Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 7:00PM | Weekend Box Office [UPDATED WITH ACTUALS] Nov 15th-17th 🔺 = New or Expanding / ★ = Recommended |
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| W I D E |
PLATFORM / SPECIALTY TITLES |
 FORD V FERRARI |
 PARASITE |
| 1 🔺 FORD V FERRARI $31.4 *new* REVIEW, PODCAST ★ |
1 🔺 PARASITE $1.8 on 620 screens (cum. $14.4) PODCAST, CLASS THEMES, BONG JOON HO ★ |
| 2 MIDWAY $8.5 (cum. $34.8) * |
2 🔺 BETTER DAYS $328k on 88 screens (cum. $1.6) |
Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 2:00PM Part One Gosford Park, etcetera
Part Two The Maltese Falcon, etcetera
...and now we conclude the countdown of the best whodunnits in honor of the impending release of the all star mystery Knives Out.
by Eurocheese
2. Memento
I know Christopher Nolan isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – fair enough. Whodunnits are essentially excuses to get inside the head of a killer. To start with a murder, realize the killer can’t trust his own thoughts , and try to put together who is pulling the strings in his mind… what an impressive conceit to thrill die hard mystery fans. Disorienting the audience in every scene while cutting in clips of a paranoid, trapped man trying to piece together his memories, without giving anything away? I have to believe Agatha Christie herself would applaud the finale...
Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 12:18PM For the 30th anniversary of The Little Mermaid I wanted to reshare this piece I wrote about the movie ages ago. Still one of my favourite essays - Nathaniel R
American members of Generation Y or Z and beyond may have a good deal of trouble imagining this but it's true: once upon a time, animated movies were considered highly uncool. They were strictly for babies. Teenagers disdained them. Adults took their children under duress. They barely caused a ripple at the box office. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences ignored them. CGI was not part of the national vernacular. Strange but true.
In a very short window of time, from November 1989 through February 1992, three major events changed modern perceptions of the animated film in a gargantuan way. Let's take them in reverse order: The third big-bang was the moment when Beauty & the Beast (1991) was nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture, the first time that a cartoon had received that pinnacle mainstream honor. The middle part of the three-part revolution was when hipster American audiences began to discover that there was more to the form than Walt Disney. Katsuhiro Ôtomo's Japanese sci-fi spellbinder Akira was the key that opened the door for anime, now very big and influential business in America. But the first key event in animation's rebirth (stateside at least) was the release of Disney's "28th animated classic" The Little Mermaid; an orgasmic reawakening of the most flexible and fantastical of film mediums...
Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 9:47AM 
Allow us this tangent for the centennial of the silent comedy The Virtuous Vamp (1919). It starred the then popular actress Constance Talmadge who claims to have been receiving over 60 scripts a week during this period in her career. This particular comedy is among the many honored titles in the Library of Congress National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The Virtuous Vamp is now in the public domain though we haven't found a way to screen it yet. From our understanding, it's not a "lost" film which is always a relief with silent pictures since the bulk of them vanished from existence through Hollywood's own negligence about their movies. Movies were always and remain cultural artifacts rather than disposable "product" to be tossed once they've stopped collecting immediate coin.
The not-at-all sexist plot (joke) is about a virtuous girl who takes a job at an office of men which causes all sorts of trouble -- none of them can concentrate and do their work due to her beauty...
Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 9:45PM by Scott Thomson
Two Grand High thesps of the most esteemed order playing against each other in a cunning game of deceit. A surefire winning recipe, right? Maybe not.
Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Helen Mirren are most certainly having a gay old time together, practically purring in each calculated exchange with one another. It is not often enough that we get to see the screen shared by a pair of Britain’s most beloved (capital ‘A’) Actors but this is far from enough to lift The Good Liar from the escalating preposterousness that clouds the fun within. It reads like an “oh my God what if we did this thing...” kind of idea conjured by a drunken playwright after too many Merlots round Sir Ian’s pub on a Saturday evening. The result is a film perhaps best enjoyed in a similar state...
