Movie Box Review

The New York Film Critics Circle famously (notoriously?), having decided that they simply couldn't wait to announce their 2011 awards until, y'know, they had actually seen all the movies (when Warners couldn't rush them a copy of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close--which doesn't open until December 25--the Circle simply ignored it), has made its late-November proclamations.  After the break, the winners and some thoughts:

Best Picture:  THE ARTIST  It's Oscar time, and that means Harvey Weinstein.  The Artist, with its admirable mix of craft and movie love, has a chance of overwhelming the critical establishment, and while that's no guarantee of Oscar glory (remember The Social Network), it certainly could make for a frontrunner.  Awards like this will also help the picture be seen by a more mainstream audience, which in turn doesn't hurt with the Academy.

Best Director:  Michel Hazanavicius, THE ARTIST  Ditto.

Best Actor:  Brad Pitt, MONEYBALL and THE TREE OF LIFE  Pitt (and Jessica Chastain below) benefit from the fact that critics groups base their awards on a year's body of work rather than for a single film.  Having 2 well-regarded pictures in one calendar year is a big boost.  Also, the fact that there's no tremendous favorite in this category could give Pitt the best chance of his career thus far for a victory.  (Which would probably be for Moneyball.)

Best Actress:  Meryl Streep, THE IRON LADY This race has seemed to narrow quickly to Streep vs Michelle Williams (and possibly Viola Davis), and the first volley goes to The Great One.  Big loser here is Glenn Close, whose Albert Nobbs is currently under the radar and may stay there.

Best Supporting Actor:  Albert Brooks, DRIVE  That perfect combination of a talent that richly deserves reward for decades of superb work with a role that genuinely surprised everyone (and in which he was remarkable ).  Christopher Plummer in Beginners seems to be his main competition.

Best Supporting Actress:  Jessica Chastain, THE TREE OF LIFE, TAKE SHELTER and THE HELP  The It Girl of 2011, and this list of movies doesn't even include her excellent turns in The Debt, Texas Killing Fields or Coriolanus.  The Oscar question is whether so many fine performances will fracture her chances of actually winning.

Best Screenplay:  Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, MONEYBALL  There aren't writers in Hollywood more A-list than these two, and in Moneyball they successfully brought to the screen a piece of source material as unpromising as anything out there.

Best Foreign-Language Film:  A SEPARATION  Sony Classics isn't opening this Iranian drama until the very end of December, but it's been making the rounds of film festivals for months.

Best Cinematography:  Emmanuel Lubezki, THE TREE OF LIFE  Even people who gave up on the movie had to bow their heads at the spectacular look of the film. 

Best Nonfiction Film:  CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS  Werner Herzog is a figure beloved by critics, and Cave was a film where his fascinations melded beautifully with the subject matter.  Also impressive as one of the first documentaries to make truly effective use of 3D.

Best First Feature:  MARGIN CALL  Yay, NYFCC!  One of the year's very best pictures--first or otherwise--gets a shout-out that will hopefully keep it alive down the awards season trail.

Deadline has some early updated weekend numbers, and there are no major surprises from the Friday results.  The top 3 are DOLPHIN TALE, MONEYBALL and THE LION KING with $14M, $12M and $11M respectively, with the family pictures garnering the benefit of stepped-up Saturday matinee business.  

After that, 3 new titles--50/50, COURAGEOUS and DREAM HOUSE--are bunched together between $8.7-9M, meaning their actual rank won't be clear until Monday's actuals are annonced.  Courageous was the most front-loaded with Friday business, which is no surprise given the nature of its appeal, nor is the fact that 50/50 had strong word of mouth on its second day; what's odd is that Dream House seems to have also done well on Saturday, despite how bad it is.

In the third echelon, holdovers ABDUCTION, CONTAGION and KILLER ELITE, as well as the new WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? are all between $4.8-5.7M, representing indifferent holds for Abduction and Killer Elite, nice continued business for Contagion, and a wretched start for the Anna Faris vehicle.

Stay with SHOWBUZZDAILY for more detailed numbers and analysis as additional boxoffice figures become available.

After a nice Friday bump, TRANSFORMERS:  DARK OF THE MOON took a small step backwards yesterday, with a lower % of increase than either of its predecessors had on their first Saturdays.  As Mitch Metcalf noted in his piece on holiday weekend boxoffice, films in general should benefit from smaller than usual declines today, with larger dips on the 4th. Not surprisingly, Dark of the Moon is doing even better overseas, where despite the lack of a holiday weekend, the picture has a $210M estimated gross through today, making for a worldwide $400M through Monday.

If there's one thing that's certain about audience behavior, it's that movies appealing to teen girls are gigantically front-loaded.  That caught up with MONTE CARLO yesterday:  while Transformers and Larry Crowne had modest Saturday increases, Monte Carlo tumbled 25% on its way to pay-per-view and homevideo.  (My review is here). 

On the limited release front, Werner Herzog's 3D documentary CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS has quietly become one of the year's more successful art films (review here).  It's already earned $4.7M, and its weekend decline was a tiny 8%.  It's not often that you'll find a Werner Herzog film and a Transformers movie in the same sentence, but in this case the two share the year's most effective uses of 3D.

Plot spoilers are even more problematic when it comes to limited releases, because by definition they're only being seen by a few people in certain selected locations, and--if they're good--will ideally be discovered by audiences over time.  Which is a roundabout way of saying that I strongly recommend, but can reveal almost nothing about, the marvelous new Italian drama THE DOUBLE HOUR beyond its premise, or I'll give too much away.  So here's that premise:  in Turin, a Russian/Italian hotel chambermaid named Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) attends a speed-dating night at a local club.  There she meets Guido (Filippo Timi), a former cop and now a security guard who's a widower and an alcoholic.  A spark is struck between them; then there is a robbery, a shooting, and--I have to stop.  Double Hour has a remarkable variety of tricks up its sleeve, not in the mindbending sense of an Inception (everything, ultimately, is explained, and it does all make sense), but through intricate and tricky storytelling where what you're seeing is rarely what's actually going on.  Giuseppe Capotondi, making his directing debut, manages the extraordinary feat of combining this kind of guile with romance, mystery, melancholy and surprise (the excellent script is by Alessandro Fabri, Ludovica Rampoldi, and Stefano Sardo), and the actors give tremendous, layered performances.  You'll just have to take my word for it:  The Double Hour is Europe's best genre surprise since Tell No One. Worth a Ticket.   (Goldwyn - 95 min. - unrated - 7 Theatres)

 

The Canadian (French-language) INCENDIES, directed by Denis Villeneuve, also asks for a spoiler alert, although of the more conventional don't-give-away-the-ending type.  Incendies, which was a nominee for last year's Best Foreign-Langauge Film Oscar, is structured as a mystery.  When Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal) dies, she leaves a strange bequest for her twin children Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette):  Jeanne is to deliver a letter to her vanished father, Simon to bring one to a previously unknown brother; only when both are successful can they put a stone on Nawal's grave and read a third letter from her to them.  The search requires them to travel to the Middle Eastern country (seemingly Lebanon, although never explicitly identified) where Nawal was born, and to journey through that region's tangled and tragic 20th Century history.  Nawal's story, it turns out, is brutal to an extent that is ultimately more symbolic than believable in a realistic sense (Velleneueve's script is based on a play by Wadji Mouawad, and sometimes shows its theatrical roots).  At times, the movie is so concerned with hiding its secrets that it becomes more confusing than it needs to be, and the ultimate revelations are so enmeshed with the political and social statements being made, that it becomes difficult to discuss the latter without revealing the twist.  All this can become a slog over more than 2 hours.  Still, Incendies is far more dramatically intense and effective in its moral complications than the recent and somewhat similar Miral, and the acting and cinematography (by Andre Turpin) are first-rate.  A film that may benefit from the repeat and back buttons on a homevideo player.    Watch It At Home.  (Sony Pictures Classics - 130 minutes - R - 10 Theatres)

No spoiler problems in Werner Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, unless you were afraid of finding out the content of 30,000-year old cave paintings.  (Shhh:  they're mostly horses, lions and bears.)  The Chauvet caves in France were sealed by a giant rockslide thousands of years ago, which resulted in the preservation of these amazing works of art, the most extensive prehistoric collection yet found on earth.  By Herzog's standards, his account and tour of the caves is quite straightforward (aside from a bizarre epilogue involving albino alligators and a brief fascination with the circus performer history of one scientist).  Although the physical conditions of the filming were very demanding, as only a bare minimum of equipment and lights could be brought into the caves, and the filmmakers had to keep their distance from the paintings themselves, Herzog managed to shoot the film in 3D, providing a model for non-gimmicky, visually justified use of that technology.  With the illusion that they are in touchable proximity, the spectacular contents of the caves are even more breathtaking, and although the content of Cave is not much different than a television documentary (it was co-financed by the History Channel), the technology renders it Worth a Ticket.  (IFC/Sundance Selects - 90 minutes - unrated - 5 Theatres)