In a little under a decade, director Ramin Bahrani has become one of America’s brightest and most emotional independent filmmakers. By focusing on the lives of everyday commoners – be it a Manhattan food cart owner in Man Push Cart (2005) or a 12 year old street orphan working with automobiles in Chop Shop (2007) – Bahrani’s films tap into a raw human nerve by detailing the highs and lows that go with striving for, achieving, and/or failing to attain the “American Dream”. His latest effort, At Any Price, starring Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron, follows a similar path; though the story of a contract farmer and his racecar driving son could’ve been bogged down by all the local jargon, Bahrani elevates the material and the stakes by delivering a movie about fathers and sons and the dreams that bring them together and tear them apart. Following in the…
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Marvel pretty much shocked the entire world when The Avengers shattered the opening weekend record with an out-of-this-world $207 million and went on to gross $623 million domestically and over $1 billion internationally. Clearly, Marvel’s plan to create a superhero universe across five different films (Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America) paid off in spades, but can the studio do it again with Phase 2? While many are looking closely at May 3rd’s Iron Man 3 to see if the studio can defy the one-hit-wonder train, we’re looking more closely at November 8th when Marvel drops Thor: The Dark World, a trailer for which was just released yesterday. Since Iron Man is an established blockbuster franchise, boffo success should be coming quick and easy to the threequel this May; Thor: The Dark World however, is a much different story…
Given last Monday’s tragic events at the Boston Marathon, we decided to hold off on last week’s Box Office Report and missed covering the openings for surprise hit 42, which topped the charts with a grand-slam worthy $27 million, the highest debut for a baseball movie ever,and lackluster sequel Scary Movie 5, which could only muster up $14 million, several million short of A Haunted House’s $18 million debut back in January (House was made by Marilyn Waynes, co-director and star of the first two Scary Movie films). This week only one nationwide release made its way to theaters, the Tom Cruise science-fiction vehicle Oblivion, but thanks to a solid debut, a pair of great holdovers, and a nice expansion from indie darling The Place Beyond The Pines, the second to last weekend of April continued to keep the month at about the same gross it was…
There are many words to describe the elusive Terrence Malick and “small” isn’t one of them. Malick is BIG. Malick is bold. Malick is beautiful. With a filmography that includes Badlands, Days of Heaven, and 2011’s astonishing The Tree of Life, I’d argue Malick is one of the greatest visionaries of all time, placed somewhere right behind the iconic Stanley Kubrick. Say what you will about The Thin Red Line, but even the scope and ambition of Malick’s least acclaimed movie is still something worth lauding. Challengingly, Malick doesn’t hold your hand through his pictures; he creates landscapes, dreamscapes even, that you must walk alone through and navigate as you please, a feat made more complex since Malick’s films have recently abandoned direct narratives and have become abstract pieces of Impressionist art. His latest, To The Wonder, is his most free flowing yet, but it might be too…
Though 2013 is only three months old, The Place Beyond The Pines is easily one of the strongest and most ambitious films of the year. In the story of three different lives across a couple of generations, Derek Cianfrance, director of Blue Valentine, creates a raw and riveting character drama, headed by a spectacular Ryan Gosling and an equally-as-impressive Bradley Cooper. Co-starring Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta, and Ben Mendelsohn, The Place Beyond The Pines is a movie that demands discussion, and after two weeks of great grosses in limited release, it appears there’s enough people out there to talk about Cianfrance’s new masterpiece. Just how good is Gosling? Is Cianfrance the new Paul Thomas Anderson? Join in on our discussion of Pines below:
Passion. This characteristic is what coursed through the veins of each and every piece of writing published by film critic, Roger Ebert – a man who quite possibly loved cinema more than anyone else. He lived a life dictated by the movies, he spoke about them endlessly and spoke to them as if they were living beings that traversed the Earth as calmly and casually as we do. He intended to echo the influential writings of ‘Cahiers du Cinema’ and instead of going into filmmaking himself, he spoke to us on the tube and invited viewers and readers to tune in every week to see what movies were worth their time and money on any given weekend. He popularized film criticism and made it look easy – maybe too easy – and he urged for film discussions to continue in the households, in mail-in responses, comment sections, tweets, etc. The…
Though March 2013 wasn’t able to surpass March 2012 at the box office – though that has largely to do with 2012’s one-two blockbuster punch of The Lorax and The Hunger Games – it still managed to give some much needed momentum to the sluggish 2013 annual box office thanks to hits Oz, Olympus Has Fallen, and The Croods. With April now in session, the first weekend frame of the new month luckily continued in last month’s footsteps as 6 nationwide releases each earned over $10 million. Thanks in large part to thrilling debuts for remake Evil Dead and rerelease Jurassic Park 3D, plus strong holds from both family films and actioners, this opening April weekend continued to give the annual box office a much needed boost as we gear up for another huge Summer Movie Season in May. Click below for a full box office report:
The R-rated comedy has had quite the past couple of years. After a string of major box office successes in summer 2011 (including smash hit Bridesmaids) the genre’s popularity came to a screeching halt last year when a number of R-rated comedies, such as The Dictator, That’s My Boy, and The Watch, all bombed critically and financially. Though this year’s Melissa McCarthy-starring Identity Thief was a box office hit – currently with a $130 million and counting gross – it was trashed by critics, meaning the last R-rated comedy to strike a chord between audiences and the media was Seth MacFarlane’s Ted last July. All of this should change in June, however, thanks to This Is The End, a violent, crude, and overly raunchy R-rated comedy starring Seth Rogan, James Franco, Danny McBride, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride as themselves during an apocalyptic alien invasion. With…
SHARF @ THE MOVIES 