Top 10 Films of 2014

While 2014 was a pretty crap year overall, but you can't say the same thing for the year's slate of movies. For what was expected to be a pretty fallow 12 months at the cinema, many critics were pleasantly surprised. There was some interesting experimentation, a few unexpected revivals, and more than a couple out-of-nowhere masterpieces. So without further ado, I present the obligatory end of year list...

The Top 10 Films of 2014

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies: A Review

From the beginning Director Peter Jackson's film adaptations of The Hobbit have been something of a failed experiment. An attempt to both stretch J.R.R. Tolkien's sparse original novel of Middle-Earth over three films and present it with the same majestic scope of his Lord of the Rings adaptations from a decade ago, people ranging from Tolkien purists to average movie-goers have questioned his approach and execution of the material. But the caveat hanging over the whole series has been that however good or bad the individual films have been, no one would be able to have a complete opinion on The Hobbit series until all three had been released. So now with the release of the last film, The Battle of the Five Armies, will the series come together at the finale or be the bloated mess everyone assumed it would be?

To catch you up on the story so far, well to do hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) has been somewhat reluctantly shanghaied into an adventure by the wizard Gandalf (Ian Mckellen) and a company of dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) to reclaim the dwarves' ancestral home from the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch). Having ousted the dragon at the end of the previous film, the dwarves now have to deal with the various parties they've aggrieved along their journey. From the men whose town they accidentally loosed the dragon on to the elves whose dungeon they escaped to the orcs who've been chasing them over the three films, all of them show up outside the dwarves' front door looking for some payback. Bilbo is caught in the middle of them and may have the only way to avert an all-out war, if he can move fast enough. Meanwhile, Gandalf has been having his own problems. He's been captured by a mysterious sorcerer and has no way of warning his friends of the orc army coming to take the dwarves' home.