Guardians of the Galaxy review

There’s something delightfully familiar about The Guardians of the Galaxy - that wacky combination of humour and action within a setting that feels dense.

Marvel’s newest outing opts to expand the universe, showing the audience that there’s more than just the Asguardians, frost giants and giant purple men in gold armour running around space.

Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) was abducted from Earth by a bunch of space pirates when he was just a kid.

While the story of a young boy growing up on a spaceship full of mercenaries and discovering a weird, wonderful universe would be an entertaining one, the film decides to pick up 25 years later.

"Ooooooooooooooooooooooooo." Star-Lord, 2014

The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro

Every comic book movie faces the same challenge when going up on the big screen, to stay faithful to the original comic or to appeal to the sensibilities of modern cinema, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro comes up firmly on the side of the comic books.

While the original Amazing Spider-Man faltered, not quite finding the right balance between its origins and the "realistic" stories current cinema seems to be enamored with, this film is much more successful in establishing tone.

TAS:ROE picks up roughly a year or so after the last film, with Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) fighting street thugs and Russian mobsters while graduating from his final year of high-school.

Luckily the film skips right to the graduation because watching Peter Parker doing his juggling act of school/personal life/superherodom yet again is probably more than the audience would have been able to take.

Insert "catching the bus" pun here.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Well here we are again folks.

Marvel is back at it again, trotting out their newest addition to the second-wave Avengers films with Captain America: The Winter Soldier – and I’m back at it again writing reviews. Hoorays all around!

Steve Rogers aka Captain America (Chris Evans) is working as an agent of Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division (S.H.I.E.L.D) protecting the US from terrorists, pirates, and probably a whole host of other nasty things.

Protecting America from THIS ONE GUY.

While his super-soldier abilities make him a perfect storm trooper, Rogers’ ideals and moral code don’t sit well with the covert operations that frequently undertakes.

After a botched mission, Rogers finds himself questioning whether or not he wants to continue serving as an agent of the state under S.H.I.E.L.D director Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson).

Unfortunately this moral crisis comes at a terrible time when he suddenly finds S.H.I.E.L.D under attack from an unknown source.

The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug

It was a monumental relief to see The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug was a much better movie than its predecessor. That being said, it is a surreal movie, which is a strange thing to say when talking about a bunch of short bearded men going off to fight a dragon.

The newest addition to the LOTR series, which can be now abbreviated to the ridiculous LOTR:TH:TDOS (which sounds like an elven name), picks up not long after the first Hobbit film ended. Would-be dwarven king Thorin (Richard Armitage), his band of misfit dwarven companions and increasingly out-of-his-depth Hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) continue on their way to the reclaim the lost mountain kingdom of Erebor from a dragon.

American Hustle

If you're anything like me, American Hustle is not the movie you were expecting.

That's not to say it's a bad movie. It's actually quite a good movie with a great cast and a pretty engaging story.

The trouble is, it's billed as basically Ocean's Eleven but set in the 70s. Woooooah, look out, Christian Bale is wearing a hairpiece. Wooooooah, Bradley Cooper has a perm. Lololol.

The reality is that it's closer to a flick called The Bank Job that was released a couple years back. But seeing as nobody actually remembers that movie, this was kind of a dumb point to make.

The Day of the Doctor

The 50th Anniversary Special of Doctor Who was an episode of two halves - one was a fairly standard romp with shape-shifting aliens invading from the Elizabethan-era...the other was a monumental tying up of loose ends and creating story hooks with one of the most popular Doctors of all time.

The Day of the Doctor focuses on three incarnations of the Doctor. Matt Smith, the current Doctor. David Tennant, the previous incarnation. And John Hurt, the "lost" in carnation - the War Doctor.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Get ready to bleak it up once again as some teenagers are forced to commit mass murder!

This time, however, the two surviving teenagers from the first movie have to mass murder a bunch of experienced mass murderers instead.

Isn't the "young adult" genre fun?

Catching Fire picks up almost immediately after the end of the first Hunger Games film and spends very little time rehashing or recapping - if you've forgotten something or are inexplicably starting the series at the second film, you're likely to be extremely lost extremely quickly.