Another calm weekend at the box office before the Christmas madness sets in. “Skyfall” took back the top slot from “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2,” which slid to third place. The DreamWorks animated film “Rise of the Guardians” rose to second. The only newcomer was the FilmDistrict dump “Playing for Keeps,” which […]
Weekend Box Office: “Skyfall” reclaims lead Read More »
Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. It’s going to be a very short piece this time, because there is only one new wide release and it’s destined to bomb. (Though, you should note that the terrific cop drama “End of Watch”
Box Office Beat: Weekend of December 7 Read More »
Perhaps the biggest problem with Sacha Gervasi’s “Hitchcock” is its title, which suggests that the film is something more ambitious and substantive than it actually is. The singular surname suggests a definitive biopic–in the tradition of “Nixon,” “Patton,” “Chaplin,” and so on–full of insights about the life and career of the man who many consider
Review: “Hitchcock” Read More »
Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly” is a gangster film that presents the world of the Mob as a microcosm of the 2008 economic collapse that sent the United States into a tailspin. Its characters inhabit an underworld that resembles the mainstream in that there’s an economy, laws to regulate it, and men to enforce the rules. As
Review: “Killing Them Softly” Read More »
It wasn’t entirely unexpected that “Killing Them Softly” with Brad Pitt opened poorly at the box office (I predicted the gross within a half a million dollars in this week’s Box Office Beat column), but any time a major movie star’s film tanks in wide release, it’s news. “Killing Them Softly” raked in a measly
Weekend Box Office: Pitt and Dominik’s “Killing” opens softly Read More »
The second most memorable image in Al Gore’s popular global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”–bested only by the former Vice President operating a mechanical lift in order to stand at the top of a big-screen line-graph demonstrating the exponential growth of CO2 in the atmosphere–was the slide in his presentation that showed the dramatic receding
Review: “Chasing Ice” Read More »
Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office grosses. It has been awhile, as I decided to forgo the column last week due to the fact that all the new films opened on Wednesday, making the Friday through Sunday figures pretty foreseeable. But I’m
Box Office Beat: Weekend of November 30 Read More »
The American film industry operates under the general rule that the narrative of any animated film must be simple enough for a small child to follow completely, a practice that harms kids more than it helps them, in that they are, as a result, very rarely exposed to the kind of sophisticated storytelling that might
Review: “Rise of the Guardians” Read More »
The “five-day weekend” over Thanksgiving has become a less popular time for Hollywood studios to release hot new movies than it used to be. As a result, the top three box office performers this year were films in their second and third weekends of release: “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2” at the
Weekend Box Office: “Twilight,” “Skyfall,” “Lincoln” beat openers Read More »
While Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” leaves viewers with dozens of questions due to its deliberate lack of a conventional narrative structure and any exposition whatsoever, the ideas that Carax explores in the film become rather clear after one’s initial befuddlement over the story details subsides. Of course, the film is so unlike anything audiences have
Review: “Holy Motors” Read More »
