Box Office: "Good Boys" makes good - did you see it?

With 16 features in wide release -- which is a lot given that there's usually only 10-12 with today's tendency to pack movies on 4,000+ screens -- let's cover the whole field, shall we?  Plus the specialty titles in limited release because we think they're just as, if not more, important on the regular. After the jump the full chart...

Weekend Box Office August 16th-18th (Actuals) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
W I D E	PLATFORM / LIMITED
1 🔺 Good Boys $21.4 *new* REVIEW  ★	1 🔺 Mission Mangal $1.3 on 263 screens *new*

2 Hobbs & Shaw $14.1 (cum. $133.7)  REVIEW  ★	2 🔺 The Peanut Butter Falcon $287k (cum. $583k) on 49 screens REVIEW ★

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Horror Actressing: Joan Allen in "Manhunter"

by Jason Adams

When I first introduced this "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series a few weeks back I mentioned that my own definition of what makes a "horror" film is fairly loose -- so is Michael Mann's 1986 serial killer flick Manhunter a Horror Film? I think that book author Thomas Harris wrote all of his Hannibal Lecter tomes with enough Guignol to them to say that yes, his intention was to unsettle our fundamental trust in the form of the world -- to violate the borders of what's sane and insane with the explicit intention of horrifying. 

But Michael Mann as a director, he does bring Manhunter back down to earth a bit -- just look at how Bryan Fuller adapted the material of Red Dragon straight into outer space with his gloriously baroque show Hannibal to see how much Mann grounded his movie in contrast. All that genre back and forth aside though, I think it's impossible to argue that the character of Reba McClane -- played by Joan Allen, who's celebrating her birthday tomorrow, in the film -- isn't meant to play explicitly with a standard horror trope...

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Mindhunter (S2) Pt 1: Panic Attacks and the Son of Sam

by Nathaniel R

So, two years ago --  TWO YEARS! -- we were all in the midst of bingeing the first season of David Fincher's Mindhunter. Sadly we never finished writing about it at TFE. This was not intentional so much as that the series was happening in October when the fall film prestige season was colliding with our blogging calendar.  So much time has passed between the first and second season that the only thing we could remember about the finale was that it left Agent Holden Ford (Emmy worthy and snubbed Jonathan Groff) writhing about on a hospital floor suffering the most frighteningly believable panic attack we'd seen onscreen. We were worried about what our terrible memory might mean for the launch of season 2 but thankfully the series picks up just where it left off. We were quickly back into its gruesome groove. That's surely do its claustophrophic focus. Much of each episode is composed of just two to four characters talking in a basement and/or two to four characters in various indoor spaces like offices, prisons, kitchens, hotel rooms, restaurants, bars, and crime scenes.

When we left off, the small team of "Behaviorial Science" was under internal investigation with an uncertain future. So let's jump back in with the first two episodes...

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Shimmer

Tweets: That sounds misérable and other observations

enjoy a curated sample of recent amusing or inspired tweets

my (60M) daughter (17F) has fallen in love with a guy she saw in the park (21M). he's at a barricade with 9 of his homosocial pals (21M-35M) & might die? i think i should save him but im also on the run from a beefy inspector (61M) since i broke my parole & became mayor. advice?

— class traitor tom branson (@combeferal) August 7, 2019

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