Any film that begins with one of those fake-news montages, where snippets of genuine CNN footage are stitched together to concoct a feeling of semi-urgency around its hackneyed apocalypse, already sucks even before it gets started.

Politically provocative and visually spectacular Snowpiercer - the best action film of 2014, and probably the best film, period.

This film is never less than pleasant to spend time with, and that’s not a minor consideration when it comes to summer moviegoing.

When it comes to any larger questions about what was lost or gained, and whether Frankie Valli’s odyssey was worth it, Eastwood throws up his hands. Who knows? He’s made a thoroughly tolerable and non-insulting summer movie for grown-ups; isn’t that enough?

After the fundamental problem of Coherence has become clear, or clear-ish – there’s another dinner party, at that other house, that looks an awful lot like this one – the movie becomes slightly too much like an unfolding mathematical puzzle, although an ingenious one that reaches a chilling conclusion.

Hellion offers a startling and memorable portrait of adolescent life in downscale East Texas suburbia, along with a white-hot breakthrough performance from teenage actor Josh Wiggins.

22 Jump Street is the good-natured, sloppily rendered pile of balderdash for that moment, a movie that’s immune to all criticism and not worth bothering to dislike.

Often scabrously funny in a post-Lena Dunham, post-Woody Allen New York comedy vein, and finds a star performance in the thoroughly unlikely personage of Jenny Slate.

If you can tolerate watching it once, it will burrow into your brain and never get out again; your only recourse will be dragging your friends into the nightmare and seeing it again.

Citizen Koch is kind of a mess. But it’s a mess well worth discovering for yourself.

I felt unable to decide between this movie is the most badass thing ever and OMG turn it off.

The influence of early Alfred Hitchcock is all over this movie, translated in unusual and original fashion.

Whatever its flaws, Maleficent is a family-friendly Disney adventure that offers a relaunched and thoroughly delightful Angelina Jolie.

While the whole thing feels weirdly miscalculated to me, A Million Ways to Die in the West tweaks the formula just enough, delivers a few laughs and keeps the guest stars coming.

I basically really enjoyed this movie, even while lamenting that I was enjoying it under mendacious premises and that there was something fundamentally cynical about its elegiac, retrospective tone.

This is a movie of tremendous visual daring, magnificent special-effects work and surprising moral gravity.

Horses of God is one of the most forceful entries in a growing body of cinema that interrogates the causes and effects of terrorism, nationalism and fundamentalism in the Arab world.

Million Dollar Arm is not just a Disney film, but a Disney film that could have been made, with minor elisions and different character names, in 1963.

As a pure head-trip visual and auditory experience it feels like one of the biggest discoveries, and biggest surprises, of 2014.

A delicate tapestry of suburban gothic, romance and realism, with a surprising sweetness at its core and a wonderful star performance from Emma Roberts.

Just a string of ludicrous excuses to get from one outrageous comedy set-piece to the next.

What makes Ida remarkable is how much Pawlikowski is able to accomplish in just 80 minutes, with a pair of mismatched female characters, a handful of wintry and desolate locations, the square-format cinematography of Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal, and a soundtrack that combines modernism, Soviet-bloc pop music and a haunting performance of John Coltrane’s “Naima” that seems to capture all the emotional possibilities the characters cannot express.

Honestly, one can only wish that Hollywood made movies for non-teenagers and non-comics fans with this much care and reverence. Are superhero movies dying? Well sure, but you and I and the planet may die first.

It’s a brilliant, slow-burning American revenge thriller that hardly puts a foot wrong, a work of startling violence and profound conscience that announces the arrival of an exciting young director.

This movie is bizarre, conflicted, unintentionally hilarious and profoundly mediocre – something like one of those based-on-a-true-story demonic possession yarns, with its polarities reversed – but not stupid in the way you’re probably thinking.

It’s shot through with sadness and beauty, with dry humor, with the certainty that even things meant to last forever actually don’t.

Mercifully, as seen from 11 years later, Jayson Blair himself seems a lot less important, not to mention a lot less interesting.

This stark and intensely controlled film is the work of a powerful visual stylist and storyteller, one who looks like he belongs on the short list of directors who have carried the narrative methods of the silent era deep into modern cinema.