Guardians of the Galaxy

Gunn hits bulls-eye with this branch-in-cheek rendition of Star Wars: The Force Avenges.  Bautista finally flexes acting muscles while Cooper perfects Pesci impression, Diesel and Seldana go green and Pratt cements his star status.   Effects, humor and heart make up for misused collection of bit-players and deus ex galactica finale.

The Imitation Game

Cumberbatch cracks a code with aid from his beautiful mechanical mind and seems right at holme with crackling clever dialog and a supporting team who are undeniably Goode and Strong.  Somewhat contrived flashback structure and overly enigmatic opening voiceover are more than offset by a devastatingly powerful genre reassignment surgery.

Birdman

Black-Swan-man embraces gravity with style despite feather-ruffling from Norton’s Norton and stoned Stone.  Watts electrifies with return to Mulholland while Galifaeioukis galls by emerging from comedic ferns.  Inairitu’s mockery of editing and soundly designed sound design give wings to a film that seemed like a long shot and still does.

Lovelace

‘Somewhat Near Deep Throat’ struggles to achieve documentary’s depth.  Miscasting, misdirection, and an excess of inference result in a tedious unpalatable drama that relies on fragmented chronology and repeatedly shoving it’s message down the viewer’s throat to compensate for a lack of compelling material.  But James Franco’s in there, so…

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Next 90 pages gains Legolas, love story, and load of steaming gold garbage.  Peter Rabbit eats carrot and strikes perfect blend between barrel-riding book’s cartoonishness and Laketown’s Lord-of-the-Ringsy epicness, but gets greedy for gold with bloated, ridiculous last act.  Also suffers trippy Necrosauron zoom and go-pro shots of orcish hideousness.

Movie 43

Outstanding cast of A-listers assemble to breathe life into SNL rejected short scripts… and fail. Stolen jokes, weak performances, and senseless frame story further ensure disaster.  Like ‘Funny or Die’ but mostly the latter as each segment manages a moment of humor, then milks it to painful and poisonous death.