grierson-and-leitch - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

A Goodbye From Grierson & LeitchIt’s a sad day here at Grierson & Leitch: After nearly four years of confusing you with movie reviews featuring seemingly arbitrary letter grades and inexplicable paragraph numbering, today is our last day at Deadspin. In two weeks, you can find us at our new home at The New Republic. But we want to...

<i>The Danish Girl</i> Makes Transgender Issues Safe For The Oscar CrowdOf all the adjectives to describe a movie, “well-intentioned” is among the least scintillating and most wearying. It’s why a lot of people have an aversion to so-called Oscar-bait— they’re the kind of films that pop up around award season to address important subjects in a respectful way, with the h...

<i>Creed </i>Hits Harder The Further It Gets From Rocky Balboa's Shadow 1. Creed works better as an actual movie than it does as a Rocky movie, which is quite the compliment, considering that it’s an excellent Rocky movie, too. (I hadn’t seen it yet when Grierson and I did our Rocky movie rankings on Monday; I’m higher on it than he is.) More than a mere boxing film, it...

<i>The Good Dinosaur's</i> Visual Grandeur Makes Up For Its Lack Of Wit

One of the constant accolades Pixar receives about its movies is that they’re not made just for kids. This is meant as a compliment: While they’re animated and appeal to children, their emotional and thematic sophistication also makes them satisfying to grownups—maybe even more so. The downside to t...

The <i>Hunger Games</i> Are Over, But Jennifer Lawrence Is Only Getting Better

1. It seems insane to think about now, but there was a time when everyone was worried about whether or not Jennifer Lawrence could pull off the Hunger Games films. Cast as Katniss Everdeen just a year after her breakthrough in Winter’s Bone, Lawrence was considered by many an undeniable talent but a...

<i>Carol</i> Is A Beautiful Love Story, Starring A Terrific Cate Blanchett

In director Todd Haynes’ films, characters have to learn how to live in worlds that don’t suit them. In Safe, Far From Heaven and I’m Not There, his lonely protagonists often feel trapped by circumstance, unable to find any sort of real happiness because, deep down, no one around them sees things th...

<i>The Night Before </i>Is One Seth Rogen Bromance Too Many

A lot of comics have a shtick, and the trick is to give it enough flexibility so that it can be twisted and reshaped in myriad ways without breaking. Since Seth Rogen’s leading-man breakthrough in 2007’s Knocked Up, his has been impressively bendy, playing overgrown man-children who end up pulling t...

<i>By The Sea</i> Makes Marriage Look Like A Beautiful, Painful Bore

About seven months after Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston got married, The Onion ran the brilliant headline “Brad Pitt Bored With Sight of Jennifer Aniston’s Naked Body.” It was a perfect joke on a couple of levels, but the element of truth that’s always stayed with me was the notion that even the mos...