>Based on Wednesday-Friday numbers, Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 1 will hold on to the #1 spot this weekend despite an anticipated precipitous drop, followed in second place by The Muppets.  The other kid-friendly openers, Arthur Christmas and Hugo, are fighting over table scraps.  The weekend is now looking like it will be down 11% from […]

> HUGO: The boxoffice story of the holiday was undoubtedly Martin Scorsese’s quasi-family film.  While almost every other film of the day fell steeply or at best held around even, Hugo zoomed an astonishing 40%  This probably reflects to some extent the older audience for the picture, but The Descendants, which has a similar appeal, […]

    THE MUPPETS:  Watch It At Home – Nonstop Cuteness   When it was announced that Disney’s new movie of THE MUPPETS (the Mouse House bought the entire franchise from Jim Henson’s company some years ago) was going to be written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, previously behind Forgetting Sarah Marshall (and Stoller […]

> The holiday movie season is not off to a roaring start. BREAKING DAWN PART 1:  The giant franchise will of course win Thanksgiving weekend.  But its $12.5M Wednesday gross was down 12% from what New Moon did on the day before Thanksgiving in 2009, which suggests a 5-day weekend that might be at $58M […]

>The holiday film season is upon us.  Based on Wednesday numbers, Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 1 should hold on to the #1 spot this weekend despite an anticipated precipitous drop, followed closely by The Muppets.  The other kid-friendly openers, Arthur Christmas and Hugo, are fighting over table scraps.  The weekend is shaping up to be […]

> Deadline has preliminary boxoffice figures for Wednesday, and there doesn’t seem to be great news for anyone.  BREAKING DAWN PART 1 appears to be the easy winner for the day and probably for Thanksgiving weekend, but its $12.5M for Wednesday, if it holds, would be more than 10% off the parallel date for 2009’s […]

>   THE DESCENDANTS:  Worth A Ticket – Flawed But Heartfelt It’s taken an unaccountable 7 years for Alexander Payne to follow up Sideways, the biggest hit of his career,  with THE DESCENDANTS, which will hit theatres in time for a serious awards season push in late November.  Sideways and Payne’s earlier Election are two […]

  A DANGEROUS METHOD:  Watch It At Home – A Visit to Dr. Cronenberg’s Clinic   Throughout his career, David Cronenberg has been fascinated by twin compulsions:  the aberrant and the repressive.  The former was at the forefront of what are still his most celebrated films a quarter-century later, squishy biological horror movies like Videodrome […]