leitch Page 7 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
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...
Saying Goodbye To Roger Ebert: <em>Life Itself</em>, Reviewed
When Roger Ebert died on April 4, 2013, it felt like a death in the family, not only because I'm a film critic, but because he and Gene Siskel are a huge part of the reason why. The different incarnations of their Siskel & Ebert show were instrumental in my upbringing, driving home the idea that ...
Auto-Chaotic. <em>Transformers: Age of Extinction</em>, Reviewed.
Age of Extinction is the best of the Transformers movies. That's not saying much: The other films in the series were all pretty bad, and this one is no good, either. But for an hour or so, director Michael Bay does what he does as well as he's done it for quite some time. Perpetually juvenile he...
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...
Double Dragon: <em>How To Train Your Dragon 2</em>, Reviewed
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, DreamWorks Animation has enjoyed plenty of commercial and critical success, winning two animation Oscars and earning almost $11.6 billion worldwide. And yet, the company remains in the shadow of Pixar, which in about the same amount of time has won sev...
Emotional Assault: <em>The Fault In Our Stars</em>, Reviewed.
The Fault in Our Stars is designed as counterprogramming for audiences who don't care about big summer action movies, but in its own way, this tear-jerking YA romantic drama is as epic and overstuffed as any CGI blockbuster. Instead of explosions and chase sequences, you get emotional epiphanies ...
<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...