The Best and Worst Movie Trailers of 2014

+ Note: This post will focus only on trailers for movies released in 2014. So sorry, no love here for The Avengers 2: Age of Ultron trailer, even though it is great. Come back next year for that one.

We love trailers, which is why when I had to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies last week, on top of the 150-minute runtime for the film, I also had to sit through 10 – YES, TEN – trailers. That’s an additional 30 minutes of sitting in the theater! And yet a good trailer can be so great – an excellent bonding opportunity for you and the people sitting around – and a bad trailer can build camaraderie, too. The collective groan from myself, the three bros in front of me, and the mom and her son behind me at The Hobbit when we saw the Terminator: Genisys trailer is proof of that.

So what trailers excited me most this year, and which made me want to run out of the movie theater and never come back? Read on for the five best and five worst movie trailers of 2014.

The five best trailers of 2014:

+ VERONICA MARS. You could brush off this movie as fan service, sure, but it’s extremely satisfying fan service. Take this trailer for proof: Look, all of your favorite Veronica Mars characters are back! Look, Veronica and Logan still long for each other! Look, Mac has an amazing new haircut! Look, Weevil is still the shit! Look, Daddy Mars is still doing dad stuff! Dick Casablancas is being, well, a dick! As a promise to fans, the Veronica Mars movie trailer was undeniably well orchestrated. (And so was the movie, too.)

+ GONE GIRL. The creepy vibe of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score still haunts my dreams, as does Amazing Amy’s equally chilly, “That’s marriage.” Maybe this year’s best movie for grownups, Gone Girl delivered with a trailer that laid out the central question—Did Ben Affleck’s Nick Dunne kill his wife, the beautiful and intelligent and perfect Amy?—while also subtly analyzing the 24-hour news cycle and upending the fake-American-dream promise of suburbia. “Where’s your wife, Nick?!” Yes, where, indeed.

+ GODZILLA. Godzilla underperformed a bit this year, but I agree withfellow PDC-er Julian Lytle that it was actually one of the year’s mostunderappreciated films—a movie that excellently chose when and how to feature Godzilla to build toward the impactful (and thrilling) final action set piece. And this trailer is a perfect microcosm of that approach: Blink and you’ll miss Godzilla, but when he wants to be seen, he’s unforgettable. And Godzilla’s final, discordant scream at the end of this trailer? It’s still giving me goosebumps.

+ X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. “We need you to hope again.” Sporting the most self-indulgent-and-yet-totally-successful cast of the year was X-Men: Days of Future Past, and this trailer forced you to acknowledge how great they all are. Patrick Stewart! Ian McKellen! Michael Fassbender! James McAvoy! The internet’s best friend Jennifer Lawrence! The internet’s best friend’s ex-boyfriend Nicholas Hoult! Tyrion Lannister! Jean Valjean! And on and on and on. Regardless of whether Days of Future Past had your favorite X-Men character or your favorite X-Men actor, that was the point: they were all in there. (Well, except for Anna Paquin, but that is a complaint for another day.) The cohesiveness of the cast did wonders for the timeline-mind-fuck of a story, and brought the contrasting movie worlds together in a way that keeps the storyline moving forward. How could you not get excited?

+ INTERSTELLAR. One of my most disappointing movies of the year still had one of the year’s best trailers, a perfect distillation of the things Christopher Nolan does well: cajole excellent performances from A-list male actors who play aching, ambitious widowers (here it’s Matthew McConaughey; see Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception or Hugh Jackman in The Prestige for further proof); present smoothly envisioned, sleekly impressive visual effects; and get Michael Caine to say something wise and sad, because that is basically all Michael Caine does in Christopher Nolan movies. It was such a formula, but oh, it was effective. If only the full version of Interstellar had been this airtight.

The five worst trailers of 2014:

+ TRANSCENDENCE. Oh look, Johnny Depp’s brain got uploaded into a computer because it’s super easy to do that. How could such an interesting idea seem so generic from even the first trailer? Pass. (Also, you’re going to have Cillian Murphy in your movie, but not even mention him in your trailer? For shame.)

+ THE OTHER WOMAN. Putting feminism back a century or two.

+ TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES. Stop giving Michael Bay enough money to destroy all our childhood dreams. Stop it! And stop pretending Megan Fox can act. Seriously, stop it.

+ DUMB AND DUMBER TO. When I saw 22 Jump Street this summer, more people laughed at this supremely awful trailer than they did during the entire length of 22 Jump Street. Because for some reason a senior citizen forcing Jim Carrey to pleasure her vagina full of dust is more amusing than the amazing meta-ness of Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill. (I hate people.)

+ EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS. Noooope.