Who did Hugh Grant make cry & Meryl's most dubious

Murtada here. Graham Norton always manages to coax stories out of his visiting guests that somehow they never divulge on this side of the Atlantic.This week his guests included Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, selling Florence Foster Jenkins. Norton brings up a recent interview in which Grant claimed all his co-stars hated him. Julianne Moore, Rachel Weisz, Emma Thompson, Sandra Bullock and Drew Barrymore are name checked. Clearly the Music and Lyrics (2007) set was not a happy one as this is what Grant said about Barrymore:

She made the mistake of giving me notes. How would you take that?

Meryl's response is perfect and gets the biggest laugh. Deservedly. She knows how to land a line!

Meryl divulges the one movie in her oeuvre she isn’t happy with. I thought it would be Still of the Night (1982) which she has spoken about before. But it’s actually The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981).

It's a fun talk show moment. And wouldn't we all love to get a glimpse of Renee Zellweger's 48 pages long emails. Do it Hugh, put them on twitter! Is The French Lieutenant's Woman really Meryl's most dubious moment on screen?

Emma Thompson's Category is: Hippie Chic Realness

Manuel here. I'm gonna keep it short and sweet and let wonderful being all around Emma Thompson do all the talking since her outfits for the upcoming Noah Baumbach film Yen Din Ka Kissa are loud! 

The film, as you may know already, stars Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, and Ben Stiller (three actors whose gifts for dry humor and acerbic comedy one hopes Baumbach will mine to great effect; he's done it before with Stiller, at least). But really—and I know I'm breaching Actor Month rules here at TFE—it's Thompson who I'm most looking forward to since her pairing with Baumbach (and with those outfits) is pretty promising. That she's described her character as a "dreadful, passive-aggressive alcoholic" is just icing on the cake, and has me thinking we may be seeing the bawdy side of Thompson we so often get on red carpets but so rarely on screen. Which boho look is your favorite?

We Wish You A Merry Everything

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Holidays.

In the immortal words of Bela Lugosi what music the children of the night make, turning the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival into my favorite playground at the fest. Happy times with horror friends! So it was with some consternation when I saw this year the fest has given us a smaller swing-set upon which to swing - there are only six films showing under the "Midnight" banner (and it's a stretchto label at least two of them as Horror).

But wait! This year's opening film of the Midnight program is Holidays, an anthology consisting of eight short films (each one about a different celebratory day of the calendar) by eight different directing and writing teams, so I suppose that doubles their numbers, in a way. We'll take what we can get.

And with Holidays what we get, as is the usual case with anthology films, is a mixed bag - some treats, some tricks, a couple of candied apples with razor wire wrapped around them, a detached finger or ten. Beginning with "Valentine's Day" (directed by the duo that brought us last year's terrific Starry Eyes) and spanning all the way to "New Year's Eve" (which was written by the Starry Eyes team as well, making them the only repeat offenders of the bunch) the film makes microcosmic the fetishization of rituals and rites so annually played out in scary storytelling; think Halloween, Friday the 13th, Silent Night Deadly Night, or Eli Roth's short film "Thanksgiving"  -- for every day a bloodbath!

Truth be told there's only one true stinker in the bunch...

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Review: Sing Street

Like Begin Again, his last love song to the restorative powers of music and collaboration, John Carney can play your heartstrings like an orchestra. And like that film’s original title – Can A Song Save Your Life? – Sing Street addresses songwriting as soul food, with a face full of neon eyeliner and a deliciously poignant streak of youth in revolt. And as a young kid trying to forge a path in 1980s Dublin, there’s plenty to rebel against – institutional alcoholism and abuse, isolation from the mainland and mainstream, and the collapse of your elders’ hopes playing out in an endless depressive cycle. The future looks as bleak as the dark and stormy skies portending above the Irish shore, but it just so happens that these are the conditions where inspiration can strike like a lightning bolt. If you don’t like the only song playing on the radio, you’d better chuck it in the bin and dream up a new one.

As the story so often goes, Conor (newcomer Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, the love child of Bud Cort and Harry Styles) starts a band with a ragtag uniform of Catholic schoolboys to impress a girl. He may not know it at first, but that’s not the only reason. More after the jump...

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Box Office: 'Jungle Book' and 'Green Room' Get Vicious

This weekend's box office winners were all about the thrills - one for the whole family, and the other decidedly not. It's like summer is already upon us!

Especially after the deflation of BvS, everyone was expecting The Jungle Book to be a big hit this weekend, though perhaps not quite as massive as the end result. The live action / performance capture retelling from director Jon Favreau (Iron Man and Chef) closed out the weekend above $100M, becoming the second largest April opening behind last year's Furious 7. Maybe the unexpected boost came from interest in 3D (I've seen comments on Twitter calling it second to Avatar for stellar use of the medium).

But Jungle's huge success isn't the only thing that will have the folks at Disney celebrating: their spring animated sensation Zootopia also crossed the $300M mark. This year is going to be one of the tightest races ever Best Animated Feature Oscar, and Zootopia should have a good shot with this level of success despite its spring release disadvantage.

In limited release, fashion documentary The First Monday in May was the highest among the debuts, but A24's Green Room took the weekend's highest screen average on only 3 screens. The indie label has used this strategy before and almost without fail, turning niche films like the uber-violent Green Room into a miniature, must-see event. Oscar is certainly out of the question and the film's reported brutality will likely keep it from trouncing Ex Machina's grosses, but it looks like A24 has another hit on their hands.

TOP SIX
01 The Jungle Book $103.6 NEW
02 Barbershop: The Next Cut $20.2 NEW
03 The Boss $10.2 (cum. $40.4)
04 Batman v Superman: Dawn of Just More Superheroes $9.0 (cum. $311.3)
05 Zootopia $8.2 (cum. $307.5) 
06 Criminal $5.8 NEW

LIMITED HITS AND NEWBIES
16 Everybody Wants Some!! $.4 (cum. $1.5) 134 screens Review & Review
20 Miles Ahead $.2 (cum. .6) 47 screens Review
23 The First Monday in May $.1 NEW 20 Screens Interview
26 Green Room $91K NEW 3 Screens
28 Sing Street $69K NEW 5 Screens
48 The Measure of a Man $11K NEW 2 Screens Review

What did you see this weekend??