Best Animated Feature Contenders: How to Train Your Dragon 3

by Tim

Only time will tell which five movies are going to receive nominations for the Best Animated Feature Oscar in January, but I can tell you this much with absolute certainty: there are going to be a lot of sequels in the mix. Each of the four biggest American animation studios released a single film in 2019, and each one of those was a franchise entry. Disney had the blockbuster hit Frozen II just a month ago, and their corporate cousin Pixar released the slightly smaller hit Toy Story 4 over the summer. Illumination Entertainment had a rare flop with The Secret Life of Pets 2. Before any of these, though, came my pick for the best major studio animated feature of the year, and a film we really haven't talked about very much at the Film Experience: DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, third and final film in a trilogy that started in 2010.

The film was greeted without much enthusiasm, whether from critics, fans of the series, or audiences more generally; this seems horribly unfair to me. While it is more than a little bit of a retread of 2014's How to Train Your Dragon 2 in its plot and especially in its generic, forgettable villain (and one should never think "unforgettable" when watching a character played by F. Murray Abraham, but here we are), the emotional stuff is all new...

Click to read more ...

Last "Regular" Weekend Box Office Report of the Year!

So, from here on out we'll be hitting our "Year in Review" lists which will include a few exciting box office deep dives on niche topics. So let's retire the regular box office charts of the weekend for 2019 with one last blowout of EVERYTHING still in wide release (there's just 13 films on that many screens at the moment and boy is the last of 'em unlucky). And, as per usual, their counterparts in limited release where the more interesting movies usually are. That said you'll notice the platform section of the chart is not yet complete. That's because those numbers rarely come in comprehensively or correctly before Monday evening so we'll update again then. 

What did you see this weekend? 

Weekend Box Office December 13th-15h (ESTIMATES)  🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
1 🔺  JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL  $60 *new*	1 PARASITE $632k on 306 screens (cum. $20.3 PODCAST, CLASS, BONG, SAG CAST★

2 FROZEN II $19.1 (cum. $366.5) REVIEW	2 🔺 UNCUT GEMS $525k on 5 screens *new*  REVIEW ★

Click to read more ...

Christmas Movies of the Moment

by Tony Ruggio

Christmas movies, full of cheer, pretty lights, and sometimes reindeer. I grew up on ‘em, on Home Alone and Christmas Vacation. I continued loving ‘em as a big kid even, with Elf and The Santa Clause holding a special place in my cold heart. They used to be one of those seasonal things Hollywood did best, but as comedy has sunk, so have movies set during the holidays. 

They were on the fast track to extinction, in fact, until streaming came along. Sure, there were Hallmark hate-watches and other network specials gasping for attention. Hallmark still has a certain devoted fan base despite the decline of cable television, but theatrical movie-going has been devoid of the holiday spirit for some time now. Thanks to Netflix, I’ve been able to indulge and Christmas party like it’s 1999, so here are three new Christmas films you may have heard of (there are two more I won’t even mention) that you may or may not want to spend time with this season...

Click to read more ...

Animated Feature Contenders: "This Magnificent Cake!"

by Tim

With no more new animated releases coming up for a while, this round-up is changing focus: we'll spend the next few weeks looking at some of the more noteworthy titles eligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar this year. And "feature" barely feels like the right word to describe the 44-minute This Magnificent Cake!, but it just makes it according to the Academy's rules (which state that a feature is more than 40 minutes long).

So it might make it to "feature" on a technicality, but it's unquestionably noteworthy. This is the longest collaboration to date from Belgian directors Emma De Swaef & Marc James Roels, who have made a cottage industry over the last decade with some of the most distinctive-looking films in the world. Not a claim to make lightly, but it's hard to come up with any other way of putting it. The duo's characteristic style is to fashion puppets out of wool and other craft material, and then give them life through stop-motion animation; it's basically what you'd get if you were told to make a movie using only the things you could find in a fabric store...

Click to read more ...

Animated Feature Contenders: "I Lost My Body"

by Tim

I Lost My Body, the first animated film to win the top prize at the Cannes International Critics's Week, is nothing if not distinctive. The "I" of the title is a sapient severed hand, which spends the length of the feature skittering around on its fingers, looking for the human to whom it used to be attached; this is a journey that is by turns bittersweet, sentimental, and horrifying. Director Jérémy Clapin, making his feature debut (he was also responsible for the celebrated 2008 short Skhizein), spent years sheperding this project into existence, and it has the unmistakable feeling of a passion project, one whose odd shifts in tone and moody emotional appeals are wonderfully earnest. While it is probably not the best animated feature of 2019, it's surely the most uncompromised and confident.

The film, adapted by Clapin and Guillaume Laurant from Laurant's novel Happy Hand (his other film credits include Amélie, and the echoes of that story ring very loudly here), divides itself into two strands. One is about that hand, deftly making its way through the all the dangers that reside six inches above the ground in Paris. The other is a quasi-romantic drama about a lost soul, twentysomething sad sack Naoufel (Hakim Faris)...

Click to read more ...