Summer
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Weekend Preview: Fright Night, One Day, Conan the Barbarian; Momoa: "Drogo would kick Conan's Ass"
As Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Help do torrid business, the dog days of August are now upon us. This is the traditional dumping ground for movies that Hollywood deems neither robust enough to compete in the summer fray nor able to earn quality reviews during the more demanding adult fall ...
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Oscar Watch: Sony Pictures Classics Boasts Strong Fall Line-up; Midnight in Paris Stays in Theaters
Sony Pictures Classics is having a good year. Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris is not only the most successful Woody Allen movie ever ($49 million domestic and counting), it's the only movie to play all summer long. After its successful launch May 20 after opening Cannes, co-president Tom Bernard ref...
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Racing Doc Senna Takes Banksy Indie Route: Opens Strong, Tries to Reel in Women
The real question after this weekend's best doc opening of the year ($36,749 per screen average) for the Formula 1 racing doc Senna is why Working Title didn't put the movie out through Universal's specialty subsidiary Focus Features, which releases many of their smaller-scale films, including the u...
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Oscar Watch: Critics, Academy, Men, Women: The Help vs. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
It's not surprising where @spikelee falls on The Help. He's retweeting the articles that support his views, from indieWIRE's Eric Kohn to Michael Phillips in The Chicago Tribune. UPDATE: And The Association of Black Women Historians also disapproves.
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Weekend Box Office: Apes Dominate For Second Week as The Help Rises
August summer box office showed some breadth, as studios battled for weekend dominance with pictures appealing to a range of audience segments, from women (The Help) to tweens (Glee) and holdover prequel Rise of the Planet of the Apes, reports Anthony D'Alessandro.Neither a 3-D bridge disaster, Glee...
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Weekend Preview: The Help, 30 Minutes or Less, Must-See is Formula 1 Doc Senna
Girl of summer Emma Stone leads a strong cast in The Help, destined to please mainstream crowds but not necessarily critics and the Academy. Meanwhile, Jesse Eisenberg returns to the big screen for the first time since his Oscar-nominated role in 2010's The Social Network with what is meant to be li...
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The Help: Mainstream Crowd-Pleaser, Not Oscar Contender
At the Academy premiere of The Help Tuesday night, DreamWorks' Stacey Snider, Participant's Jeff Skoll and Ricky Strauss, and Disney's Rich Ross presided over an industry unveiling that yielded plenty of tears and applause. The crowd was packed with Colleen Camp's Academy list, from producers Norman...
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The Help Reviews: Southern Sass, Avoiding the Sociological Minefield, Davis and Spencer Shine
The Help, based on Kathryn Sockett's 2009 novel, is finally landing some better reviews (below) that should help quell some of the controversy over the insider's look at black maids in 1960s Mississippi--told from a white woman's perspective. The reviews had been held back under an embargo, leaving ...
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Who Gets Credit for Rise of the Planet of the Apes?
Now that word-of-mouth has caught up with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which is well on its way to being a huge global hit, folks will be lining up to take credit for the picture. Who deserves the credit for how well this turned out?
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Weekend Box Office: Good Word Propels Rise of the Planet of the Apes to $54 Million, Change-Up Soft
Truth is, Fox did not know what a powerful box office contender it had in prequel Rise of the Planet of the Apes, waiting to screen the film until the last minute when the film's astonishing VFX were final. Then the good word exploded, and the movie scored a rousing $54 million opening weekend. Anth...
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