Top 10 Hollywood movies of 2014
10. X-Men: Days Of Future Past
Great though 2011's X-Men: First Class was, it's exciting to have Bryan Singer back in the chair for Days Of Future Past, an adaptation of the 1981 comic book run which aims to tie the two timelines in the X-Men cinematic universe. To this end, we'll have both James McAvoy and Patrick Stewart playing Professor X in two separate epochs, and Michael Fassbender and Ian McKellen playing Magneto.
Having a fight for mutant survival play out across two points in time could prove too much for some directors, but Singer's The Usual Suspects is evidence that he can handle complex storylines with ease. Among the expected cast, including Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and a returning Anna Paquin as Rogue, there's also Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde, and the great Peter Dinklage as scientist Bolivar Trask.
If Singer can make another comic book movie as good as X2, we should be in for a real treat. Certainly on the basis of the first trailer, he's heading very much in the right direction.
9. How To Train Your Dragon 2
There are some terrific-looking animated movies that we simply didn't have space to squeeze into this countdown - Mr Peabody & Sherman and Big Hero Six chief amongst them. But our animated movie of choice for 2014 is the eagerly awaiting How To Train Your Dragon 2.
The first film was a triumph for DreamWorks Animation, and arguably one of its very best films. And whilst co-director Chris Sanders went off to make The Croods (and is now working on The Croods 2), the other co-director - Dean DeBlois - has been calling the shots on this sequel. In fact, he's also knee deep too in How To Train Your Dragon 3, which is scheduled to land in 2016.
For the purposes of chapter two, five years have moved on, so when we meet Hiccup and his friends again, they're late teenagers. But Hiccup is no ordinary teenager - he's not spending hours locked in his room looking at 'educational' YouTube videos - as he finds himself in the midst of a new conflict between humans and dragons. Oops.
We've already had a trailer for How To Train Your Dragon 2, and it went down a treat. Here's hoping the final cut of the film does when we finally get to see it June 2014.
8. Guardians Of The Galaxy
In truth, Guardians Of The Galaxy may not turn out to be the best Marvel movie of 2014. But on paper, it's comfortably the biggest gamble. Not for the first time, Marvel is taking a property that the mass audience isn't particularly familiar with, and giving it to a director who isn't the most obvious choice.
So, we get a space-based adventure, from the man who directed Slither and Super (films we like, we should point out), that includes a talking tree, Bradley Cooper voicing a raccoon, Karen Gillan with no hair, and a cast of characters that don't easily lend themselves to the shelves of Toys R Us.
Bluntly, we can't wait. Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Benicio del Toro and Michael Rooker are amongst the rest of the cast, and it seems clear that if you were looking for a comic book movie that's happy to resist the usual template, Guardians Of The Galaxy is looking like your best bet. How will it gel together with the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe? We're already getting clues and teases for that through mid-credits sequences. But we look forward to finding out more on August 1st.
7. The Raid 2
When Gareth Evans' The Raid appeared in 2011, its effect felt like a solid punch between the eyes. With some lightning fast martial arts moves from Iko Uwais, a simple high-concept premise - about the storming of a drug lord's high-rise lair by a group of cops - and some incredibly intense, almost horror-like direction from Evans, The Raid was a truly thrilling action film.
The Raid 2 again stars Uwais - it's safe to say his former job in a call centre is now firmly behind him - who this time goes undercover in a Jakarta gang. Only time will tell whether Evans can create the same air of menacing intensity as the previous film, but with characters listed on IMDb with names like Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man, we can't wait to see how it all turns out.
6. Big Eyes
Tim Burton stormed back into form with the wonderful Frankenweenie in 2012, and Big Eyes builds on that, as he reteams with his Ed Wood writers - Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski - for a biopic that could by one of 2014's standouts.
Made for a modest price, Big Eyes stars Christoph Waltz as Walter Keane, who came to fame in the 1950s and 1960s for paintings that featured big-eyed children. Only they weren't his paintings: they were the work of his shy wife, Margaret, who's played in the film by Amy Adams.
Burton's film will frame this through the divorce battle that eventually occurred between Walter and Margaret, where the latter accused the former of stealing her work. The last time Burton made a low budget biopic, the aforementioned Ed Wood, the result was his best film, and an Oscar for Martin Landau. Might Big Eyes be the movie to finally get Amy Adams a gong? Maybe, maybe not. But it's most definitely one of our must-sees of 2014, and - for the first time in a while - a Tim Burton live action film that we're absolutely aching to see.
5. Birdman
Looking for an actor to play a one-time big screen superhero who's fallen out of the public eye? We're curious if Michael Keaton actually had to audition for Birdman, the new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, and we certainly wouldn't be surprised if he didn't.
Birdman, billed as a comedy, sees Keaton as Riggan Thomson, once the man who played Birdman, but now desperately trying to put on a Broadway play (in this instance, Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love). Barriers to him doing so? Ego, family, insecurity. On top of the usual stuff.
Emma Stone, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Zach Galafianakis, Naomi Watts and Amy Ryan co-star. But the wildcard here might be Iñárritu himself - it looks, on paper, like a change of tone from the man who brought us the amazing Amores Perros, and films such as 21 Grams and Babel.
If nothing else, the chance to see Keaton in a big, major lead role is comfortably enough to sell us a ticket. It's been too long...
4. How To Catch A Monster
As if Ryan Gosling wasn't an enviable enough figure, he's also turning his hand to directing with How To Catch A Monster. He's assembled an equally enviable cast for his debut, including Christina Hendricks, Saoirse Ronan, Matt Smith, Eva Mendes and Ben Mendelsohn. It's described as a fantasy neo-noir, about a single mother and her young son, and the discovery of a path to a city under the sea. If Gosling's directing's as good as his acting, this one could be marvellous.
3. Interstellar
Christopher Nolan's a notoriously secretive filmmaker, and like Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, specific details surrounding Interstellar are difficult to come by. According to some sources, the story's about scientists trying to use wormholes in space to find arable land for a starving planet. Officially, though, all that's been confirmed is that it's about the discovery of a wormhole, and a team of scientists' voyage through it.
The cast includes Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck and John Lithgow, and filming has been underway since August in locations including Canada and Iceland. The screenplay, rewritten by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, is based on the work of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, so we should be in for something approaching the more cerebral science fiction of, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
If Inception's anything to go by, the synopsis and marketing will only give us a vague idea of the final film's true nature. We can't wait to see what filmmaking tricks Nolan has in store for us.
2. Godzilla
With 2010's Monsters, director Gareth Edwards proved that he could make an engaging sci-fi drama on a miniscule budget. And with Godzilla as his second picture, we'll get to see what he can do with a larger effects department and an entire team of technicians behind him.
The 1998 Godzilla adaptation may have played fast and loose with Japan's most famous kaiju, but there are signs everywhere that Edwards plans to make his film in the mode of Ishiro Honda's dark, sombre 1954 original. This is certainly backed up by the cast, which is full of actors capable of bringing the requisite gravitas: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Ken Watanabe and David Strathairn are just a few of the most prominent names.
A recently leaked Comic Con trailer fuelled our excitement further, with its ominous soundtrack and images of a devastated city establishing the mighty Godzilla as a truly intimidating force of nature.
1. Transcendence
Since Memento in 2000, cinematographer Wally Pfister became known as a regular collaborator with Christopher Nolan, and since that low-budget classic, the pair worked together on a string of projects, each more grand than the last. Transcendence marks Pfister's first project as director, and it sounds extremely exciting.
It's set in a future where scientists are on the cusp of creating a computer intelligence superior to our own, and a terrorist organisation is doing its best to prevent a technological singularity from occurring. Johnny Depp stars as a computer scientist whose consciousness is uploaded to the internet, and Rebecca Hall joins him as his wife and scientific colleague.
"Is it really Will who is interacting with humanity in order to make things better," reads the intriguing synopsis for the film, "or a sinister clone bent on the termination of the world as we know it?"
The premise alone sounds fantastic, and Pfister's presence means it'll be beautiful to look at, too. And while Pfister may have taken on a mammoth task in this potentially expensive, star-laden movie, let's not forget that he's spent more than a decade working with one of the finest mainstream film directors currently working. Transcendence could be the moment where Mister Pfister strikes out as a brilliant storyteller in his own right.
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