May 2012

Video Minefield: DVD & Blu-Ray releases for May 22

On tap this week: five new home viewing options. Here are our capsule reviews… Certified Copy was the cinephile’s head-scratcher of 2011, a beautiful film about the afternoon spent between a man (opera singer William Shimell) and a woman (the incomparable Juliette Binoche). What first appears to be a cerebral character piece along the lines […]

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Director aims to finish “Dark Blood,” River Phoenix’s final movie, via crowd-funding

When 23-year-old River Phoenix died of a drug overdose in 1993, he was working on a movie entitled “Dark Blood,” directed by George Sluizer. The project, which Sluizer said was 80 percent finished, was put to rest. The insurance company wanted all the footage destroyed, but Sluizer refused and kept it for himself. Now 79

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New trailer for Luhrmann, DiCaprio’s “Great Gatsby”

When Baz Luhrmann announced that he would be helming a new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”–in 3-D, no less–nobody expected it to be a straightforward, classical treatment of the material. (That was already attempted in 1974 by Jack Clayton and Francis Ford Coppola, and the result was less than satisfactory.) Nonetheless, I

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Teaser Monday: First glimpses of PTA’s The Master and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Today, teasers for two of the most anticipated upcoming films–which couldn’t be more different from one another–hit the web. The more exciting of the pair is the one for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, starring Joaquin Phoenix in his return to formal acting. The teaser does exactly what it should — it doesn’t let you

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Weekend Box Office: Sub-headline? We don’t need no stinkin’ sub-headline

The reason this piece doesn’t need a sub-headline is because you already knew that The Avengers took the #1 spot, zooming over everyone else ala Iron Man in the photo above. Let’s just get to the chart already. No. Title Weekend Per Theater Average Total 1 Marvel’s The Avengers $55.1M $12.958 $457.1M 2 Battleship $25.3M $6,856 $25.3M

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Review: “Battleship”

Peter Berg’s “Battleship,” “based on” the board game, is the sort of film that contains the caption “Hong Kong, China,” as if to remind the viewer that the events aren’t unfolding in the rival Asian metropolis of Hong Kong, Nebraska. The caption is an indication of just how low the film’s sights are set, made

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