Predestination (2014)
The Spierig brothers take a notorious Heinlein paradox and a career-making Sarah Snook performance and build the most disciplined time-travel film in years. Small, clever, and built to be watched twice. 8/10.
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Ex Machina (2014)
Alex Garland steps up to direct his own script, a chamber piece about a tech billionaire, a young coder and the machine between them. Cool, controlled and genuinely clever about artificial intelligence. 8.5/10.
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Kingsman - The Secret Service (2014)
Matthew Vaughn takes the spy film, strips out the self-seriousness, and rebuilds it as a vicious, well-tailored comedy. Loud, funny, and far more confident than it has any right to be. 8.5/10.
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The Imitation Game (2014)
A handsome, tightly built Bletchley Park drama carried by Benedict Cumberbatch, smoothing the real Turing into a more conventional shape but rarely loosening its grip. 8.5/10.
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Interstellar (2014)
Christopher Nolan trades the dream architecture of Inception for a dying Earth and a wormhole, and builds the most emotional film of his career around hard physics. The science is sound, the sentiment is bold, and on scale and rewatch value it is near the top of the genre. 9/10.
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The Equalizer (2014)
Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington reunite for a slow-burn vigilante thriller that trades plot for craft and a wonderfully controlled lead. The script is thin, the violence is precise, and the rewatch value is high. 8/10.
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The Guest (2014)
A polite stranger turns up on a grieving family's doorstep and the temperature drops a few degrees every scene. Adam Wingard's synth-soaked thriller knows exactly what it is doing. 8/10.
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A tiny, automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory
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Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Marvel hands its riskiest property to a director from the B-movie fringe and gets back the funniest, most musical space adventure in years. A talking raccoon, a sentient tree and a soundtrack of seventies pop should not work this well. 8.5/10.
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Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
Matt Reeves takes the rebooted apes somewhere most blockbuster sequels never go, into a sombre tribal war story with Andy Serkis's Caesar at its centre. It is bigger than its predecessor and, against the odds, sadder. 8.5/10.
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