Snowpiercer (2013)
Bong Joon-ho takes his class war onto a frozen train that never stops, and turns a single corridor into one of the strangest, most committed dystopias of recent years. 8/10.
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Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Doug Liman takes a Japanese light novel, a video-game premise and a movie star willing to die on camera a hundred times, and turns them into the sharpest summer science fiction in years. 8/10.
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The Raid 2 (2014)
Gareth Evans answers a lean siege thriller with a sprawling crime epic, and the fights are somehow even better. The story strains at the seams; the craft does not. 8.5/10.
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Captain America - The Winter Soldier (2014)
Marvel hands its most straight-arrow hero to a paranoid 1970s conspiracy thriller, and the gamble pays off handsomely. The best film the studio has made so far. 8.5/10.
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Her (2013)
Spike Jonze imagines a man who falls in love with his operating system and, against every instinct, makes you believe it. A soft, plausible near future and one of the most humane films ever made about technology. 8/10.
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The Hunger Games - Catching Fire (2013)
The second Hunger Games hands the franchise to a new director and comes back sharper, angrier and more political than the first. A rare sequel that improves on the original. 8.5/10.
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Gravity (2013)
Alfonso Cuarón strands Sandra Bullock in orbit and builds ninety minutes of pure tension out of silence, vacuum and falling debris. As a piece of cinema engineering it is close to flawless, though the story underneath is thin. 8/10.
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Captain Phillips (2013)
Paul Greengrass turns a real 2009 hijacking into a procedural thriller that screws the tension tighter for two hours, then lets Tom Hanks fall apart in the last five minutes. 8.5/10.
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Prisoners (2013)
Denis Villeneuve's first English-language film is a long, grim abduction thriller carried by Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Roger Deakins. Punishing to sit through, hard to shake off. 8.5/10.
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Rush (2013)
Ron Howard turns the 1976 Hunt-Lauda season into a two-man war of temperament, and it is one of the most purely entertaining true stories in years. 8.5/10.
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