The Movies: Interstellar, Gone Girl, Boyhood, Guardians Of The Galaxy 2014 has brought spectacular new movies from some of the best directors working today; Spike Jonze gave the world Her, Wes Anderson delivered his most Wes Anderson movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Bryan Singer returned to the not too distant future for the best X-Men movie yet. Not all of the movies from proven masters were greeted with overwhelming plaudits, however. Both David Fincher and Christopher Nolan released films whose general reaction can be summed up in the same manner; "not the director's best, but still an incredible piece of (flawed) cinema." The similarities are particularly stark when looking at their endings. Gone Girl not giving Amy any punishment for her manipulation, ending on something of an anti-climax, and Interstellar showing Matthew McConaughey realising that love was the key to the universe (or whatever) both received raised eyebrows, becoming the most divisive elements of their respective movies. Even Boyhood, Richard Linklater's seminal meditation on childhood that essentially closes the book on the whole coming-of-age genre, wasn't exempt from this, with its final ten minutes of desert-trekking irritating some viewers who were already emotioned-out after Patricia Arquette's goodbye. The same goes for Guardians Of The Galaxy, which marked yet another Marvel movie to succumb to the CGI-explosion finale syndrome.
