What did you see over the long Thanksgiving weekend?

What did you see over the weekend? General audiences were singing along to Frozen II in big numbers while Knives Out exceeded expectations with a strong opening weekend. After the jump everything still in wide release plus their counterparts at the moment in the world of platform titles...

Weekend Box Office November 29th-December 1st (ACTUALS) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
1  FROZEN II  $85.9 (cum. $288.8) REVIEW	1  JOJO RABBIT $1.2 on 730 screens (cum. $18.3) TIFF WIN, PODCAST ★

2 🔺 KNIVES OUT $26.7 (cum. $41.4) REVIEW, WHODUNNITS ★	2 PARASITE  $1.0 on 382 screens (cum. $18.2) PODCAST, CLASS, BONG ★

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Interview: Jayro Bustamante on 'Temblores'

by Murtada Elfadl

In this followup to his debut Ixcanul (2015), Jayro Bustamante shifts his focus from rural Guatemala to Guatemala City and both its vibrant queer subculture and strict evangelical institutions that believe in a type of gay conversion therapy. Temblores is about Pablo a seemingly straight father and husband who tries to balance both his life as an out man and his responsibilities to his children and family and does not find an easy compromise. The film won the grand jury prize recently at NewFest, New York’s LGBTQ film festival, I was a member of that jury.

I recently spoke to Bustamnate about the film and how he based it on research and interviews with many men - he called them his Pablos which is the main character’s name - who were forced to come out and some faced rituals of conversion therapy to reconcile with their religous beliefs and with their Christian families...

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Horror Actressing: Rebecca Ferguson in "Doctor Sleep"

by Jason Adams

(As the year marches towards its conclusion we're using our weekly "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series to take a look at the best of what the genre's given us in the past 12 months, actress-wise. Here's our latest fave 0f 2019.) It's an exciting time to watch Rebecca Ferguson on-screen -- you still get the feeling of discovery every time she shows up, like we haven't got an inkling still of what she's capable of tapping into. She's reminding me of Andrea Riseborough in that way...

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How had I never seen... "Rear Window"?

by Chris Feil

Rear Window has to be one of the more embarrassing blind spots to have among the entirety of Alfred Hitchcock’s repertoire or as a Jimmy Stewart lover, but alas I had it. I know, I know.

Maybe the best thing I can chalk it up to is something that’s been in the ether of my lifelong Hitchcock consumption that’s kept me from the Happy Ending Hitchcocks. Things like To Catch A Thief stayed out of my orbit until adulthood without the veneer of morbidity to entice them to a young horrorhound. And rest assured that Rear Window ends as quaintly, if subversively sly, as any of his films. But like me telling myself I’ll eventually catch up to the film, Rear Window is itself about things we put off and avoid. It’s a movie about a man trying so hard to avoid commitment that he gets himself invested in a murder.

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"The Irishman" isn't "The Irishman"

by Cláudio Alves

Martin Scorsese's latest magnum opus is an epic in most senses of the word. It's one of the master's most dense exercises, using biography as a vehicle to explore the great social transformations of post-war American Society. The Irishman is a portrait of Death as an ever-encroaching certainty, a treatise on the painful passage of time and a theatre of memory where the spiritedness of youth is curdled by the self-image of the old men who revisit it. 

That's heavy stuff but here's something lighter: As the film's very credits show, this gargantuan feat of cinema isn't called The Irishman at all…

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