Halfway: Best Leading Performances of 2015 Thus Far

½way mark - part 2 of ? You can't see everything but you should see as much as possible if you're in the awardage business, or business of watching awardage, or business of watching awardage watchers and... well you get the picture. SEE MORE MOVIES. I know I need to and I see plenty.

Let's take stock of what's come out in theaters thus far (Jan 1st - Jul 1st for our purposes here). Even if conversations suggest otherwise in November through January each year we always pray that Academy members are regular moviegoers and don't just wait until their screeners arrive.

10 best lead performances from the year's first half...

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Melissa McCarthy Rules the Box Office Yet Again

This weekend I was too caught up in 1979 (see the Smackdown) and birthday festivities (the celebration of meeeee!) to see any new pictures -- though Spy was previously seen and Rose Byrne is magnificent! The weekend box office went pretty much as people expected, Melissa McCarthy still being a huge draw. Though it remains a mystery how there were ten million dollars worth of people who missed HBO's Entourage. Who knew?!

WIDE RELEASE
June 5th-7th Weekend
01 Spy NEW $30 
02 San Andreas $26.4 (cum. $92.1) 
03 Insidious Chapter 3 NEW $23
04 Entourage NEW $10.4 (cum. $17.8)
05 Mad Max Fury Road $7.9 (cum. $130.8) Review & Podcast
06 Pitch Perfect 2 $7.7 (cum. $160.9) Review 
07 Tomorrowland $7 (cum. $76.2) Review 
08 Age of Ultron  $6.2 (cum. $438) Review & Marathon & Podcast
09 Aloha $3.3 (cum. $16.3) Review
10 Poltergeist $2.8 (cum. $44.4)

What did you see this weekend? Or are you busy counting down the minutes until the Tony Awards to think about the movies?

Rose Byrne in "Spy"

Let's make this happen universe.

Or we'll all be as sad as Bulgarian clowns. 

Golden Spy

Manuel here bringing you an eye-catching poster to get this week going.

I love the random cartoony paws on her jacket.

I saw this golden poster for Melissa McCarthy’s upcoming Spy comedy and I couldn’t not talk about. It’s so amazingly silly yet self-serious. It’s precisely the type of eye-catching visual gag that this marketing campaign needs (better than the one-note poster Margaret discussed back in January). More importantly, it’s exactly the careful tonal balance the film will have to pull off if it’s going to succeed critically as well as commercially. I know it’s supposed to make me think of Goldfinger (and perhaps of Goldmember?) but all I could think was the posters for Dominic Cooper’s The Devil’s Double, a movie I know everything about exclusively from this (NSFW) post (thanks JA!)

They're clearly going for the Bond tie-ins with these character posters and why wouldn't they? If you're going to riff off the spy genre, there's really nowhere else to mine.

Perhaps it’s my affection for pre-Bridesmaids (ie. Gilmore Girls) McCarthy that’s getting to me, but I am hoping that her softer comedic side resurfaces at some point in her career. May Spy do the trick? Is the presence of real-life action figure Jason Statham and Jude Law in full-Bond mode enough to sway you to give Spy a chance this summer?