In a year from now, “You May Not Kiss the Bride” will make for decent background noise when it inevitably airs on Lifetime, the channel that you only happen upon on lazy Sunday mornings when you’re nursing a hangover with Bisquick pancakes. Yes, I mean Bisquick pancakes specifically, because anyone with enough intellect to pick […]
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Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office grosses. There are a whopping five new wide releases, which will make it especially pathetic if not one bucks the ongoing trend of box office duds. Last weekend, “Resident Evil: Retribution” and “Finding Nemo 3-D” didn’t
Box Office Beat: Weekend of September 21 Read More »
In “Trouble with the Curve,” Clint Eastwood and Amy Adams play father and daughter Gus and Mickey Lobel — cartoon character-esque names that were undoubtedly created by screenwriter Randy Brown under the presumption that if he were to pick plainer ones, the viewer would instantly forget them and think of the duo not as characters, but
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Mike Birbiglia’s “Sleepwalk with Me” is structured like a standard narrative feature, but that’s just a thin veil covering what it actually is: a personal essay. Anyone familiar with Birbiglia’s popular stand-up act knows that he has trouble avoiding the titular behavior of the film–he slumbers in a sleeping-bag zipped up to his neck, wearing
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“Resident Evil: Retribution” and Disney’s 3-D retrofit of “Finding Nemo” were the new wide releases this weekend, but with underwhelming box office numbers–the former performed nearly 20 percent worse than its immediate predecessor and the latter came in well under industry tracking, more in line with “Beauty and the Beast 3-D” than “The Lion King
At his recent Republican National Convention speech, actor Clint Eastwood first addressed the crowd by saying, “I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, what’s a movie tradesman doing out here? You know they are all left-wingers out there, left of Lenin. At least that is what people think. That is not really the case. There are
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Despite sharing a similarly whimsical spirit with their first feature, “Persepolis,” “Chicken with Plums” is not the follow-up that one would expect from filmmakers Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, though perhaps it signals that they will build their entire career around unexpected marriages of subject and aesthetic. “Persepolis” used simple, hand-drawn, black-and-white animation to bring
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Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office grosses. Well, except for last weekend’s, that is — can you believe that after writing this column for 17 weekends in a row, it completely slipped my mind? It’s hard to blame me, really, given how
Box Office Beat: Weekend of September 14 Read More »
It is a testament to the gimmick-free execution of “Robot & Frank” that one of the first adjectives that come to mind when discussing the film is not “quirky.” After all, the premise–in the near future, a former cat burglar (Frank Langella) battling dementia uses his helper robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) to steal jewelry
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“The Words” is a story within a story within a story, and only one of these offers anything that resembles a conclusion. Given writer/directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal’s apparent love of plot–what other Hollywood filmmakers have recently implemented a three-layered structure?–the movie’s abrupt, mildly confusing ending seems auspicious at first. But upon reflection, it
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