I've seen very few films that I actively despise. In fact, it's limited to maybe one or two a year. I was hoping for a clean 2014, but The Angriest Man in Brooklyn has gone ahead and sullied it. It takes a pretty damn awful kind of movie for me to summon this level of vitriol, but this one's got it all. I feel ill, a little bit dirty and a good deal dumber having sat through it. I had to - it's my job - but you don't, so save yourself some trauma and go see Blue Ruin again - or just stick your head in the oven for an hour and a half, Lord knows that's better than the alternative.
Don Draper is a freaking badass - a man among men, never short of a smart quip or a crippling matriarchal complex. With the seventh and final season of Mad Men in full and retrotastic swing, it's high time we all took a few leaves out of the leather bound, well-dressed, scotch swilling notebook of Don Draper.
The first Amazing Spider-Man felt like a pretty cynical piece of cinema. A reboot of a franchise barely five years dead (and rumored to be born only out of the necessity for Sony to hold on to the rights for the titular character), the finished product was rather underwhelming. A padded runtime, a perfunctory script and a thoroughly dull adversary overruled the undeniable merits of Andrew Garfield as the spandexed web-slinger. Thankfully, that's not the case this time around. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 feels like a proper movie. It may never reach the wonderful heights of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2, but with its goofy sense of humor and super-villain overkill, it's the best Spider-Man film since that landmark.