Weekend Box Office: No Such Luck
This summer’s box office is down nearly 13% from last year, and a lot of that is due to the month of August. Down 34% from last August, this month’s releases are barely drawing an audience.
Category Archives: At the Movies
Weekend Roundtable: Favorite Hitman Movies
I doubt that many of us would ever really want to cross paths with a hitman or assassin in real life, but the movies have a long history (in evidence again with ‘The Hitman’s Bodyguard’ this week) of portraying p...
‘Bushwick’ Review: Stunning Mediocrity
There was a time executing a movie in long single-takes was but a beautiful directing dream. Hitchcock made a thriller in that style in the 1950s, but those “hidden edits” aged quickly. The move from film reels to digi...
Weekend Movies: Lucky Harms
Some actors and filmmakers who star in or make excellent films are also capable of churning out absolute garbage. With them, you never know what you’re getting. This weekend just so happens to feature two new movies, each of...
‘Ingrid Goes West’ Review: #AwkwardGram
Every day, social media provides new and exciting opportunities for humiliation. The services have made communication easier and invented all new forms of public shame. It only makes sense that cringe comedies would thrive in this...
‘Logan Lucky’ Review: Soderbergh Gets Silly
The release of ‘Logan Lucky’ marks a return from self-imposed cinematic retirement for director Steven Soderbergh. You’d think that might mean the Oscar-winning filmmaker has an extra important and ambitious proj...
‘The Hitman’s Bodyguard’ Review: Old-School Bud
‘The Hitman’s Bodyguard’ is a throwback. Essentially, it’s the 87th remake of ‘Midnight Run’, only this time with assassins, Sam Jackson, Ryan Reynolds, and European settings. It doesn’t t...
Weekend Box Office: Nut Allergy
Horror is on the rise, while shoddy kids’ movies and shameless Oscar bait are declining. Despite one of the weekend’s new movies having an unexpectedly large opening, the other releases under-performed so much that the...
Weekend Roundtable: The Book Was Better
Hollywood often turns to adapting popular books as the basis for new movies. Occasionally this works out, but frequently the resulting films are pale shadows of their source material. For this week’s Roundtable, we look at m...
‘Step’ Review: Sweet but Too Conventional
It’s amazing how many documentaries exist about teenage dance competitions. Most are essentially long advertisements for their schools strung together with inspirational tales of youths dancing over adversity. Amanda Lipitz&...
‘Menashe’ Review: Meaningful Sadness
‘Menashe’ is a film that hopes to present itself as a contemporary version of ‘Marty’ (in Yiddish no less). Fair enough. Beautifully observed works of humanism like ‘Marty’ barely exist anymore ...
Weekend Movies: Be a Doll, Would Ya?
Since when did the summer blockbuster season come to a halt in August? Instead of opening big titles atop one another for the past three months, the studios should have saved some of their big stuff for this and the coming slow we...