Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 1:00PM Can you guess the movie from its first & last shot?
The answer is after the jump...
Horror, Insidious, Patrick Wilson, first and last Monday, February 3, 2020 at 8:00PM by Jason Adams
Sunday, January 7, 2018 at 4:00PM by Nathaniel R
| Weekend Box Office (Jan 5th-7th) |
|
| W I D E 800+ screens |
L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide |
 |
 |
| 1. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle $36 (cum. $244.3) |
1.🔺 I Tonya $2.4 on 242 screens (cum. $5.2) REVIEW | GLOBE SURPRISE? |
| 2. 🔺 Insidious The Last Key $29.2 (cum. $212.1) | 2.🔺 The Post $1.7 on 36 screens (cum. $3.8) REVIEW | OSCAR KICK-OFF PODCAST |
| 3. The Last Jedi $23.5 (cum. $572.5) LYNN'S REVIEW | NATHANIEL'S TAKE |
3. Call Me By... $758k on 117 screens (cum. $6) REVIEWISH | SCREENPLAY | SEX |
| 4. The Greatest Showman $13.8 (cum. $75.9) REVIEW | ZAC ATTACK | ZENDAYA | 4.🔺 Hostiles $310k on 46 screens (cum. $435k) |
| 5. Pitch Perfect 3 $10.2 (cum. $85.9) REVIEW |
5.🔺 Along with the Gods $280k on 35 screens ($1.1) |
One thing that we're always forcefully reminded of each holiday season -- since we tend to forget -- is that the whole world is not, in point of fact, thinking about Oscar buzz. Each year countless films casually ring up rather large box office returns without generating any "heat" in award season and some not even being part of that game. Insidious for example had the weekend to itself in terms of new wide releases and was rewarded for it. The Greatest Showman, is another one that isn't really banking on Oscar love. The musical's global gross has already doubled its budget (though given the P&A expenditures it's probably got some ways to go before a profit still)...
Tuesday, September 17, 2013 at 12:48AM No, no. Not the top ten actual grosses from last weekend but ten things worth noting.
1. Any article about this weekend's movies that does not mention Short Term 12 is just a giant waste of time. Expanding into 30+ more cities, this awesome indie climbed the box office charts escalating its gross to a healthy ½ million to date. Congratulations to writer/director Destin Cretton and Brie Larson (interviewed right here at TFE) and everyone involved with this wonderful movie. But most of all let's thank Cinedigm and their publicity team for really getting behind this one. Securing distribution is only half the battle. Once you've got a distributor, you had better hope someone really believes in your movie. And several someones did.
2. Insidious Chapter 2 opened at #1 with a huge $40.2 million, making it Patrick Wilson's second smash hit horror movie of the year. He's found his niche, however different that niche is than I expected when I first fell for him.
3. The Family, Michelle Pfeiffer's pfirst leading role since Chéri (2009) and only her third in the past ten years (jesus!) opened in second place with $14 million. That's neither here nor there as openings go but at least she's in a movie again! We'll talk about that one soon.
seven more brief notations about current movies after the jump
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 2:06AM 
Craig (from Dark Eye Socket) here with this week's Take Three. Today: Barbara Hershey
Take One: Beaches (1988)
Whilst Bette Midler played the brash let-it-all-hang-out role in Beaches, Hershey was required to provide the flipside, a more fragile, buttoned-up role. Of course, in Garry Marshall’s timeless, weepy but somehow sickeningly enjoyable sorrowthon emotional barriers are royally broken down. As a solidly played, and, at times (all times, in fact), downright sentimentally treacly showcase of female solidarity, it works, and works very well indeed. (The late ‘80s was a fruitful time for the re-animation of such “woman’s” pictures; see also Steel Magnolias, Working Girl et al.) Beaches was a classic two-hander: one performance perfectly complemented the other. As the luxuriously-named San Franciscan heiress Hillary Whitney Essex, Hershey exuded just the right kind of well-turned-out class.
Her performance really was consistently good, despite the stock genre mannerisms very likely insisted upon by the filmmakers. She amiably chipped away at the inherent brittleness of the role, made her character appropriately timid, unexpectedly fragile and actually a believable mess with many of the concerns that spoke to half the women watching. (The other half would’ve surely identified with Midler’s character – this is a large part of Beaches’ amiability.) As the requirements of the genre dictate, there are melodramatic turns aplenty – love rivalry, career diversions, terminal disease – and Hershey and co. revel in its cornball pleasures. In the process it gave Hershey her biggest exposure. It was a certified commercial platform on which she could do great work. She broke through the privileged whininess of the character and made such a prim, off-putting madam feel thoroughly deserving of our investment and sympathy. But didn’t Hershey look as if she wasn’t always best pleased to be the wind beneath Bette Midler’s wings?
Take Two: The Entity (1982)
Just recently Hershey’s made a bit of a re-emergence on the big screen in a couple of notable roles. Earlier this year we saw her add some major dramatic supporting greatness as the nervous-wreck mother in Black Swan (see below), for which she unfortunately missed out on a second Oscar nomination (her first and only so far was for Supporting Actress in 1996’s The Portrait of a Lady). She followed that as a nervous-wreck grandmother in haunted house person flick Insidious, too. But it’s not the first time Babs has battled apparitions from the afterlife. Her career has seen its fair share of paranormal activity: back in 1982 she caused a spooky stir as beleaguered Carla Moran in Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity; a role for which she should have earned her her first Oscar nomination.
Two years before the Ghostbusters zapped spooks left, right and centre, Hershey and her parapsychologists had to lure her spectres in with a fake house set-up and little more than a majorly unnerving atmosphere in order to trap the unnatural forces that have been pervading her home and her very being in frozen liquid helium. As you do.
