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The Grierson & Leitch Best Films of 2013: Nos. 5-1
It's the final week of 2013, so we're wrapping the year up the way movie people are supposed to wrap the year up: Lists! Friday, we each gave our five worst films of 2013. Yesterday, we each counted down our No. 6-10 best movies of the year. Today, we finish off with our top fives....
The Grierson & Leitch Best Films of 2013: Nos. 10-6
It's the final week of 2013, so we're wrapping the year up the way movie people are supposed to wrap the year up: Lists! Friday, we each gave our five worst movies of 2013. Today, we each count down our No. 6-10 best movies of the year, and tomorrow, we finish off with each of our top five....
The Worst Films Of 2013
Yes, many people are already writing their Top 10 movie lists for 2013. We're saving ours for the last week of the year. While we wait for this terrific movie year to wind down, we're going to start looking back at some highlights. Today, it's the five worst films each of us saw this year, in alp...
Why That Dumb AIDS Tweet Was So Captivating
Will Leitch, senior writer at Sports On Earth and founder of Deadspin, is doing his yearly fill-in for Drew Magary on today's Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo. (Here is 2011's version, and here's 2012's.) Leitch has written four books. Find more of his business at his Twitter feed....
What You're Expecting, But More So: <em>Anchorman 2</em>, Reviewed.
1. When did the tide start to turn on Ron Burgundy? It's a strange thing: Since Will Ferrell introduced his greatest creation in 2004, there has been a relentless drumbeat among the public to bring him back, from cameos on Conan to rampant interview requests to the ultimate point where Ferrell and P...
A Dog Distracted By A Squirrel: <em>American Hustle</em>, Reviewed.
1. David O. Russell is a director who doesn't know what he's doing. I say this with legitimate, if cautious, admiration. Some of our most celebrated directors have been incorrigible perfectionist assholes: David Fincher makes actors do hundreds of takes; Kubrick sent crazy (but not wrong) letters to...
Completely Operational. <em>Her</em>, Reviewed.
1. "Don't knock masturbation," says Woody Allen's Alvy Singer in Annie Hall. "It's sex with someone I love." Her is many things, but at its heart, it's a clear-minded, alternately romantic and fatalist look at what, precisely, we are falling in love with when we are "falling in love." Falling in lov...
Mark McGwire Made You Happy. It's Time To Admit It.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be examining the merits—and relative lack of merits—of all 36 players on this year's Hall of Fame ballot for the purposes of better informing the electorate, i.e., you. All entries in the series can be found here....
Killing Jennifer Lawrence: <em>The Hunger Games: Catching Fire</em>, Reviewed.
1. The first Hunger Games movie was entertaining enough, but still plodding, awkward, and weighed down with so much exposition that you found yourself wishing everyone would stop sketching out the rules of this universe and get down to mourning all the dead children falling from the skies. The movie...
2013 Deadspin Hall Of Fame: Let's Have Your Nominees
Holy shit. Thanksgiving's, like, next week. That means it's time for you to do something constructive for a change by giving us your nominees for this year's Deadspin Hall of Fame induction class....
<em>Dallas Buyers Club</em> Is Gay History For Straight People
In his blistering, deeply moving Grantland essay about 12 Years A Slave, Wesley Morris lays waste to decades of white-guilt piety in films about racism and slavery—A Time To Kill, Cry Freedom, Glory—in a single sentence: "They've been appeals to white audiences by white characters talking to other w...
Anti-<em>Gravity</em>. <em>All Is Lost</em>, Reviewed.
1. I never got to write about Gravity in this space—Grierson took that for us—but I found it as terrific as most people did. Dizzying, awesome, disorienting, terrifying: It's earned all the praise it has received. But I couldn't get past one thing: Didn't the Sandra Bullock character's backstory se...
Cruelty Unchained. <em>Twelve Years A Slave</em>, Reviewed.
1. Twelve Years a Slave is a devastating movie experience, one that will leave you shaking with anger. This is not an attempt to shed new light on the shame of slavery, or, heaven forbid, a winky postmodern re-imagining of slavery as a self-referential cinematic revenge fantasy. (After seeing Twelve...
Contained Space: <em>Captain Phillips,</em> Reviewed.
1. There's a moment in Paul Greengrass' United 93, one of the best films of the last decade, in which we are invited not to sympathize with the hijackers of Flight 93, exactly, but at least take a look at them as humans, if just for a moment. They're monsters, but they're people, on that plane, too,...
Zigging And Zagging And Then Ending: <em>Don Jon</em>, Reviewed
1. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of those actors for whom I find it nearly impossible not to root. He has an inherent, innate likability about him that doesn't seem forced, calculated or manufactured; he's a labrador puppy you have beers with. Now, I don't know anything about Joseph Gordon-Levitt in r...
American Nightmare: <em>Blue Caprice</em>, Reviewed
1. The John Muhammed/Lee Malvo Beltway shootings in October 2002 continue to occupy a specific segment of the American nightmare. The twisted, horrible genius of the killings was their selective randomness: The Beltway snipers chose their targets specifically so that people would believe they could...
The 16 Fall Movies You Should Be Excited About: A Guide
Labor Day is the signpost every year that the sugary summer junk is behind us and that the nutritious square meal of awards season has finally arrived. That's the theory, anyway: In actuality, summer movies like Before Midnight and Fruitvale Station will be as well-received as any Oscar bait, and th...
Be Amused. Be Very Amused. <em>You're Next</em>, Reviewed.
1. You're Next is officially a horror movie—it is sold the way all horror movies are sold these days, with an ominous poster image and an appealingly simple, self-sustaining premise—but it's really a comedy. It is a comedy in the way Army of Darkness is a comedy, or The Cabin in the Woods is a comed...
History As Pop As Camp: <em>The Butler</em>, Reviewed.
1. Lee Daniels is a total lunatic of a director, a man who knows nothing of restraint, decorum or moderation. Sometimes this works for him; his Precious was lurid and garish and melodramatic in a way that fit the material, making the protagonist's sufferings feel both pulpy and weirdly real. Mostly,...
Subtle As A Boomsaw: <em>Elysium,</em> Reviewed.
1. Elysium, like writer-director Neill Blomkamp's much-loved first film District 9, is very concerned with making you understand that it is about something. I wasn't as big a fan of District 9 as most were—it felt like a great idea for a short film, which it was, stretched out to feature length—but ...