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Denzel Washington Will Kick Your Ass Now: <em>The Equalizer</em>, Reviewed
1. I know we just talked about Liam Neeson around here, but I feel obliged to bring him back up, because suffice it to say, if Liam Neeson doesn't have the aforementioned late-career action-movie rebirth, there is no way The Equalizer exists. Ostensibly a big-screen reboot of the CBS crime procedu...
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 ...
Family Futile: <em>This Is Where I Leave You</em>, Reviewed
This Is Where I Leave You feels like a social experiment in how much slack we're willing to cut a movie filled with actors we like. There's nothing particularly new or interesting in this umpteenth story about a family coming together after the death of one of their own, and yet the collective g...
Toronto Film Festival 2014: 10 Movies We Can't Wait To See
The Toronto Film Festival, which starts Thursday, is always excellent one-stop shopping for many of the major films hoping to crash the Oscar and best-of-the-year conversations. Beyond the world premieres, it also features the best of what played at Cannes, as well as plenty of films that alread...
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...
Stay Home: Four Great New Indie Movies, Available On Demand
As we've mentioned in the past, Labor Day weekend is one of the worst on the Hollywood calendar. It's when studios dump their duds, knowing full well that everyone is too busy doing one last barbecue before summer ends. So rather than suffering through The November Man or As Above, So Below, w...
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...
The Perfect Imperfect Couple: <em>Love Is Strange</em>, Reviewed
Leo Tolstoy's line "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" could be applied to romantic relationships as well—especially if you're not in a good one. From the outside, a happy marriage can look like an aberration, a fluke, or just dumb luck. Because so muc...
<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 ...
Perfectly Imperfect: Saying Goodbye To Robin Williams
One of the dumbest things the public does is think it "knows" celebrities. Those people we see on our TV or on a movie screen, because they come into our lives and make us laugh and cry—we believe we have some sort of special connection, not to the characters they play, but to the actors themse...
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 ...
Rock Bland: <em>Hercules</em>, Reviewed
What makes Dwayne Johnson such an appealing movie star is that he's never seemed hung up on being a movie star. Not unlike Jason Statham, he has a twinkle in his eye that suggests he's having way more fun at his job than most of his action-hero brethren. That sense of fun (self-effacing withou...
Nothing Up Woody Allen's Sleeve: <em>Magic In The Moonlight</em>, Reviewed
Magic in the Moonlight is the sort of Woody Allen movie that longtime fans have trouble defending, not because it's terrible or lazy—it's neither—but because it's so painfully familiar. Likeable and completely disposable, his new comedy has its chuckles, but as he gets closer to the 50-feature m...
Big, Dumb, Unsexy: <em>Sex Tape</em>, Reviewed
Sex Tape is such a dumb movie that it's hard to know where to start. So let's try this: Its premise is total nonsense. Married-with-kids couple Jay (Jason Segel) and Annie (Cameron Diaz) decide to spice up their inert love life by filming themselves with Jay's iPad doing every position mentioned...
From <em>Slacker</em> to <em>Boyhood</em>: Ranking Richard Linklater's Movies
Today, Richard Linklater's acclaimed Boyhood (which we love) opens in select cities. (It'll be expanding next week and be practically everywhere by mid-August.) To celebrate, we decided to rank all 16 of the man's commercial features, and what we hope you'll notice is that over a 23-year career, he'...
Great Ape: <em>Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes</em>, Reviewed
Three years ago, expectations for Rise of the Planet of the Apes were understandably low. The director (Rupert Wyatt) wasn't well-known, a lot of people despised the film's star (James Franco) for his Renaissance Man routine, and we all remembered how terrible Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes...
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...