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This Isn't Your Life: On the Brilliant, Trippy <em>Holy Motors</em>
We like to believe that we're the masters of our own destinies, that our lives are ours to do with as we wish. But in reality, that's not true. We behave differently around our bosses than we do around our friends. Even as grown-ups, we still revert to childish tendencies when we're around our paren...
Less Is More: How The <em>Paranormal Activity</em> Movies Got Better With Each Sequel
Sequels are almost never as good as the original movie, so it's a downright miracle when a franchise gets better as it goes along. It's hard to think of many that achieved that feat, but here's one you may not have considered: The Paranormal Activity series....
Hooray For <em>Sinister</em>, A Horror Movie That's Actually Good
For a genre that remains a Hollywood staple, horror doesn't get much respect. If a film isn't screened in advance for critics, it's usually a horror movie. Although they dominate Halloween, they're also the movies that get dumped at the deadest corners of the release calendar: January and late Augus...
Sam Rockwell Is The Next Christopher Walken
There's a scene, late in Seven Psychopaths, the deliriously entertaining meta-movie that opens Friday, when Sam Rockwell's character Billy—the most psychopathic of all the psychopaths of the title—attempts to decipher the hoary adage, "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." He mulls for a ...
Ben Affleck's Only Weakness As A Director: Casting Ben Affleck. <em>Argo</em>, Reviewed.
1. Argo is such a terrific, jaw-dropping true-life tale, with such a natural, seamless movie storyline, that anyone who knows the story would beg the filmmakers not to screw it up. So it's a relief that they absolutely do not do that. There are so many tones to juggle here; this is a film that veers...
Bennifer No More: Ben Affleck's Amazing Comeback
The Academy Awards aren't until February, but as far as Roger Ebert is concerned, we already know who's going to take home the big prize. "The winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture will be Ben Affleck's tense new thriller Argo," he wrote on September 10, not because he thinks it's the best mo...
Watch Your Favorite Actors Humiliate Themselves In <em>The Paperboy</em>, The Worst Movie Of The Year
In 2003, Matthew McConaughey starred in a film called Tiptoes that went straight to video. It might seem odd that this film would go straight to video, considering its cast included McConaughey, Kate Beckinsale, Gary Oldman, Patricia Arquette, and Peter Dinklage. But then you see what the film was a...
God Bless Liam Neeson, He Sure Does Try. <em>Taken 2</em>, Reviewed.
If you liked the first Taken, it was probably because of Liam Neeson. With that unlikely hit, the Oscar-nominated actor established himself as a tough-guy action star, a development that was surprising not because he's a bad fit for the role but, rather, because he proved really adept at it. Anyone ...
Seth MacFarlane Hosting the Oscars? Really? A Grierson & Leitch Discussion
Yesterday, the Motion Picture Academy of America announced that Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane would be hosting this year's Oscars. This was flabbergasting news, to say the least, and it took us a day to process it. We decided to talk it out, so that when we were done, it might actually make som...
Box-Office Grosses Aren't Sports Scores. Who Cares If <em>Looper</em> Flops This Weekend?
Last year, around this time, I started seeing a ton of ads on Fox NFL games for the movie Drive. I'd seen the movie early and thought it was terrific, but I couldn't help but notice how ill-fitting the promotions for the movie were juxtaposed against Pitbull's Dr. Pepper ads and Terry Bradshaw doing...
Welcome Back, "30 For 30": In Praise Of ESPN's Documentary Series
When Will Leitch started Deadspin, his guiding principal—beyond a belief that he could get the whole world to refer to the Arizona Cardinals as the Buzzsaw—was that sports, in the grand scheme of things, aren't that important. Yes, there's lots of money spent on them, and when your team wins the Wor...
Always Be Posing: What 20-year-old <em>Glengarry Glen Ross</em> Can Teach Us About Manhood
There's a certain type of masculinity we're used to seeing on screen. John Wayne, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Statham: big, taciturn dudes who won't put up with any weakness in others and certainly not in themselves. They're not just muscular and powerful, though—they're heroic, saving the day and ...
Bruce Willis And Time Travel, Both More Alive Than Ever. <em>Looper,</em> Reviewed.
1. Looper is essentially two different movies spliced together at the midway point, but that's OK, because: a) the movies are thematically connected, with the second building off the windup of the first; and b) they're both excellent. The first half is a dark, thrilling time-travel mind-twister that...
The Anti-KStew: In Praise Of Jennifer Lawrence
There are many ways to tell if you've become a popular actress. Your name appears above the title on the poster. You're on the covers of magazines. You get an Oscar nomination. Those are all pretty great things. Then, there are those other ways of finding out that you're popular. These are a lot les...
<em>End Of Watch</em>: How Cops See Themselves
For some reason, I'm reminded of an old Letterman Top 10 list, from Dec. 1, 1989. (How great is it, by the way, that there's an online database of old Letterman Top 10 lists?) The list was "Top 10 Amish Pickup Lines." This one always just killed me: "Say, my favorite movie is Witness too!" (All righ...
Kill ’Em All. <em>Dredd</em>, Reviewed.
Even a truly morally reprehensible, super-violent movie has its place in the culture. I'm not talking about a film like Dark Knight Rises, which in the wake of the Aurora shootings was the subject of our most recent cultural spasm over Hollywood violence. That was actually a thoughtful, artistic com...
Paint Your Corners. Clint Eastwood's Baseball Movie, <em>Trouble With The Curve</em>, Reviewed.
1. Pretty much everything about Trouble With the Curve is a crock, but I couldn't help but like it anyway. It has a hackneyed, painfully overstructured screenplay; its motivations for its characters are stock at best and embarrassingly obvious at worst; and it knows so little about the game of baseb...
Toronto Film Festival: In Praise Of The Shamelessly Trashy <em>Spring Breakers</em>
For the past week, Grierson has been at the Toronto Film Festival seeing the movies we're all going to be talking about for the next few months. Today is his second of two dispatches....
Toronto Film Festival: Who Cares That Terrence Malick's <em>To The Wonder</em> Is Minor?
For the past week, Grierson has been at the Toronto Film Festival seeing the movies we're all going to be talking about for the next few months. Today is his first of two dispatches....
Know A Black Guy, And Other Tips For Being A One Percenter From Richard Gere's Stupid New Movie, <em>Arbitrage</em>
I try to avoid pre-release publicity, even trailers, as much as possible, but inevitably one gets blasted with the Internet news firehose no matter how much one tries to avoid it. So I knew that Arbitrage, which opens Friday, was supposed to be a thriller about a hyper-wealthy hedge fund manager and...