6 articles
Box office report: 'Guardians' nears $300 million, 'Identical' flops
9 hours ago | EW - Inside Movies | See recent EW.com - Inside Movies news »
Guardians of the Galaxy claimed the No. 1 spot once more this weekend with an estimated $10.16 million as it makes its way towards the coveted $300 million mark, while the faith-based musical drama The Identical (Cinema Score: B)—the only new wide release—failed to catch on in any significant way, opening in 11th place with a shoddy $1.91 million. The rest of the top five were all holdovers, earning in or around $5 million.
If things seem somewhat unexciting at the box office this weekend, your eyes and untouched movie dollars aren’t deceiving you: It was basically planned to be that way. »
- Lindsey Bahr
Toronto Film Review: ‘While We’re Young’
13 hours ago | Variety - Film News | See recent Variety - Film News news »
: Witty, articulate and reminiscent of several talented directors who no longer mean so much to today’s kids, Noah Baumbach’s latest stars Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as husband-and-wife filmmakers who “adopt” a mid-20s hipster couple as friends. Though not as broadly appealing as a Judd Apatow picture, Baumbach’s own acutely observed this-is-life laffer features his most relatable characters yet. Marketed right, it stands to considerably outperform his other pics, which tend to top out around $4 million.
Like the Woody Allen character in “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Stiller’s Josh Srebnick frets that the talky, noncommercial documentary he’s been working on for the past decade may never get done. Looking back, he and wife Cornelia (Watts) can’t seem to figure out when they stopped being young and ambitious, and instead became a pair of middle-aged disappointments, though their choice not to have kids — more nature’s decision than their own, »
- Peter Debruge
Toronto Film Review: Reese Witherspoon in ‘The Good Lie’
19 minutes ago | Variety - Film News | See recent Variety - Film News news »
A good lie, according to Huckleberry Finn, is a prevarication where the “rightness” of the outcome excuses the “wrongness” of having fibbed in the first place. to a film that isn’t really about her character at all — nor should it be. But if that mistruth helps spread the word about the Sudanese situation, earning Warner Bros. a pretty penny in the process, how wrong can it be?
The thing is, we miss Reese. Over the past decade, the actress has grown too scarce on the bigscreen, and though “Wild” promises to be her big awards vehicle this year, the advertising campaign for “The Good Lie” suggests a chance to see America’s sweetheart in feisty “Erin Brockovich” or “The Blind Side” mode, demanding, “Who do I have to screw around here to see a goddamn immigration supervisor?” in her most sexually empowered redneck drawl.
That happens, by the way, »
- Peter Debruge
X-Men: Days Of Future Past's Desperate Plan To Become The Series' Highest Grossing Film
52 minutes ago | cinemablend.com | See recent Cinema Blend news »
Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past has unquestionably been a huge success, and is currently ranked as the highest grossing X-Men movie worldwide, but there is a very important number one spot it has not yet achieved within the franchise: biggest domestic release. The movie has made $233,666,000 to date, but that number still falls short of $234,362,462, the total that Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand managed to bring in back in 2006. While you may think that the race is over, considering that Days of Future Past is entering its 16th week of release, the reality is that 20th Century Fox isn't giving up yet. Instead, the studio has given the movie a small but significant push in the last couple weeks, presumably in an attempt to try and claim a very important record for the marketing department. MoviePilot first picked up on the move, noticing that Fox »
Toronto Showcases Wide Range of Asian Films
57 minutes ago | Variety - Film News | See recent Variety - Film News news »
More than any festival outside the Asian region, Toronto serves up the widest range of contemporary Asian cinema each year.
The festival can perhaps thank the city’s multi-cultural makeup: Toronto has significant Indian and East Asian populations. And the festival can be grateful for its large scale, which allows it more room to cover the diversity of the world’s most prolific filmmaking region than smaller events.
But credit also should go to Asian programmer Giovanna Fulvi and Tiff’s chief selector Cameron Bailey, who makes several trips per year to the region and is personally responsible for the selection
of Indian films.
Bailey has been credited with popularizing the term “Hindie,” short for “Hindi indie.” It reflects the trend for internationally aware and financially savvy Indian filmmakers to break ranks with the country’s traditional film financing sources (and some Bollywood stereotypes), and instead use co-productions and private »
- Patrick Frater
Toronto Film Review: ‘This Is Where I Leave You’
1 hour ago | Variety - Film News | See recent Variety - Film News news »
Sitting shiva makes the heart grow fonder (and the libido rage and the repressed grievances runneth over) in “This Is Where I Leave You,”. Repping a concerted effort by “Night at the Museum” and “Cheaper By the Dozen” helmer Shawn Levy to spread his wings beyond the gilded cage of family-friendly tentpoles, this alternately manic and mawkish adaptation of Jonathan Tropper’s 2009 novel aims for “Kramer Vs. Kramer” and “Terms of Endearment” territory and ends up somewhere closer to a Semitic “Home For the Holidays” or “August: Osage County.” But a tremendous ensemble cast gives the pic a significant boost, especially when they’re allowed to act rather than merely act out. Opening wide Sept. 19 following its Toronto Film Festival bow, “This” occupies an increasingly rare space on a major studio’s release slate: a literary adaptation that’s neither tween-centric nor awards bait, but which could generate some modest »
- Scott Foundas
Box-Office: ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’ Lead Slowest Weekend Of The Year, & Surpasses ‘Iron Man’ & ‘Man Of Steel’
1 hour ago | The Playlist | See recent The Playlist news »
They say January is the dumping ground for movie releases, but audiences tend to forget that late August/early September is also a pretty piss-poor time at the box-office as well. And so it should be no surprise then that this past weekend was the slowest box-office weekend of the entire year. Worse, it was absolutely pitiful; the lowest grossing weekend at the box-office in at least ten years. You already knew the 2014 box-office was hurting—it’s been a dreadful season financially, not one domestic film to crack the $300 million mark—but this was a terrible ending to an underwhelming summer. What should have tipped you off was that there was one film in wide release: “The Identical,” a movie you had barely heard of and that completely flopped spectacularly (it’s a faith-based musical drama about an Elvis-like figure, oy). Freestyle Releasing opened the movie in almost 2,000 theaters, »
- Rodrigo Perez
Toronto Film Review: ‘The Theory of Everything’
1 hour ago | Variety - Film News | See recent Variety - Film News news »
The intricate workings of a rare and remarkable mind are rendered in simple, accessible terms in “The Theory of Everything,”. Striving to pay equal tribute to Hawking’s first wife, Jane (on whose memoir the film is based), and her tireless devotion to him until their 25-year marriage ended in 1995, director James Marsh similarly attempts to find intimate, personal applications for Hawking’s grand cosmic inquiries, tracing the story of how the author of “A Brief History of Time” came to defy time itself. Still, what’s onscreen is less a cerebral experience than a stirring and bittersweet love story, inflected with tasteful good humor, that can’t help but recall earlier disability dramas like “My Left Foot” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Superb performances from Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones should stand the Focus Features release in good critical and commercial stead when it bows Nov. 7 Stateside. »
- Justin Chang
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