The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, 2014)

8/10
I really liked this. Comparing it to other Best Picture nominees, it is not tier 1 (Boyhood) or tier 2 (Budapest) but fits snugly with Whiplash and Birdman in tier 3 as movies that were not life-alteringly brilliant but ones that I can definitely say I enjoyed on most levels. On the face of it its closest comparable is The Imitation Game but I found TToE had a lot of warmth and heart that Imitation Game lacked.
I will say one thing with respect to Tkachuk4MVP's review a couple of posts ago - this is definitely a movie that knows it has a tremendous amount of ground to cover and at times it's easy to become conscious of that as a viewer. Often, especially at the beginning, it feels like it's racing along, cramming in necessary scenes and info, but not really taking as much time as it should to dwell on them (gotta stay inside that Academy friendly 2 hour running time!).
But on the other hand, I liked how it took the focus off of Hawking's genius (mostly). We all know he's a genius, we don't need the movie to go to the necessary lengths to tell us that again. And frankly I assume what would be needed to establish just why Hawking is a genius would go over a lot of the audience's heads, myself included. So I give the movie credit for dodging that battle and instead mostly focusing on a (not so) simple love story that does plenty of credit to the subject himself while remaining engaging, interesting, and heartfelt. Not to mention beautifully shot, extremely well acted, and featuring a really good score. Plainly put if you take it for what it is, it makes virtually no missteps. No pun intended.
I also thought Eddie Redmayne was exceptional and deserving of every accolade he should get for his performance including (if I had my way) the Oscar.

Project Nim (James Marsh, 2011)

7/10
A documentary about a chimp named Nim who, in the 70's, was given to a hippie-ish family to be raised as a human child (as much as possible, anyway) and taught sign language, as a kind of loose science experiment. The film focuses less on the scientific/sociological/anthropological questions and more on the actual tribulations Nim endured in his life as a result of human meddling. Indeed, the story has a built-in drama to it, and didn't really require any great leaps on the part of the filmmakers (the team behind Man on Wire) to bring it to the fore. I thought it was more a damning indictment of human naivety than anything else, and was kind of disappointed at how little scientific attention was given in the film to a chimp learning sign language - this is treated as more of a casual characteristic of Nim rather than the central thrust of the documentary. Judging from the glowing reviews, more people seemed to get swept up in Nim's life story than I did. Oh well.
One thing I really didn't like were the artistic "recreations" that cropped up during the film, probably to take away from the assumed monotony of constantly looking at talking heads and archival footage - when the voiceover of an interviewee is talking about Nim's mother being tranquilized so they could take Nim from her, don't show me a shadowy man in a shadowy room blurrily firing a tranquilizer gun into the camera lens - I'm not 5 years old, I can picture this traumatic event for myself thanks.