Onward, First Cow, to the Weekend Box Office.

What did you see this weekend? Pixar's Onward was the big winner with a $40 million haul. The hot ticket in platform release was Kelly Reichardt's First Cow which had the weekend's highest per screen average at just 4 theaters.  

Weekend Box Office March 6th-8th (ESTIMATES) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
Onward	First Cow
1 🔺 ONWARD  $40 *new*	1 🔺 PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE $540k on 334 screens (cum. $3.3) TOP TEN LIST ★
2  THE INVISIBLE MAN  $15.1 (cum. $52.6) *new* REVIEW	2 🔺  BAAGHI 3 $475k  *new*

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Almost There: Rachel Weisz in "The Deep Blue Sea”

In honor of Rachel Weisz's 50th birthday this weekend, we’re revisiting The Deep Blue Sea with a bonus entry in the "Almost There" series. Here's Cláudio Alves...

To portray depression compellingly is a great challenge for any actor.  The danger in in authentic internalization is becoming a dull and an uninteresting subject for the camera, an unsolvable cipher. On the other hand, attempts at creating entertainment out of a depressed person is a good way to fall into the perilous pit of superficiality. Mental health issues are thus transformed into walls that block the audience's emotional investment or colorful quirks with no relation to reality. It's a difficult tight rope but some great thespians can walk it. More importantly, some can do it and make it look easy. 

Such is the case of Rachel Weisz who came close to a nomination for Best Actress in 2012 thanks to her virtuoso work in Terence Davies' sad song of love and postwar despondency, The Deep Blue Sea…

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If "Company" were a movie...

by Lynn Lee 

Company may be approaching its 50th birthday, but it’s never looked hipper – not that it ever really went out of fashion.  But between its prominent appearance in last year’s Marriage Story, a recent successful gender-switched revival in London that’s transferring to Broadway (previews just started!), Sondheim’s musical about a thirtysomething Manhattan bachelor and his various coupled friends is definitely having a(nother) moment. 

Which raises the inevitable question: why hasn’t anyone tried to make a movie out of it?  Could it even work as a movie?  I think it could...

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Posterized: Romanian Cinema

by Nathaniel R

Whistlers, the Romanian submissions for this past Oscar race opened in a few US cinemas this past week (we reviewed it in November). It's a blackly comic noir that's been compared to the work of the Coens and it comes from one of the most celebrated Romanian New Wave auteurs, Corneliu Porombiou.

Romanian cinema was largely neglected and underfunded until after the fall of Communism in 1989. Things began to pick up after that. In the mid-Aughts the country's cinema became a critical cause with prize-winning films emerging with great frequency. The country's most acclaimed cinema is often categorized by gallows humor and incisive or satiric socioeconomic and political commentary.

For the second episode of this new season of "Posterized" and  "Making Waves" a retrospective of Romanian cinema currently playing a US tour, we've selected the (arguably) 15 most famous and/or acclaimed films from the country over the past 30 years. How many of these  have you seen? Don't feel bad if your number is very low (we haven't seen the majority of them either) but do you see anything you've been meaning to catch up with or that now piques your interest? 

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Links

Tik Tok "Pull the lever, Kronk" - a genius bit of Emperor's New Groove lipsyncing
Hulu Lady in a Cage - don't forget to watch as we're discussing it on Monday night. And boy is there a lot to discuss!
Matt Reeves pics of the new Batmobile in The Batman (2021)
Coming Soon Superhero Christian Bale will now be a supervillain. He's facing off with Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson in Thor: Love and Thunder (2021)...

More after the jump including Jacob Elordi, SXSW, The Eternals, Twenties, Chris Evans, and more...

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