Housebound (2014)

A permanently scowling young woman is sentenced to house arrest at her mother's house, the cluttered multi-storeyed homestead of her childhood that her mum thinks may be haunted, in this really amusing horror comedy that entertains as well as it creeps-you-out, and it has elements of absurdly funny mystery, too.

★★★★☆

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Every Secret Thing (2014)

You have to wonder at the atmosphere within the home of husband and wife authors David Simon and Laura Lippman: he wrote that rivetting but grim-as-grim true crime brick Homicide, and she is the author of over twenty detective novels, including the bleak one upon which this movie is based, about a detective (Elizabeth Banks) investigating a case of baby abduction that puts her back into contact with two kids, now adults, who seven years prior were charged, like the boy killers of real-life James Bulger, with the kidnap and murder of an infant - a sobering plot (and dinner-table conversation in the Simon-Lippman household, one presumes) given it is more interested in probing baby killer psychology than having fun with mystery reveals.

★★★☆☆

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Still Alice (2014)

A 50-year-old Linguistics professor is diagnosed with a hereditary form of Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease in this tearjerker that is as much a character study of the debilitating disease itself as it is a character study of the unfortunate woman, Alice, and her family - of course no-one's idea of a good time but the movie features such a good performance by Julianne Moore you won't be able to take your eyes off it.

★★★★☆

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While We're Young (2014)

Husband and wife forty-somethings find themselves caught between two worlds — that of their procreating couple-friends, and the hipster orbit of a couple of twenty-somethings whose grooviness reinvigorates them — in this really very funny comedy with witty things to say about Gen Xers getting old and having to "hurry up because they've changed the rules, honey."

★★★★★

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Far From Men (Loin des Hommes) (2014)

So that he can be tried in a French court, Daru, a schoolteacher, reluctantly transports Mohamed, a confessed murderer, across Algeria's Atlas mountains and along the way the two men become embroiled in the beginnings of Algeria's War of Independence, in this visually arresting, philosophically interesting, and broadly politically relevant neo-Western drama based on a 1957 Albert Camus short story, The Guest.

★★★★☆

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Trash (2014)

The source material, a book by Andy Mulligan, apparently also awkwardly straddled the divide between young adult fiction and violent crime drama and that is the problem here in this movie adaptation about street kids in Rio de Janiero doing kids' stuff (code-breaking, sneaking past adults and playing Donkey Kong) while also dodging bullets, falling victim to police brutality and running afoul of criminals who torture and kill - adults will yawn through the childish adventure while wanting to shield their younger kids from the violence and language.

★★★☆☆

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In Order Of Disappearance (Kraftidioten) (2014)

The 2018 American remake of this darkly funny Scandinavian Harry Brown seemed to think the interest lay in the irreverent detail - the gangster nicknames, the odd bod characters, and the quirky relationships - and so ended up an unfocused Fargo mess while the 2014 Norwegian original includes all the irreverent detail but remains tightly focused on how the actions of a revenge-seeking everyman (in fact, a small-town Citizen of the Year), um, snowball and erupt a war between rival drug gangs, all while the everyman miraculously dodges bullets.

★★★☆☆

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Hector and the Search For Happiness (2014)

Things momentarily improve when Toni Collette turns up in the last third and shines brightly as the only genuine thing on the screen, but otherwise this is a nauseating affair about a psychiatrist (Simon Pegg) - a sometimes accident-prone Mr Bean, a sometimes naive trenchcoated Monsieur Hulot, an occasionally slapstick Charlie Chaplin, once a midair doctor, and at other times a wide-eyed Walter Mitty fantasist - who zips around the world like that Eat Pray Love person, searching for happiness, which he finds and packages up in fifteen one-line platitudes that appear on the screen occasionally throughout the movie like patronising summary statements of all the nonsense that has come before - cartoon sequences, a brutal kidnapping, mawkish travelogues, cloying romance, slapstick - a series of events seemingly intended as a "wondrous kaleidoscope" of the human condition but just irritating.  

★★☆☆☆

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Marshland (La Isla Minima) (2014)

Spain has emerged a democracy after years of Franco repression and its people are split between those excited by the prospect of freer times and those who wish things back to the way they were, a divide mirrored in the female victims of this movie's serial killer, all of whom, a police investigation reveals, dreamed of escaping a Spanish backwater but met with foul play in the remote marshlands where they felt stuck, and it is up to two cops, one a liberal campaigner and the other complicit in Franco-era secret police crimes, to work together to stop the killer.

★★★☆☆

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Dracula Untold (2014)

If they'd dispensed with the tired false promise of that title and marketed it as a live-action Castlevania, maybe more people would have enjoyed this origin story that melds together the mytholology of the world's most famous nocturnal neckbiter, Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, with the history of the 15th Century exacerbater of the Ottoman Empire, Vlad the Impaler even if the movie does rely a little too often on its swirling cgi bats and even if, like the film's antihero, the film refuses to die despite several ideal moments when it should impale itself on a stake and end but instead rises diabolically again and again and again (each time with a swirl of bats) because the gap between history and mythology that the film is bridging is actually a chasm with nothing in it, one that requires at some point just a stupid leap.

★★★★☆

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Zombeavers (2014)

Both words are stressed on the first syllable, making the portmanteau cumbersome — 'zɒmb(i)vəz and zɒm'bivəz are more natural, but the far more awkward 'zɒm'bi'vəz is probably correct — and a lexical horror that will gnaw at you as this low budget creature feature pretends to be meta but remains utterly derivative for its first two-thirds, setting up as disposable meat objects a threesome of scantily-clad sorority girls in a cabin in the woods, letting three revolting boys get their turn before the 'zɒm'bi'vəz are set upon them, leaving the surprisingly funny stuff — perhaps two or three intentionally ridiculous scenes of humans transforming into zɒm'bivəz and gnawing at trees to create roadblocks — for the far-too-little-too-late end.

★☆☆☆☆

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Reclaim (2014)

While in the Dominican Republic, an American couple - one of the pair, Ryan Phillipe in a defiantly white tee - falls victim to a human trafficking scam that proves so dull a badly animated and wholly unnecessary cgi car-dangling-from-a-cliff sequence is thrown in towards the movie's end in an effort to liven things up, but it doesn't and nor do the repetitive oh-no-the-bad-guy-(John-Cusack)-rises-again (and chases the couple through the forest again) endscenes.

★☆☆☆☆

Big Game (2014)

Alone overnight in the Finnish wilderness taking part in a coming-of-age hunting ritual, a 13-year-old ends up protector, not hunter, of the President of the United States on the run from a psychotic Arab prince in German officer jodhpurs who has just downed Air Force One, and you just wish a movie with this sort of outlandish plot, one featuring Samuel L Jackson as POTUS, spent less time on the set-up and allowed more time for the 13-year-old to show his mettle and outsmart the baddies, not simply outrun them in comicbook-style for twenty minutes near the end.

★★☆☆☆

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About Last Night (2014)

Kevin Hart somehow manages to be likeable even playing shrill objectifier and verbal abuser of women Bernie Litgo and even more likeable is his friend played by Michael Ealy, a tenderheart with a moral compass ready to settle down with his corporate go-getting partner, and this surprisingly engaging movie, not quite funny enough to be considered an outright comedy but amusing, follows these two likeable characters as they move about the city and transition from young carefree partyers enjoying the singles scene to adults in committed relationships with their girlfriends.

★★★☆☆

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Kung Fu Killer (一個人的武林) (aka Kung Fu Jungle/Land of the Best) (2014)

"Who's Killing All The Great Martial Artists of Asia?" tells the story of an imprisoned martial arts expert enlisted by police to help track down a glory-hungry kungfu serial killer and in China was clearly an event film judging by the sheer number of martial artists and celebrities who appear in it, but whether the Chinese-Hong Kong production is as good an action as suggested by all the accolades the movie garnered upon its 2014 release is hard to determine for this non-Mandarin, non-Cantonese-speaking viewer: those in charge of the subtitles might as well have used Wingdings - it is like reading a phonebook in the dark for two hours.

★★★☆☆

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A Walk Among The Tombstones (2014)

There are references to Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade in this neo-noir mystery starring Liam Neeson, but there are also touches of Sherlock Holmes in Neeson's recovering substance abuser and dogged sleuth, Matthew Scudder — especially given the presence at his side of a Baker Street Boy, TJ, who helps the Luddite gumshoe with tech matters — but while Scudder is like a gritty contemporary Sherlock Holmes, the crimes he investigates are Thomas Harris Silence of the Lambs ones and this is where the problem lies in a movie that is two disparate halves — one half investigation procedural, the other half unbearably sick torture porn.

★★★☆☆

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The Salvation (2014)

This Danish production set in an Old West with computer-generated stormy skies spends far too much of its running time demonstrating just how bad the bad guy, Henry Delarue, is - he hunts and tortures his brother's killer, hunts and batters a mute woman, kills off the townsfolk two-by-two (you won't care) and extorts from them their land deeds - so when revenge is finally metered out in a rush at the last minute, it no longer even matters by whom: it is simply the long overdue comeuppance needed to end the dreariness.

★★☆☆☆

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The Interview (2014)

I had assumed the controversy surrounding its release - because it centres on a plot to assassinate a living leader - was a marketing ploy to overshadow the fact James Franco and Seth Rogen's comedy was a laughfree bomb, but in fact, despite myself, I enjoyed this audacious - and immature and unnecessarily violent - comedy greatly boosted by the genuinely touching relationship that develops between Randall Parks' Kim Jong-un and Franco's dopey celebrity shockjock, Dave Skylark, enlisted by the FBI to kill the leader during a staged, ratings-boosting interview.

★★★★☆

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Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (2014)

Once you know it is inspired by an urban myth that sprang up to explain the 2001 death in the freezing Minnesota cold of a young Japanese woman, you can't help but be dismayed by this confection that removes poor real-life and probably broken-hearted Takako Konishi from the story of her suicide, replacing her with Kumiko, an oddbod fantasist and broad-brushstroke product of Japanese society, and replacing the genuine tragedy and elements of genuine mystery of Konishi's death with fairytale stylings, an absence of established details of Konishi's life (her ex-lover, her suicide note..) and a particularly obtuse and - I imagine offensive to some - final scene.

★★★☆☆

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John Wick (2014)

John Wick's two-hour gun and knife killing spree, including a brief scene featuring a yellow bus and an extended scene in a hotel called "The Continental", is justified because someone killed his dog and stole his car, but if the bus had "Columbine High School" written on it and if scenes in The Continental occurred on, say, the twelfth floor of a hotel in Las Vegas instead, the terrible indictment on America's gun culture that is not the intention of directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch's ice-cold, low affect neo noir thriller, might dampen the dumb awe of fanboys who have driven demand for not just a number two but coming soon, John Wick: Chapter 3 - Even More Bullets To The Head.

★☆☆☆☆

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