As beautiful as Maleficent is to look at, it is unfortunately an emotionally flat effort that feels cribbed together from a variety of superior sources.

A Million Ways to Die in the West is a misbegotten, unfocused attempt at Western comedy that never gels like it potentially could have.

Zack Parker’s Proxy movie is very good at pulling the rug right out from underneath you. Proxy isn’t what you think it is going to be, playing a game of bait and switch right at the halfway point that’s jarring and incredible.

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Blended is a mess, and as enjoyable as it may be in parts on the whole it’s still an exasperating misfire wasting its inherent plusses and attributes to an almost unforgivable degree.

X-Men: Days of Future Past manages to take such a convoluted scenario and present it in ways that are easy to process and even more fun to digest. It treats its audience with intelligence and respect but doesn’t skimp on action pyrotechnics.

“I hope [Locke] is seen as a bit of a comedy, a bit of a thriller, a bit of a melodrama, but at the same time you begin to feel that all of this is real, that everything happening was actually happening.”
– Steven Knight

Edwards has done the unthinkable, crafting a modern Godzilla that not only pays deft homage to the creature’s glorious past but also makes many of its closest impersonators feel hollow and misguided when stood up next to it.

In many ways Locke is the thriller of the year, a real time, ticking clock masterwork of tension and suspense that’s as unrelenting and unmerciful as anything likely to see a release in all of 2014. In others, it is nothing more than a quickly paced melodrama of responsibility and regret, focusing entirely on a single character, the choices he has made and the price he is forced to pay when the bill for his self-centered actions come tragically due.