Beauty vs Beast: Nanny Dearest

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" -- today we're wishing a happy 32 to one of our absolute favorite working actresses, the great Mackenzie Davis. If you watched Halt and Catch Fire you got it the second her "Cameron" showed up and from that moment on it's just been a long slow waiting game for the rest of the world to catch up. But catch up they have, I think - I mean she is about to star in a Terminator movie so I think they have. Whether she'll have anything of actual substance to do in that we'll have to wait and see.

But we'll always have Tully! Jason Retiman's 2018 film was one of our faves (Nathaniel gave it several nominations and a win for its screenplay in his Film Bitch Awards), spinning an exquisite dissociative dramedy out of the newborn fugue state -- it reeks of new parent smell. The film's a showcase for Theron and Davis' easy charms -- one of the year's true pleasures was getting the chance to explore the constant moment of total anxiety in such capable hands. You feel a little bit saner on the far side of Tully.

survey tool

PREVIOUSLY Last week's Spring Breakers poll turned out to be closer than I anticipated, given how well James Franco's "Alien" was receieved at the time, but he won it only at 54% -- indeed nobody had anything kind to say about him or his performance in the comments. So we'll share some love for the girls, via Tom G:

"I give credit to Hudgens for trying to take risks with her career post HSM. She did Broadway as well and is generally regarded as the saving grace of the live musicals she appears in on TV."

50th Anniversary: Bob Fosse's "Sweet Charity"

by Eric Blume

Fifty years ago today, audiences saw their first Bob Fosse film:  Sweet Charity, the Cy Coleman/Dorothy Fields musical for which he won the Tony for Best Choreography three years earlier.  It’s fascinating to look back at this movie five decades later to see all the seeds that Fosse later brought to fruition in his subsequent films...

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"London Fields" and Bad Movies as Palette Cleansers

Please welcome new contributor Tony Ruggio...

Have you ever wondered why Film Twitter is more fickle than critics? If you spend a reasonable amount of time there you’ll find deep pockets of hate among many non-professional critics for critical darlings as varied as Birdman, La La Land, even Black Panther. Critics, often dismissed as snobs or "the elite", actually appear to enjoy more films per year than other journos, pundits, and regular Joe or Jane cinephiles on social media. Critics are the only animals in our film bubble ecosystem who are forced to watch everything, even the bad ones. Others might skip the latest Adam Sandler romp or Netflix original dump, but critics (many of them anyway) see it all and I'm here to argue that it gives them perspective. Bad movies have a place, and can serve an under-discussed purpose, and that purpose is encouraging a greater appreciation for what the Inarritus and Andersons of the world are putting out there.

Art is subjective, yes, but most of the time we know a BAD movie when we see it. On the heels of SXSW, I was drowning in good cinema. Between Captain Marvel the week before, Jordan Peele’s near-masterpiece Us, and a few little gems I could find nowhere else, the festival had given so much yet deprived me of a proper palette cleanser. London Fields was it, a gonzo film noir so inept and ill-advised that I was left more than a little awestruck...

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Review: The Aftermath

Please welcome guest contributor J.B.

When I saw The Aftermath, the latest from Testament of Youth director James Kent, starring Kiera Knightley, Jason Clarke and Alexander Skarsgård, last weekend, I was seated next to an older man with a notepad who I assumed was a journalist. I chatted briefly with him before the film started, and when the lights went up and the credits began to roll, I asked him what he thought. His response: “I interviewed her [Knightley] when she did Atonement with James McAvoy. She was so good in that.”

That's a pretty fair takeaway from The Aftermath, which casts Knightley as Rachel, a bereaved military wife recently arrived in Hamburg in 1946 to join her estranged husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke), an officer in the British Army tasked with overseeing the rebuilding of the war-torn city and ferreting out any remaining Nazi-sympathizers...

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1st Quarter Box Office Report. Twelve categories!

With the first quarter wrapping up, let's break down the year at the box office (thus far). It's much more interesting to break it down into types of films and see which films most interested the ticket-buying public. Figure are as of March 31st, 2019. Since many of these are still open, these aren't final results but we thought it would be a fun snapshot of this moment, 1/4th of the way through the calendar year. (One final note: We did not include Fathom Events and other non-traditional styles of release because those numbers aren't directly comparable and often make less sense. i.e. if you couldn't see it at regular showtimes in a theater somewhere it's not included.)

TOP GROSSING FILMS WITH A FEMALE LEAD
(Excluding films where a male lead is just as prominent as his female co-star)

What Men Want

01 Captain Marvel (Disney/Marvel) $353.9 starring Brie Larson. March 29th
02 Us (Universal) $127.8 starring Lupita Nyong'o. March 22nd
03 Alita Battle Angel (Fox) $84.9 starring Rosa Salazar. Feb 14th
04 What Men Want (Paramount) $54.4 starring Taraji P Henson. Feb 8th...

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