The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Lawrence, 2013)

Sequels of big-budget franchise films can be tough to get right for a mass audience. People who fell in love with the first film usually want that same exciting feeling again for the second film, which is unfortunately rare for many franchises. The first Pirates of the Caribbean film felt like the start of a exciting new series of movies but the franchise quickly devolved after introducing too many one-dimensional characters and unnecessarily complex plots in the sequels. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire had huge expectations riding on it, with 2012’s The Hunger Games becoming a huge, worldwide box office phenomenon and turning Jennifer Lawrence into America’s Sweetheart. Catching Fire not only had to please fans of The Hunger Games book series by Suzanne Collins, it also had to give non-book readers enough to properly enjoy it without prior knowledge of what was to come. As someone who was a fan of the books, I can say that director Francis Lawrence has created what may be the best possible adaptation of Catching Fire imaginable.

Thor: The Dark World (Taylor, 2013)

Marvel Studios has really turned into a well-oiled machine in terms of producing successful blockbusters. Their movies are simple enough to be enjoyed by all audiences with varying levels of intelligence but they’re also quick-witted enough to keep the adult audience engaged. Thor: The Dark World is largely another one of Marvel’s brilliantly packaged but ultimately disposable movies. It is like a fast food meal that you enjoy while you’re consuming but does not exactly stimulate you or enrich your life in any way. There are moments in Thor: The Dark World that deal with the complexities that come with relationships, whether they be brotherly or romantic, but those moments are not explored beyond a basic, surface level.

Kill Your Darlings (Krokidas, 2013)

It is notoriously difficult to create films about poetry and writing. Such a cerebral art form is tough to reproduce in a visual format without going fully pretentious and having the characters spout ridiculous, unrealistic lines of dialogue. The visual language of Kill Your Darlings, a film chronicling the early lives of some of the most influential poets of the Beat generation, is almost secondary to the writings themselves. This isn’t a film meant to dazzle with visuals and spectacle. At its best, Kill Your Darlings presents the young poets as they are developing their own rules and limitations for what language can do and discovering who they are in the process. It is a character-driven drama that wants you to feel the motivations of each of its many characters, even if its grander ambitions prove too much for it to handle.

12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013)

When looking at the subject matter of a film, it is tempting to judge its merits on the importance of the story its telling. Dramas about war are rarely bashed in the critical mainstream and historical epics are generally given good reviews as long as the subject feels important and necessary. I believe that this was the case in 2012 when Lincoln achieved exalted status despite being mostly speechifying men sitting in rooms and nothing else. If a film presents all the right parts: human struggle, evil oppressors, lots of crying, etc., it tends to be praised as one of the best films of the year. Underneath all those necessary parts, however, is sometimes very little of substance, making the film seem like torture porn just for the sake of it. It is for these reasons that I went into 12 Years a Slave with a skeptical eye. The film had been praised as the contender to beat at the Oscars and was being tauted as a life-changing experience by some critics. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have another Lincoln experience, in which people would make grand, overwrought proclamations about slavery set to a sickeningly sweet score.

Captain Phillips (Greengrass, 2013)

There are some moviegoing experiences that make it difficult to come out of the theater with a sense of satisfaction, regardless of the film’s quality. In these instances, the film’s director has usually made a movie that feels so unsettling and visceral that you are left haunted by it hours after the experience. Paul Greengrass is a director that specializes in putting the audience right in the heart of the action, with the general desire to make the audience feel like they’ve experienced something as it really happened. Greengrass’ Academy Award-nominated work in United 93 is a prime example of placing the audience in a dangerous, thrilling situation, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. Just as United 93 put us on a plane full of horrified people headed toward Washington, D.C. on 9/11, Captain Phillips places us on a 2009 ship off the coast of Somalia that just so happens to be taken hostage by pirates.