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The Badass-Action-Hero Rebirth Of Liam Neeson
Does anybody else remember when Liam Neeson was kind of a wimp? It might seem strange, now that he spends every movie beating up everyone in sight (and inspiring a particularly wonderful Key & Peele sketch: "He straight jacked up them wolves!"), but when Neeson was younger—and presumably stronger ...
The Best And Worst 2014 Summer Movies: A Grierson And Leitch Report
If you ask the bean-counters, this was a disappointing summer: Almost every major sequel underperformed (Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Expendables 3, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 were all the lowest-grossing entries in their respective series), and there were some truly ugly flops, most n...
Film Noir For Dummies—<em>Sin City: A Dame to Kill For</em>, Reviewed
1. The original Sin City movie felt so inventive and revolutionary in 2005 that it's not really fair to make fun of it for how poorly it holds up now ... but you can't help it. For all the loveliness of Frank Miller's compositions—and considering how lousy his co-director Robert Rodriguez's movies...
<em>The Expendables 3</em>: An Actor-By-Actor Breakdown
No film series in recent memory relies more on the sheer mass of its cast than the Expendables movies. I've seen the assembled talent referred to as the Traveling Wilburys of '80s Action Stars, but there were only five of those guys. This more resembles the cast of a '70s disaster movie, in which ...
Too Much Is Just Enough: <em>Guardians of the Galaxy</em>, Reviewed
1. The best thing about the Marvel movies, to my eyes, is how self-aware they are without ever getting too winking about it. Captain America and Thor are excellent at this, playing off their leads' lunkheaded, uber-wholesome charm, but 2012's The Avengers—still the best Marvel film, and one of the...
Scarlett Johansson Enters The Matrix: <em>Lucy</em>, Reviewed
1. Lucy posits that if a person were able to somehow assess 100 percent of his or her brain capacity, he or she would be able to travel through time, from the Big Bang to the dinosaurs to the dawn of man to the end of the world, and gather all the wisdom from millennia and hand it over as a gift to ...
High On Life: The Divine <em>Boyhood</em>, Reviewed.
1. Boyhood makes you want to protect—to save—everyone onscreen. They're not in any sort of peril, at least not plainly so; there are alcoholic dads and neighborhood bullies and some broken hearts, but no one's ever in any danger of being attacked by a bear or anything. But without ever seeming t...
Melissa McCarthy's Self-Made Waterloo: <em>Tammy</em>, Reviewed
1. So what happened here, exactly? Tammy is a passion project for Melissa McCarthy—she co-wrote the film with her husband, Ben Falcone, who also directed and has a small role as a fast-food manager—and she spent nearly a decade trying to make it. So why is it so, so terrible? This is the movie McCa...
The Grierson & Leitch Top 12 Movies Of The First Half Of 2014
As of today, we are halfway through 2014. Most of your "prestige" movies aren't out yet—only a third of our top 10s last year were from the first half of 2013 —but that doesn't mean this year's first six months didn't have its delights. Surprisingly, many of the standouts were bigger-budgeted studio...
Mo' Meta Blues: <em>22 Jump Street</em>, Reviewed
1. How much credit are we supposed to give a movie for being self-aware? 22 Jump Street is so self-conscious and nervy about its status as an unnecessary cash-grab sequel that it never stops bringing it up. There are multiple inside-baseball asides about how much more expensive missions are the seco...
<em>Groundhog Day</em> Goes Sci-Fi: <em>Edge Of Tomorrow</em>, Reviewed.
1. Edge of Tomorrow is such a terrific idea for a movie that everyone involved seems to be in high spirits, like they all have a little pep in their step knowing they're making a good movie. There's so much junk out there that you can tell when the filmmakers know they've hooked a big one; there's a...
Unforgivable: <em>A Million Ways To Die In The West</em>, Reviewed.
1. Think about how much of an indictment it is to say, "All the good jokes are in the trailer" about a movie. Trailers, at most, are three minutes long. A Million Ways to Die in the West runs 116 minutes. That is a ton of time to comb through to dig out a Family Guy-esque gag about running into Emme...
Time Is Not A Flat Circle: <em>X-Men: Days Of Future Past</em>, Reviewed
1. X-Men: Days of Future Past feels like one of those special-edition comic books that takes all the characters we know and love, drops them in some sort of parallel universe (so the storyline's ramifications don't affect the current canon timeline), and shakes up both the plot and those characters ...
Kill All Humans, Or At Least Mute Them: <em>Godzilla,</em> Reviewed.
1. The go-to example for critics complaining about big-budget summer blockbusters today—and how they've devolved from some past, theoretical peak—is Steven Spielberg's Jaws. One of that 1975 film's many genius innovations was to hold off, as long as possible, on ever letting us see the shark. The mo...
I Guess This Is Growing Up: <em>Neighbors</em>, Reviewed
1. Neighbors is your typical Seth Rogen/Apatowian coming-of-age comedy, in which an overgrown manboy learns that he has to curtail his childish pursuits of weed, video games, and general irresponsibility to become a functional member of society. (They've now cranked out a decade's worth of movies ab...
(500) Hours of Spidey: <em>The Amazing Spider-Man 2</em>, Reviewed
1. There's a moment in 2004's original Spider-Man 2, directed by Sam Raimi, that represents the peak of what a comic-book movie can do. It's when an unmasked Spider-Man attempts to save a (geographically impossible, but no matter) elevated NYC subway train from careening off the platform and into th...
<em>Nymphomaniac</em> Has Repulsive Hardcore Sex And Is Made By A Crazy Man. It's Great.
Every Lars von Trier movie, deep down, is about how depressed Lars von Trier is and how much Lars von Trier hates himself, which is another reason it's amazing how gleefully deranged and entertaining each of his movies keeps turning out to be. He is the world's strangest guilt artist. He keeps findi...
Who Was The Best Oscars Host Of The Past 25 Years?
11. James Franco and Anne Hathaway (2011). Always beware of courting the "young," particularly two young people who are basically 50-year-olds in grownup clothing. Franco, stripped of all self-referential schtick, turned into an empty suit with nowhere to hide, and Hathaway's desperate attempts to p...
Grierson & Leitch Predict The Oscar Categories You Actually Care About
Yesterday, to help you out with your pool, Grierson made predictions in all the technical Oscar categories. Today, we both make our predictions for the eight major categories, the ones you actually care about. Let's go to it....
Block Party: <em>The Lego Movie</em>, Reviewed
1. The Lego Movie is way more fun than it has any need to be. Though it never quite reaches the lunatic levels of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it has that film's same hellzapoppin' zeal, that willingness to go anywhere for a joke and that absolute insistence that it must never, ever slow down. The Lego ...