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Grierson & Leitch's Bold Predictions For The Oscar Technical Categories No One Understands
Come Sunday night, you may embark on that annual ritual: Filling out the bottom of your Oscar pool entry, pretending you know the difference between Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. Will and I will both offer our picks for the eight major categories tomorrow, but today I'm going to offer my...
Brand New Star, Same Old Crap. <em>Identity Thief</em>, Reviewed.
Everybody is happy for Melissa McCarthy. After years on TV shows (Gilmore Girls, Mike & Molly) and small parts in movies (she's great in John August's The Nines), she broke through with Bridesmaids, getting an Oscar nomination in the process. She's a really funny lady who's ridiculously effervescent...
Sundance Film Festival: Five Movies Everyone Will Be Talking About
Spending a week at the Sundance Film Festival, you can see a little bit of everything: horror movies, activist documentaries, experimental low-budget indies, even mainstream comedies starring the leads from Parks & Recreation. It's impossible to catch everything—scheduling issues kept me from buzzy ...
Cop Out. <em>Broken City</em>, Reviewed.
When Mark Wahlberg is at his best, it doesn't look as if he's acting. In fact, it hardly seems as if he's even thinking. Watch him in The Departed or I Heart Huckabees and he comes across as a flawed regular guy who just wants to do the right thing, even though his characters aren't always the brigh...
The 10 Films I’m Most Excited To See At The Sundance Film Festival
Every year, the Sundance Film Festival shows about 200 features, documentaries and shorts. Last year, the festival was the launching pad for Oscar-nominated films Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Sessions, and Searching for Sugar Man, not to mention that it premiered modest indie hits like Sleepwalk...
Shooting Blanks: <em>Gangster Squad</em>, Reviewed.
If a group of 12-year-old boys wanted to make a movie in their backyard, there's a good chance it might end up something like Gangster Squad. Sure, it wouldn't have the flashy production design and big names, but it would definitely share the same adolescent mindset. With its tough talk and bang-ban...
Jacked Creature: In Praise Of Tom Cruise's Relentless Intensity
There are lots of perfectly understandable reasons not to like Tom Cruise. His attitude about antidepressants. The Oprah couch-jumping episode. That church he attends. And, outside of his personal life, he's made tons of questionable professional choices, yes....
Resistance Is Futile. <em>Les Misérables</em>, Reviewed
As someone who hasn't read the Victor Hugo novel and is only vaguely familiar with the musical based on it, I can't say I went into director Tom Hooper's version of Les Misérables with any expectations or cultural baggage. I suspect that's part of the reason why the film worked for me—or, at the ver...
Creaks And Reeks. Judd Apatow's <em>This Is 40</em>, Reviewed.
In recent years, critics have pegged writer-director Judd Apatow as the next James L. Brooks. That's meant to be high praise. Brooks—the director of movies like Broadcast News who, like Apatow, transitioned from television to film—managed to create sophisticated romantic comedies that mixed humor an...
In Sickness And In Health. <em>Amour</em>, Reviewed.
When my wife and I got married, I gave a toast where I laid out all I wanted for us: A long, healthy, happy life. Not great riches, not great success—just a fulfilling marriage that would sustain us both for the rest of our lives. So far, we've been lucky, and I'm grateful for that, but as anyone wh...
Just Like <em>Heaven's Gate</em>: Why Didn't The <em>Lord Of The Rings</em> Series Fail?
Next week, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens, setting in motion another Tolkien trilogy from director Peter Jackson that will end in the summer of 2014. Everyone's wondering whether these Hobbit movies can live up to the Lord of the Rings films, whose combination of commercial and critical suc...
<em>Hitchcock</em>: For The Birds
Over time, great individuals can attain such a level of public adoration that any sort of criticism leveled against them is treated as sacrilege, whether they be Abe Lincoln, Mother Teresa, or a Beatle not named Ringo. Naturally, that inspires a certain kind of person to take dead aim at such sacred...
<i>Red Dawn</i>: The Movie That Will Make You Hate America
In general, I don't put a lot of stock in criticisms that accuse Hollywood movies of influencing social behavior. Yes, some films glorify violence, but rather than inspiring horrible acts, I think Hollywood mostly responds to what's already out there in the culture, catering to particular audiences ...
<em>Life Of Pi</em>'s Ang Lee: The World's Least-Cool Great Director
It's hard to classify Ang Lee, whose latest movie, Life of Pi, comes out on Wednesday. He's a respected, acclaimed director—he won an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain—but he's not in any one niche. He's not a purely commercial filmmaker—his one stab at that was Hulk—but he's also not a challenging, prov...
How The New <em>Anna Karenina</em> Reinvents A Classic Without Destroying It In The Process
Every year, we get plenty of costume dramas and literary adaptations, and while they come in a lot of shapes and sizes, generally they can be reduced to their essential components: flowing gowns, antiquated hairdos, rampant tastefulness. A segment of moviegoers will always love these movies simply f...
I ♥ David O. Russell: An Unpredictable Career Gets Back On Track
With all the great directors out there to choose from—Tarantino, Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson—it's hard to think of many aspiring filmmakers who would look at David O. Russell's career and say, "That's who I want to be." There are auteurs who follow the beat of their own drum, and then there's Ru...
James Bond, The Dark Knight. <em>Skyfall</em>, Reviewed.
When Casino Royale came out in 2006, it was rightly praised for lots of reasons: Daniel Craig's franchise-rehabilitating turn as James Bond; the excellent action sequences; the fact that it was smart and compelling, unlike a lot of recent Bond movies that had gotten progressively sillier, almost sel...
10 Movie Scenes That Scared The Bejeezuses Out Of Us
It's Halloween. We're too old to dress up anymore-we've essentially been 43 since we were 14-so we thought we'd honor the day with each of us picking the five scenes that scare the living bejeezuses out of us. With clips, of course. Put on your headphones and lose your shit along with us....
More Pixar Than Pixar: <em>Wreck-It Ralph</em>, Reviewed.
Pixar, Pixar. For something like a decade, every animated film has been inevitably judged by-and found short of-the gold standard set by the computer-animation powerhouse. Even Pixar can't compete, as tepid reviews of films like Cars 2 and Brave attest....
You Don't Know Me: On The Terrific And Unsettling <em>The Loneliest Planet</em>
I waste as much time on the web as anyone, but one thing I always avoid are those videos that careen around the internet that depict some poor schmoe being caught on camera doing something horribly embarrassing. I don't mind if local TV news reporters accidentally make fools of themselves—they signe...