As I predicted in this week’s edition of Box Office Beat, “Skyfall” ended up earning the biggest opening weekend of any James Bond film to date, surpassing the last installment, “Quantum of Solace,” by about 30 percent. “Skyfall” grossed $87.8 million over the three-day and an even $90.0m when accounting for Thursday IMAX preview shows. […]
Weekend Box Office: “Skyfall” soars Read More »
The meat of Julia Loktev’s “The Loneliest Planet” stems from a single action that lasts no more than five seconds, nearly an hour into the film, and is never referenced again. An unfortunately timed bathroom break would render the second half unintelligible. There’s no denying that this structure is daring in its unwillingness to pander
Review: “The Loneliest Planet” Read More »
Jacob Aaron Estes’ “The Details” has no idea what tone it wants to establish. Billed as “darkly comic,” the movie attempts to strike that distinctly Coen Brothers-esque balance between farcical humor and over-the-top violence. But Estes is nowhere near as artistically gifted and confident as the Coens and, by not committing exclusively to either style,
Review: “The Details” Read More »
Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. It’ll be a short version this time, because there is only one new wide release, albeit a huge one: Daniel Craig as James Bond in “Skyfall.” I would usually be inclined to pontificate about the
Box Office Beat: Weekend of November 9 Read More »
David Weissman and Bill Weber’s documentary “We Were Here” operates on two levels by providing both an overarching account of the 1980s San Francisco AIDS crisis and intimate portraits of five people who lived through it. The group of subjects, comprised of four men and a woman, offer a variety of perspectives: the guilt-ridden survivor,
Streaming Pick: “We Were Here” (2011) Read More »
“Cloud Atlas” is a huge, exhausting film, one that might defy audiences to even make up their minds about whether or not they like it. It’s an important work in that it demands analysis and discussion as precious few do, providing a cornucopia of ambitious technical decisions, intertwined narratives, and New Age rhetoric that succeeds
Review: “Cloud Atlas” Read More »
Going into the weekend, there was a general feeling that the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy would depress grosses, especially with about 300 theaters along the Eastern Seaboard closed on Friday. But it did anything but–in fact, one could make a case that the box office actually improved this weekend because there was little else for Northeasterners to do–as
Weekend Box Office: Sandy no match for “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Flight” Read More »
In “The Sessions,” John Hawkes plays Mark O’Brien, a 38-year-old polio survivor living out his life in an iron lung who decides it’s finally time to lose his virginity. To accomplish this, Mark seeks the services of a sexual surrogate, Helen Hunt’s Cheryl Cohen-Greene, a type of therapist who engages in sex with those whose
Review: “The Sessions” Read More »
Detractors of “Wreck-It Ralph” will undoubtedly dwell on the shameless transparency of the Walt Disney Company’s attempt to expand the size of their potential audience by melding a classic arcade game-based premise that evokes nostalgia in 20- and 30-somethings with their usual family-oriented formula. But this isn’t a fair point of criticism unless one presumes
Review: “Wreck-It Ralph” Read More »
Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. Last week, I decided to take a much needed break before the onslaught of heavyweight holiday releases over the next couple of months, and it turned out to be a good time to do so:
Box Office Beat: Weekend of November 2 Read More »
