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??

April Foolish Predictions: Visual Categories

Hello Dear Reader! Your host Nathaniel checking in from a screening and chart-making frenzy. I'm heading off to my jury meeting at the Nashville International Film Festival (New Directors competition) to bestow prizes. But I wanted to point you to chart updates (the remainder will premiere this week to complete our April Foolish tradition). So let's talk costume design and cinematography and such. (lots more after the jump)

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Please switch off your phone.

An excerpt from an interview with AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron, from Variety.

Would appealing to millennials involve allowing texting or cellphone use?

Yes. When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow. You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life.

Actresses react. 

"Personally speaking, I can't wait to see life tear you apart".

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