Another night, another prestigious awards show. In the crux of award season, it seems that every other day brings a new batch of winners and losers, and last night, the 19th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, like the Globes and BFCAs before it, shook up the Oscar race in dramatic fashion. Bestowing their Best Ensemble Cast prize to Argo (how it won over the great Silver Linings Playbook is beyond me!), the Screen Actors Guild further propelled Ben Affleck’s Iranian hostage crisis thriller to the front of the Oscar race for Best Picture. With top honors from the HFPA (Golden Globes), the SAG, and the PGA (the Producers Guild), Argo is sweeping the Best Picture prizes and is now the one to beat come Oscar night. Equally as locked in for awards following last night’s SAG Awards are Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis and Best Supporting Actress Anne…
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When box office analysts and everyday cinephiles cite January as a “garbage dump of a month”, let this weekend be the perfect example of why. Despite the presence of three new nationwide releases – the revisionist fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, the comedy anthology, Movie 43, and the latest Jason Statham action vehicle, Parker – not one film managed to debut past the $20 million mark, and, even worse, each of the three releases were widely panned by critics. Since the box office is typically sluggish during the opening months of the year, this weekend’s quiet box office results are hardly surprising, but three box office bombs in one weekend is still quite a blow nonetheless. For a full box office breakdown, including the current top 10 movies in America, continue reading:
Tonight, the awards season reaches another milestone in the form of the 19th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. By this point in the lengthy awards season process, the winners are almost always a forgone conclusion, and while that may be the case in many of the acting categories – yes, Daniel Day-Lewis is Best Actor, Jessica Chastain has the edge over Jennifer Lawrence for Best Actress, Anne Hathaway is the definite Best Supporting Actress, and without a nomination for Christoph Waltz it’ll probably be Tommy Lee Jones for Supporting Actor – the big prize is still wide open. In what is the most exciting and competitive Oscar season race for Best Picture in recent memory, the Screen Actors Guild has the potential with its Best Ensemble Cast prize (the SAG equivalent to Best Picture) to either create a definite frontrunner for the Oscars or, if things work out as…
Can Jason Statham die? After walking way fresh and clean despite being punched in the rib, shot in the back, gruesomely beat up, and stabbed in the collarbone and through the hand in Parker, it seems that Statham is some kind of immortal God on the silver screen. And that’s fine. These days, nobody goes into a Statham vehicle expecting our charismatically brutish British action star to perish at the hands of some scheevy villain. What we do expect, however, is high-octane and bloody violence, and in that department, Parker, director Taylor Hackford’s adaptation of the Daniel Westlake novel, delivers in spades and then some. And yet, after three Transporter movies, two Crank films, Death Race, The Mechanic, Safe, Killer Elite, and more, is it that obnoxious to say that I’m slowly falling off the blood-soaked bandwagon and suffering from minor Statham fatigue?
Because there is a seemingly infinite amount of movies you could watch, allow us to introduce MOVIE REWIND here at Reel Reactions, a place where my fellow writers and I can discuss movies that we never got the chance to and review films that demand to be seen if you haven’t already, be them recent hits, hidden gems, or acclaimed classics. With the 
Less than a month into the New Year, one of cinema’s biggest and most influential festivals is already close to wrapping up. The Sundance Film Festival, held annually in Park City, Utah, is the first stop on the festival circuit at the top of each film year. It is there, amidst the snowy mountains and near the salt flats, that dreams come true and some of what will become the year’s biggest films are first debuted and then picked up by studios for distribution. Sundance 2013 has given some of my own favorite critics some exclusive first looks at the films that will reign supreme in 2013, and I’ve compiled a list of ten films that I (and hopefully you) will be on the lookout for during the next eleven months. The trades are hot with buzz, so let the new film year finally be under way; without further ado…
Over the past decade, the MLK Holiday Weekend has become the first lucrative box office frame of the new year. Interestingly enough, the weekend has always skewed male, with sports, crime, or action oriented dramas like Coach Carter, Cloverfield, Glory Road, Green Hornet, and Contraband scoring impressive debut weekends. It makes sense, then, that Hollywood would follow suit and fill this year’s MLK Weekend with male dominated films Broken City, a crime thriller that pits Mark Whalberg against Russell Crowe, and The Last Stand, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bombastic return to the big screen. However, neither the testosterone of Whalberg or Arnold were any match for Jessica Chastain, the recently crowned Golden Globe winner who dominated the charts with the #1 and #2 movies in America. Defying history, Chastain took the MLK Holiday Weekend and brought it into a female’s hands with spectacular results; click below for a complete box office…
Let the awards begin! After months of prestigious releases and relentless campaigning, the award season kicks into overdrive tonight with the 70th Annual Golden Globe Awards. Unlike the critic awards, the guild awards, and the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes are voted on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), a group of around 90 journalists who cover the film industry in over 55 countries worldwide. Since the HFPA has a knack for honoring sophisticated, star-studded efforts, the winners here don’t always match up with that of the Oscars (for instance, they chose Babel over The Departed and Atonement over No Country For Old Men); nonetheless, the Globes are still a revered honor and this year a number of worthy films will be fighting it out in both the Drama and Comedy/Musical Categories. Below, our critics Zack Sharf and Mike Murphy take their best guesses as to who will walk away with the gold:
After months of preliminary critic group and guild awards, Oscar host Seth McFarlane and actress Emma Stone finally revealed the nominees for the 85th Annual Academy Awards this morning. Up until 8:35am (or 5:35am for you West Coasters), the time when the pair announced who would be duking it out for Oscar gold, the Oscar nominees were still a big question mark, with only a few definite films being locks in particular categories. As expected, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln dominated the playing field with 12 nominations, followed by Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, which surprised with a lofty 11 nominations; both films clearly have passionate fans within the Academy and should be considered the heavyweights at this point. Elsewhere, the Oscar nominations celebrated award favorites like Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty, SIlver Linings Playbook, Les Miserables, and Argo, and were their typical blend of deserving (Beasts of the Southern…
SHARF @ THE MOVIES 