In this year's crop of tech-themed movies you'll notice that the paranoid machine vs. human/singularity-horror-show pictures of the 1990s and early 2000s (The Matrix et al) seem to have given way to a new kind of story that explores the peaceful, if troubled, coexistence between the carbon- and the circuit-based. Some of the year's best movies feature robots and AI that seem to possess more of our better angels than their human masters. Others are traumatized by the humans' confusion and conflicting notions about how to relate with their robot companions.

The best of the batch seem interested in exploring the human/machine issues that will arise as the machines become more like us, and as the two types of sentient beings grow closer together and even merge.

I'm not going to say that any of the tech-flavored movies that came out in 2014 will make the all-time best list. After all, Her came out last year, and nothing in 2014 came even close to Spike Jonze's masterpiece. However, some respectable tech movies did hit theaters. I've collected mine and the VentureBeat staff's picks here in no particular order.

The Machine

The British sci-fi flick The Machine has flavors of Blade Runner and Her. It's a well-imagined telling of the oft-heard tale about artificial intelligence beginning to replace humanity at the top of Earth's food chain. But it's more of a meditation about the positive interaction between humans and machines than about a paranoid foregone conclusion that the machines will win.

A new Cold War between China and the West has resulted in the deepest recession in history. The "proles" are in danger of starvation and extinction, while the governments of the two superpowers engage in an arms race to develop more intelligent and deadly machines. Britain's Ministry of Defense (MoD) has almost completed the world's first artificially intelligent robotic soldier that sounds and looks a human woman but with incredible strength, speed, and agility. But the AI is pulled from the lab too early and thrust into military service. The movie is about the AI's struggle to adapt, and the desire for revenge.

Most of The Machine takes place indoors, which limits the storytelling somewhat, but as a cerebral experience it's among the best of the year.

In Godzilla (2014) an American engineer begins investigating a coverup of the real causes of a nuclear meltdown that took place 15 years ago at a plant near Mount Fuji in Japan. Turns out it's not Godzilla's fault. The core was breached by a manmade monster called MUTO (Massively Identified Terrestrial Organism!). This beast was engineered at a secret lab, which the main character and his son discover well inside the quarantine zone around the mountain. Actually there are many of these MUTO things. As the movie progresses, Godzilla and the MUTO things all converge on San Francisco where the engineer's wife and kids live. They do battle and lay waste to the city, trampling all over the Silicon Valley types who live there.

The Godzilla movies have always been about the horrible unintended consequences of technology, and the point is made once again in this 2014 update.

And now for the worst...

Interstellar

It turns out that traveling across the galaxy and ducking out through a wormhole into another reality is no problem for science in this sci-fi mess of a movie, but stopping crop blight -- blight! -- is so insurmountable a problem that the Earth must be abandoned. Yep, in Interstellar, the Earthlings must disappear through a wormhole and inhabit a planet on the other side of the galaxy to survive. But not before our hero, an ex-NASA pilot played by Matthew McConaughey, and a team of researchers go in search of the planet that's the best fit for a new home. Gah.