Leighton has written 81 reviews for films released in 2013.
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This Is the End 2013
This is the 🌿King of the Stoner Comedies🌿 in the twenty-first century and that title is not up for debate.
I gave myself an edible treatment yesterday evening (my Friday night this week) and let this ridiculous, idiosyncratic, somehow charmingly narcissistic comedy wash over me again for the first time in eleven years with its singular coarseness that somehow, someway owned Hollywood once upon a decade ago.
It's more batshit bonkers than I remembered, it's roguishly smarter than I remembered,…
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Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 2013
You'd think it would be hard to be disappointed by a film with apperceptive food, but all the joy and fun of Lord and Miller's first film have been taken out and replaced with the requisite brand of crass, self-serving humour that every corporation thinks will get kids and adults to laugh together.
My kids laughed. I didn't.
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Blue Ruin 2013
" [...] No speeches, no talking. You point the gun, You shoot the gun."
A potboiler without a pot. There's grime, but it's not grimy. There's blood, but it's not bloody. There's violence, but it's not violent. There's inhumanity, but there's humanity also.
The tension just boils and boils and boils. Saulnier lowers the heat and then turns it up all the way until we can't take it anymore and the postcard finally arrives in the last frame. This is the work of a craftsman using a fine tooth genre comb to searing minimalistic effect.
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The Before... Collection 2013
Richard Linklater's fascination with time and how it weaves through stories and changes the characters within them is only one tiny reason as to why this right here is one of the best collection of films released as one continuing story.
(I know I shouldn't be rating or reviewing this on here as it's really just three individual films, but dammit I can't help myself so here it is anyway.) -
Man of Steel 2013
☄️ The Prep for Zack Snyder's Justice League ☄️
"Hi... Lois Lane. Welcome to The Planet."
I'd like to argue that Zack Snyder kinda knows what the hell he's doing. While it's such a shame that everything surrounding his visuals feels rather vapid and overwrought, his composition and overall visual aesthetic have brought me back to his films for a rewatch here and there. Frankly, I'd rather watch a filmmaker going for broke - for greatness or for the worst…
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Thor: The Dark World 2013
MCU Rewatch Marathon - #7
I have now seen this both sober and screamingly drunk (this viewing here) and the only time this has made any sense at all was when Thor recapped it for us in Endgame. -
Iron Man 3 2013
MCU Rewatch Marathon - #6
Holy shit, y'all, Shane Black made the best Iron Man film! I say this with much surprise as I was pretty soft on it my first couple of viewings for what seems like no good reason. I just couldn't see that it actually slaps. Yeah, it gets a little messy there at the end with the CGI-bloated Guy Pearce on fire climax, but up until then it more than holds up as the strongest individual… -
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The Immigrant 2013
Bleak and perfect. A heart-shattering period masterpiece that still stands as James Gray's greatest work. Cotillard is just as terrific here as in La Vie En Rose (yes, I said it), her emotions reserved but transparent throughout. And that final shot... I cannot think of a better one in the 2010's.
Though it's not Gray's most accessible work, it's his finest hour as a filmmaker and the one film of his I find myself wanting to return to again and again.
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Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 2013
Looks like they took notes on what Nolan did with The Dark Knight Rises and did the exact opposite delivering a ballsy, gruesome and thematically satisfying end to this Batman saga.
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Antonyms of Beauty 2013
The least judgemental documentarian I've encountered. His hybrid doc work is fascinating and uncompromising and as dense a meditation on humanity as I've found.