like suddenly being trapped in a lift with a comedian you really admire, whereupon he breaks wind and asks you "who farted?" You chuckle - of course you do, because you are a good-humoured soul who likes a laugh - but then he does it again. And again, in a sillier voice. And once again, this time in ebonics. And again and again, until his repertoire of comedy accents has been thoroughly exhausted and the whole lift smells like a pig pen, and sure, you've laughed a couple more times because once or twice he hit a really funny accent that didn't sound vaguely racist but all in all you're wondering why the hell you got in the lift with him in the first place and when you're likely to black out from the stink. So no, it's not very good. Yes, it's funny in spots (Ron brushes his teeth with a live lobster after he's blinded, because that's a thing that happens), but for the most part it's internal-organ-liquefyingly awkward, a massive glut of context-free and plotless nonsense that doesn't seem to be about anything, has no coherent targets to poke real...

So... 'Frozen'. Full-3D digital animation and I will never snuggle up together by the pinewood fire, I fear. With every passing Disney/Dreamworks/Pixar picture, even the better ones, I cannot but notice that when digital-modelling technology gives an artist total freedom of movement, their instincts about such vital matters as pace, volume and weight can often become handicapped. 'Frozen' is a movie set in a completely snowbound hinterland, and no-one struggles through a snowdrift, gets trapped by cracked ice, stopped short by a blizzard. No-one, in other words, ever, ever slows down, and the film's relentless pace makes it feel like it's rushing breathlessly from one grand adventure to another, context and contrast left for dead in the powder behind. Would your kid (the target audience for this, after all) like it? More than this prematurely senile, bearded grouch? Perhaps, but I'm rather ambivalent about that question - 'Frozen' may be good, damn good, but I don't really feel happy about reinforcing the idea that a "kids film" should automatically be a hyperactive adrenaline rush with not a moment to pause for drama, pathos, tragedy, and spend some time trying to actually MOVE YOU. If you do take a child...

So... 'Gravity'. Go and see it. Don't argue with me, just go and see it. And while you're at it, ACTUALLY GO AND SEE IT. No-one who heard me rave and gibber about 'Pacific Rim' seemed to go to that movie, which seemed dashed unfair to me; I stop overanalysing/snarking about a film for once, you go and see that one film. Seems fair, no? Let me put it thusly: everything after the first shot of the film (which lasts approximately 15 minutes straight) is spectacular, beautiful to look at, almost unbearably thrilling and more exciting than I can reasonably convey in a paragraph. It's well-acted, sometimes heartbreaking, a work of genius in technical terms, and the closest I think I've come to finding a film that feels like the proverbial 'thrill ride.' I had a few problems with its politics, it will almost certainly discomfort those prone to motion sickness, and I'll probably enjoy it more on a second viewing because I'm not waiting for a 'jump scare' in a spacecraft interior scene (trust me, you'll know what I mean), but in other words, it's a wonderful and worthwhile entertainment that had me grinning as I left the...

So... '12 Years A Slave.' Go see it. Though this really quite extraordinary film - filled from the beginning with almost endless misery - has sadly not unseated 'Gravity' from the throne of stars on which it's sat in my brain for some time now, '12 Years...' is the movie that deserves every award coming to it. And most years I could barely care less for film awards. Some fine performances are to be found here in Cumberbatch, Fassbender and Giamatti, and some utterly brilliant ones in Ejiofor and Nyong'o. Its soundtrack is either the best thing Hans Zimmer has ever done or his very worst example of self-plagiarism; I leave that up to you. What I am sure of is that it's something of a masterpiece from director Steve McQueen, who photographs everything with, astonishingly, a genuinely excellent grasp of cinematic language. The film doesn't rely, for instance, on handheld, unbalanced shots for that feeling of intense but ultimately vacuous 'realism', but neither does it become stately and static. He fills the foreground and background both with incidents of horror and pain, and despite the subject matter it's a genuine treat to see sequences composed to have meaningful...

So... '300: Rise of an Empire'. Go and see it. 'ROAE' is one of the nicest surprises I've had from a film of its kind in a long, long while. It's a rousing action movie that makes plentiful room for aesthetic inventiveness and characters who speak to each other in well-balanced dialogue that actually sounds like human beings communicating rather than slabs of meat bellowing memes at each other. It's a shoehorning of history into a three-act framework that makes up for wild inaccuracies with excellent performances (the whole movie is held by up Sullivan Stapleton and then trampled on by Eva Green) and genuinely compelling, well-rounded motivations. Its score is perfect, its compositions varied and fluid, its violence tactile and impactful rather than effervescent and routine. It's a fantasy caricature of two warring nations that, quite shockingly, actually reduces the tendency towards objectification and dehumanisation its predecessor subjected the villains too, and yet becomes somehow more, not less, visually imaginative because of the sacrifice. It feels like nothing less than an attack on '300' and that films celebration of the suicidally self-involved 'heroism' of Leonidas and the Spartans. I doubt, with some degree of sadness, that 'ROAE' is...

So... 'The Zero Theorem'. I'd say 'go see it', but given that the film vanished from a paltry fistful of UK screens after taking a measly £84,000 one week after release, you probably can't anymore. Were I feeling sour, I'd probably make some kind of off-colour observation about Sony Pictures being too busy moistening up an inexplicably willing public for yet another hot, sticky and utterly pointless explosion from Spider-Man into our wide-open eyes to properly support this movie, but it's lucky I'm not nearly so cynical as that, isn't it? 'The Zero Theorem', therefore, should find its way onto your viewing device of choice the INSTANT it becomes available for home viewing, because it deserves far, far better than the reception it received. SF movies with some sort of message to impart have suffered in the last decade or so. Allegory and metaphor are tricky things to keep coherent and legible when they become broadly applied in popular-genre storytelling, and as such, we've been treated in recent times to a slew of movies that aren't half as smart as their marketing desperately wants us to think they are. 'The Hunger Games' is undercut at every turn by careless...

So... 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier'. ‘Cap Am 2’, as we shall know it hereafter, is a strong, weighty, genuinely subversive and rather risky drama, propped up on the shaky foundations of a fairly poor modern action movie. Not bad in the sense that its action is unengaging, more because it opts at every possible instance for the intensity of handheld shooting and rapidly-paced, scattershot images, and happily accepts loss of visual clarity, clear sense of the space of action, and interesting compositions that the more traditional ‘Cap Am 1’ used so wonderfully well. A little disappointing, perhaps, but you know what? I can dig that like a shallow grave when I’ve got some nice, old-school spy-thriller intrigue building up, well-handled callbacks to the wider series, an unsubtle but actually rather thoughtful political message to absorb, and Robert Redford and Samuel L. Jackson presiding over affairs like dignified elder statesman rather than swaggering tough guys. Colour me pumped… …is what I was thinking for about the first half of the movie. And then came the big twist. The twist smack dab in this movie’s centre marks the point at which it takes a flying leap off its pseudo-realistic thriller...

So... 'Noah'. Go see it. I left the screening tonight a touch deflated. Devoutly as I might wish it, I cannot see 'Noah' becoming much of a lasting topic of conversation amongst filmgoers - for all the controversy it's supposedly generated, the film is too hallucinatory, too shockingly beautiful, just too strange for the pious to make much of it either as a testament to faith or as a fan to generate heat about how popular culture misrepresents religion, and the secular folk are probably going to stagger off in confusion, underwhelmed by half-baked action sequences and mishandled emotional beats jutting awkwardly out of a movie that is less interested in drama than the far more ponderous subject of mythmaking. It will be a shame if that turns out to be true, because 'Noah' is quite extraordinary. It is well-cast, solidly acted, gorgeously designed and, in such moments as the seraphim's fall or the time-lapse detailing of staggering geological and biological upheaval, astonishingly imaginative. It is not, what with all that relatively disinteresting but not unwelcome action, a movie that one might thrill to; Darren Aronofsky is not Cecil B. DeMille. But the industry in which he made 'Noah'...

So... 'Transcendence'. It's only April, and we might already have the worst movie of 2014 on our hands. Certainly it's the only movie I can ever recall (I am including 'Transformers 3', 'Man of Steel', 'The Room' and insert-your-own-personal-worst-movie-experience-evaaar-here in this assessment) feeling angry about as I left the theatre. Not disappointment, apathy, or boredom that I had to work into readable prose through hyperbole; real anger. Conceptually, I get what it wants to say. Were it put together by human beings who had the slightest notion of how to write, shoot, direct and edit a comprehensible drama, I might have called it halfway intriguing. It takes a question posed by '2001', 'I, Robot', the first 'Matrix' movie and many other SF pictures - how can humankind finally reconcile conscious reason and irrational instinct, so as not to continue tearing itself and its environment apart? - and actually provides an answer. SPOILERS, for anyone who cares: the eponymous transcendence has humans exiting their fleshly frames to become a shared nanotech consciousness that distributes itself in the weather patterns, so as to influence and sustain the environment. Thus, man at last achieves equilibrium with his surroundings - or, as Alan...

So... ‘Godzilla’. Curious, the things we critical nerds (and we nerdy critics) will forgive. Gareth Edwards’ ‘Godzilla’ opens on a disquieting note, for the wrong reasons. The titles roll across a barrage of rapidly-cut-together intelligence-agency still photos and stock footage, here re-appropriated to suggest – what else? – the coming of the King of the Monsters in the early years of the Nuclear Age. The credits are themselves partially redacted as they hop back and forth across the screen and, being barely differentiable from the background images, they swiftly cause the viewing eye to become completely lost in the whirligig, searching desperately for something significant to cling to. You’ll forgive me if I thought that an ill omen for things to come. It’s worrying enough that the movie thinks its best and scaliest foot to put forward is an introduction essentially identical to the last American attempt at a Godzilla film in 1998, but the real problem is not one of plot or set-up, but of perspective. Godzilla and the chaos he brings is observed in many places by many people in this movie, and the ones who aren’t vacuous, empty shells are pushed offstage before they can do...

Whence cometh evil? In the horror movies of the last decade or so, evil has sprung from a place more troubling than frightening; the home. Mainstream audiences, presumably composed of working and middle-class people with enough disposable income to enjoy frivolous entertainments in dark rooms, have little to fear from bloodsuckers and flesh-eaters in reality, but the prospect of the loss of one’s home and career in the of the economic crisis was (and remains) all too real. It takes little looking to see the horror genre, the mirror in which we can see only our anxieties, reflecting this back at us since 2008. Insidious , Sinister, The Conjuring , even Paranormal Activity all worked the same motif; something has invaded our nicely ordered homes, something ancient and more unmannered than we can quite handle. The foundations are rotten; we have built our luxuries over hellmouths. Our homes have betrayed us; our homes are themselves evil. What’s troubling about this tendency, reflective though it may be of real fears, is that the humans within these films become rather lost once their monstrous residences have swallowed them up. What, after all, is the point of imbuing a character with depth...

Pause a moment, and imagine. Imagine you are standing by a river; say, on the Southbank in London, late at night. Look down. Underfoot, if the right time was taken, you might uncover an infinite history in little more than the stone slabs and the dirt beneath it; self-renewing systems of life, from the miniscule to the microscopic, are trampled and buffeted every day by the press of feet and the whurling flow of the river. In a single square foot of geography, we may find enough of the stuff of life to occupy us forever, but wait a moment; now, you must look up. Push through the smoggy clouds, and see the stars. Now your focus is in the macro, and what you see is almost impossible to absorb. Above us all, the smothering tapestry of bright, black space; barren orbs drift around tiny pinpricks of light, roasting at thousands of degrees kelvin and separated by billions of miles of emptiness that a wave of your hand against this great blanket would seem to cover. This image, of space and by extension, the time it takes for light and matter to traverse it, bends around your vision, and...

It was always Alice whom I pitied most. Whatever the iteration of Susan Hill’s wonderful story – the novel, the stage show, the TV movie or the Hammer movie – it was always the thought of Alice Drablow alone in Eel Marsh House that terrified me most of all. Arthur Kipps suffered greatly, no doubt, but he had a dog for company and a tangled mystery of inheritance and parentage to unravel between all the ghoulish bumps in the night. Alice Drablow was the only living soul in that wide-open grave of a mansion for who-knows how many years before Kipps showed up, but Alice Drablow was not alone. One imagines that most fans of ‘The Woman in Black’ have been, even just briefly, chilled by the idea of what the titular Woman subjected Alice to before she died, but equally one suspects that many of those same fans may not care to have that horrible situation clarified. Some hauntings diminish when they leave the frightening nebulousness of the imagination. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death indeed clarifies that situation, in a sequence that is both coldly effective and depressingly self-defeating. The entire movie, in fact, flits...

Sometimes, it’s a joy to come late to a party. The Grand Budapest Hotel is the kind of joy that one does not mind having missed in cinemas. True, it must have been a rare delight for many reasons; for the delicious candy colours and somewhat Overlookian design of the eponymous hotel, co-mingling to charming and sometimes worrying effect. For the way the frame continually reshapes and resizes itself around the tale, the deliberate artifice never quite papering over the black cracks that oncoming fascism and war are continually poking through. Or, quite simply, for Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori, whose double act feels for all the world like discovering a spin-off film made by the long-lost fifth and sixth Marx Brothers. But on occasion, it’s delightful to come across such a film as Grand Budapest long after everyone else has had the good sense to see it. On home viewing and VOD the film is somehow an even sweeter treat, one that you do not have to share amongst a pack of cinema-goers but are free to gorge yourself on as you please. The detailing is as wonderful as the snap and kick of the central tale; as...