Honorable Mentions: “Argo” – Ben Affleck continues his career resurgence in front of and behind the camera with the year’s best crowd-pleaser. Centering on the true story of how the C.I.A. extracted several Americans from Tehran during the Iran Hostage Crisis posing as a film crew, “Argo” manages to be an affectionate satire of Hollywood …
“End of Watch” is a superlative cop film by way of the war movie. That’s not an exaggeration, as its two protagonists, beat officers in the worst part of Los Angeles, patrol an area that seems just about as foreign and violent to most Americans as Afghanistan. The movie departs from the cop genre of …
As I predicted in this week’s Box Office Beat, Open Road’s cop film “End of Watch” did much better than most prognosticators expected, with receipts of $13m, and took the top slot on the chart for the weekend. It technically tied for first with Relativity’s horror-film-in-marketing-only (as our Timothy Semenza called it), “House at the …
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 …
