Drive

A vision in teal and orange, a slow meditation on LA crime that feels personal but is naturally inconclusive.

Reminds me a lot of sections of Pulp Fiction, not least in its ability to make you feel every brutal death. Gosling does a lot with very few words, as Refn and his cinematographer do much with very little light and the natural backdrop of Los Angeles streets. Gorgeous opening sequence.

Overall the story feels a bit pointless (other than reiterating that crime doesn't pay) - much of the suspense comes from the protagonist living under threat of murder from various crime bosses, but he eventually dispatches them with apparent ease, leading me to wonder why the threat mattered in the first place.

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The Adventures of Tintin

Visually spectacular but disjointed in story and script.

I'll start by being nice: the lighting is some of the greatest I've ever seen in animation, and the detail in skin, hair and fabric is incredible. Motion capture clearly enhances scenes such as the sword fight in the burning ship - but the faces are stuck firmly in the uncanny valley, beautiful in stills but creepy, dead and unsynchronised in motion.

Frozen

"Hoo-hoo! Big summer blow-out. Half off swimming suits, clogs, and a sun balm of my own invention, ja?" — Oaken

Refreshing to see this style of movie feature two women as the main dynamic, who aren't just fighting over men. The 'true love's first kiss' trope hasn't worked since Shrek did it (and did it well, as the point was that they were in fairyland), but the characters' wit was in a modern and slightly different style, the environment was new and the villains less hackneyed than expected. Music variable (For the First Time in Forever's lovely, Let It Go can be nothing less than stonking with Idina Menzel's pipes behind it, but the trolls' song was dire). Not bad, but not topping any lists.

Star Trek Into Darkness

"Bones, what are you doing with that Tribble?" — Captain James Tiberius Perfecthair

A very worthy sequel, with a brilliant villain, with good banter, and succumbing only slightly more to "ooh he said the line he says in the thing" than the first one. As a physicist my favourite part was the National Ignition Facility standing in for the Enterprise's warp core. That's some serious science cred.

Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls

"Shikaka. Shikaka... Shikasha. Shish kebab. Shawshank Redemption. Chi-ca-go, you're outta there!" — Ace Ventura

One of the best comedy sequels I've ever watched - I'd go so far as to say it's better than the original. Maybe just because I didn't get all the baseball metaphors. At least it doesn't hinge on making fun of trans people.

Ian McNeice and Simon Callow are both brilliant foils for Carrey, and some of the set pieces (the arrival at the mansion party, the projection room) are classics. I can never sing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang the same way again.

The Artist

Nice enough as a modern silent film, and modern black and white film. The era and filmic tropes are recreated very faithfully, and Dujardin has one of the warmest smiles in cinema history - but overall it doesn't feel like there's much here. Maybe as I'm so used to the modern busyness and 'rich experience', something with so little to work from just doesn't cut it any more? Yet I still find The General, Sunrise etc. gripping and hilarious. Altogether not sure how this is an Oscar-winning IMDB Top 250 movie.

Terminator Salvation

A reasonable furthering of the franchise. Every plot twist was predictable far in advance, and the writers didn't have the strength to keep the references to and quotes of the original Terminator script to only one tasteful instance, but the story overall worked and paced well between action, suspense and reflection. Sam Worthington's accent was variable as always, Christian Bale's personality was his stock gravelly hard-man, but Anton Yelchin's Kyle Reese and Moon Bloodgood's (what a name) original character Blair found a niche of realism and purpose. The line-less child character of Star might as well have been an inanimate object - I'm sure the young actor did a good job but her presence was purely a tool of the script.

The Wolverine

Stretching it a bit.

The barely-present romantic subplot was completely pointless and transparently tacked-on, the samurai/Yakuza/'disrespect' Japanese setting felt uncomfortably stereotypical, and the secondary villain had no backstory whatsoever. Jackman is once again the perfect Wolverine (the opening sequence in the bar was done well), physically (holy Christ) and tonally, but the film feels like a tedious attempt to wring a higher movie count out of the character. About the only useful transformation as a result is showing Logan's turmoil over Jean's fate - something that could have been accomplished in a flashback or vignette as part of the next X-Men story.

Planet of the Apes

A classic allegory of religious indoctrination against truth and discovery, with added prosthetics. Could have been a Star Trek episode.

The storytelling and the make-up still stand up fairly well (could have been cut down into an episode of TNG, not just TOS...), but some of the pacing is a bit drawn out and unnatural, and the delivery of the line that's more famous than the film itself is out of focus.

Jekyll

James Nesbitt takes the lead in this dark, twisting, slightly predictable Moffat romp with visions of Sherlock, which eventually loses momentum and ends up taking itself a bit too seriously.

Doctor Who: The Time of the Doctor

Another Christmas offering, this time heralding the end of the Eleventh Doctor. Honestly though, it's getting a bit tiring.

On the motion of Bullock in an orbit: Gravity

IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL.

As an astrophysicist, I never quite know how to approach the science in movies. For works like Contact (thankfully written by an esteemed scientist), there's a clear and story-serving divide between the real world and the entertaining fiction inspired by sciency ideas. You can see where the fictions have developed from, and accept them as plausible extensions of reality. I appreciate that scientific accuracy is often rightfully discarded in search of a good story - I'm not puritanical. But movies like Gravity still make me a little fidgety in the science department.