Wild – 7.5

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Reese witherspoon was extremely nice company to spend two hours with, and I don’t begrudge any awards she might garner. Not having read Cheryl Strayed’s book, however, I never quite got why or how she carried out such a daunting wilderness trek, why she didn’t get lost or sick or see more fellow hikers. The views of nature disappointed – compared to The Horseman – but the feel-good vibe, typified by the Jerry Garcia memorial concert, made the journey pass pleasantly – for this viewer, at least.

Top 5 – 5.5

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This romcom was more romance than comedy, and once you got past the disappointment of its not being very funny you could see its sweetness, in a hip-hop way. Rosario Dawson was the center around which it swirled; if we didn’t know Chris Rock was a star in his own right he would have seem miscast. Then again, so is Woody Allen, and you could think of this as a black Annie Hall.

The Kill Team – 6

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What was fascinating was trying to figure out how the filmmakers got their footage of Adam Winfield with his psychiatrist, his defense lawyer, his parents. Perhaps someone decided when he got arrested that his best hope of justice was to film everything. Getting such cooperation from codefendant Morlock, after he was sentenced to 24 years detention, was also noteworthy. The film itself, however, could as easily have been reduced to a 20 Minutes segment.

Tim’s Vermeer – 5

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Tedious in the extreme, even when seen on a transocean airflight. The opening montage of actual Vermeer paintings made everything that followed pale in comparison. An analogy might be watching someone without much personality dissecting a Penn & Teller magic trick for 90 minutes, as opposed to watching the trick itself.

Guardians of the Galaxy – 7.7

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A good-spirited hoot of a movie. Lots of character-based laugh-out-loud moments and fun ’80s music amid all the whizzing around. It came across not so much as a Star Wars parody as a Star Wars reductio ad absurdum, with a raccoon in place of R2-D2 and a tree for 3CPO.

Boyhood – 8

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A charming passage through the growing-up years of one Mason Evans; our own youths may have been different, but we recognized the situations, with lots of nods and knowing smiles. Richard Linklater’s technique – filming the same actors over a 12-year period – gets all the attention, deservedly – but one shouldn’t overlook the performance of Patricia Arquette, the single mom who makes bad choices in men but holds her family together. The talkie nature is reminiscent of the Linklater’s series with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, but it’s astonishing how much better this movie was than his latest, Before Midnight.

Locke – 6.5

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A one-person drama that is daring in conception and clever in execution; but in the end you feel it might work better as a play or a short story. We get a pretty good read on Tom Hardy’s character halfway through, and with no more surprises you wait for his car to arrive, which, metaphorically and physically, it doesn’t.

Monuments Men – 3

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I sat through 65 minutes without finding a scene that was either believable or likable. I once thought George Clooney could do no wrong, but here he’s done nothing right, from casting to acting to plot to tone. The famous actors, with the possible exception of Cate Blanchett, just play themselves and you wonder what they are doing in this bloody mess (by which I could mean the war or the movie).

Lee Daniels’ The Butler – 5

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Purest hokum. Every president since Ike and every civil rights moment since Brown v. Board of Education is seen through the eyes of a White House butler, and in order to compress them all, plus the growth of the Black Power movement, into the space of this movie, there’s not much room for subtlety or character development. The depiction of life on the farm pales in comparison to 12 Years A Slave, and the characterization of the butler made me long for Carson. I did cry a couple times, but that was because the historic events were so resonant, not because of anything Lee Daniels did.

Fruitvale Station – 8

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This movie crept up on me. Watching on an airplane, I couldn’t make out some dialogue, and nothing much out of the ordinary seemed to be happening. The character of Oscar continued to build. Yes, he was a bit of a fuck-up: he cheated on his girl, he was hotheaded, he was fired from his job – but he had a heart of gold, loved his mom and was quick to help others. Good people, the movie seemed to say, can get in bad situations. The ending literally stunned me, and when I read the postscript – that this was a highly, if locally, publicized true event – I felt the tragedy, and its reflection on our world, even more deeply.