I love the penguins in the Madagascar films, but they’re best taken in small doses with no character arcs. This film was fun, but it wasn’t awesome.

If you’ve seen the third Madagascar film, the one with the circus, the opening chase scene is over-the-top hilarious. Delightful. Penguins of Madagascar gives us a gondola chase that is similarly over-the-top, but it didn’t quite clear the bar set by the Paris chase in the previous film.

Part of the problem with this film is that in all of the others the penguins are a force of nature. They are super-beings whose successes are godlike, and whose failures mean a thing simply cannot be done. In this film, however, the penguins are our protagonists, so they’re not allowed to be super-beings. They come close, sure, but their failures feel contrived, and their successes can’t ever be quite as awesome as they were in the previous films.

So: small doses.

I had fun, though. Penguins of Madagascar comes in at #14 for me for the year.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is pretty powerful, but it might rub a lot of folks the wrong way. It doesn’t tell the story of Moses the way biblical literalists would have it be told. (Disclaimer: It’s also not the story of Moses that I believe in, but I didn’t expect it to be.)

That’s okay. It’s a pretty good story. And it’s a story that rings true in a lot of ways, especially in the ways that the characters relate to each other.

Was it fun? Not really — I’m putting it at #16. But it was beautiful and powerful and I liked it. Best of all, I never once heard Batman noises come out of Christian Bale’s mouth. Although Batmoses would have been a cool movie, too.

On a strictly literary level, Batman and the other comic-book superheroes are very similar to the gods and heroes of ancient myth. They’re part of a modern mythic pantheon, and this is a very flattering way to justify why their origin stories and key adventures keep getting re-told (much more flattering than the “we’re too scared to take chances with a new story” version). In that light, Exodus: Gods and Kings is a Moses movie just like The 13th Warrior was a Beowulf movie, and Troy was about Achilles.

I am quite happy to have looked up the length of this film prior to scheduling a trip to the cinema. Per Twitter:

Looked up INTERSTELLAR. Good grief, it’s 2 hours and 49 minutes long. That’s “fly a spaceship into Mordor” length.

— Howard Tayler (@howardtayler) November 10, 2014

This one didn’t clear the Threshold of Awesome, but it worked well in spite of the way it shamelessly luxuriated in those 169 minutes. Unlike a lot of genre films, Interstellar gives the viewer time to process what’s going on, and to feel what the characters are feeling. It’s good art.

Still long, though.

I have two major quibbles with the film: it is deeply pessimistic (or at least it strikes that tone in order to present a cautionary tale) and it deploys the dreaded deus ex machina. Sure, it’s a great story, and there is plenty of human heroism in it, but those two elements dampen my excitement about science, and I’m pretty sure that’s almost exactly the opposite of the reaction the film makers had in mind for me.

In context of those two issues the bad astronomy and crazy astrogeography were only mildly annoying. I know why the film makers did what they did, and those decisions made for a much more powerful human story, but now I want a space travel hard SF movie that doesn’t invoke magic.

But if you’re going to invoke magic, you can’t do it much more beautifully than Interstellar did.