Halfway Mark: Best Actors of 2016 (Thus Far)

Halfway Mark Festivities begin now! It's never too early to start thinking about year-end lists. If you keep a list all year long, you make better choices at year's end. Unlike The Academy we don't believe that the film year begins in October. So let's name the best male performances and achievements from the first half of the year.

Disclaimer: Notable films I missed that might have factored in to these categories but that I'll have to catch up with on DVD include 10 Cloverfield Lane and The Nice Guys.

NOTABLE MALE PERFORMANCES 
(January through June, 2016 - U.S. Theatrical Releases)

Best Leading Actor

• Alfredo Castro as "Armando" in From Afar
  One of world cinema's most dependably unnerving actors but his performances are never copies. (He's also great in the predatory priests drama The Club also released this year)
• Colin Farrell as "David" in The Lobster
  This underpraised actor continues to push himself when similarly famous stars would have long ago started coasting. Just wonderful as this lovelorn but surprisingly amoral sadsack
• Jake Gyllenhaal as "Davis" in Demolition
  Can someone please start giving him films that can keep up with him? He's been on such a tear. Get him while he's at his peak!
• Daniel Radcliffe as "Manny" in Swiss Army Man
  Though it's not much of a high-bar to proclaim this Harry Potter's best performance, that doesn't negate the compliment. Radcliffe does wonders with the weird constrictions of the role, never over or underplaying this corpse that talks, marvels, and learns and yearns for love
• Ferdia Walsh-Peelo as "Cosmo" in Sing Street
  He's a major find, superbly charting Cosmo's growing confidence and musical passion.

Four more categories after the jump...

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The Furniture: Merrily We Dance in Hail Caesar!

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Hobie Doyle is out of his element. Tossed from the great outdoors into the drawing room by the head of the studio, Alden Ehrenreich’s cowboy careens into words with hilarious indelicacy. It might be the single funniest scene in the Coen Brothers’ Hail Caesar!, now available on DVD and Blu-Ray, or at least a close second place to the hysterical clerical debate. It also has one of the most interesting sets, if not the flashiest.

The production in question is "Merrily We Dance," a genteel comedy by the director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes). A hodge-podge of George Cukor and Noel Coward, he stands in for the not-quite-closeted geniuses of the era. The film, which seems to fall somewhere between Private Lives and Dinner at Eight, sends a jilted lover to an upscale party from which the hostess has absconded to Lake Onondaga...

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Hail, Caesar! is a secret musical.

If you didn't catch the Coen brothers Hail, Caesar! this weekend it might surprise you to hear that it could actually be categorized as a musical. No, not a full blown musical with a good portion of their narrative emerging from the songs but musically inclined. It's more like "a film with music" as Yentl once said to the ticketbuying public. There are three distinct musical numbers in the film, which is three more than 95% of films get. More...

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Box Office: Caesar wasn't quite hailed

A somewhat quiet week for moviegoing as all eyes turn towards the Superbowl. Well, not all eyes. I don't know who's playing other than Beyoncé. Kung Fu Panda had no trouble fending off newcomers. Star Wars recently crossed the $2 billion mark worldwide (though it's still behind Titanic and Avatar globally) but the new movies didn't make enough of an impression for ticket buyers. Unfortunately Hail, Caesar! opened significantly below the gross of the last widescreen comedy from the Coen brothers Burn After Reading.

BOX OFFICE
01 Kung Fu Panda 2 $21 (cum. $69)
02 Hail, Caesar! $11.4 new Coen Brothers - 17 Films, Interview: Score
03 The Revenant $7.1 (cum. $149.7) Interview: Costumes, Interview: Production Design 
04 Star Wars: The Force Awakens $6.9 (cum. $905.9) Review, Podcast
05 The Choice $6 new
06 Pride & Prejudice & Zombies $5.2 new Review
07 The Finest Hours  $4.7 (cum. $18.3)
08 Ride Along 2  $4.5 (cum. $77.2) 
09 The Boy $4 (cum $26.8)
10 Dirty Grandpa  $4 (cum $29.3)

What did you see this weekend? 
I rewatched Silence of the Lambs (for our 25th anniversary celebration which starts tomorrow!) and also hit Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Some friends asked me to wait for them for Hail, Caesar! and I agreed. This is always a bad decision because they are never in the hurry that I am to devour new movies

Posterized: The Coen Brothers

Hail, Caesar!, opening in theaters nationwide today, marks the 17th feature film from the highly decorated and much cinephile-obsessed over sibling auteurs Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.  Joel is the elder by 3 years and after he worked as an assistant on Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, the brothers made their first feature, Blood Simple (1984) which caused a mini sensation at festivals and the arthouse. From there on out they slowly became more mainstream directors in the best way possible: they brought the mainstream to them rather than changing their genre-hopping singular ways. Thirty-two years later they're now a showbiz institution with four Oscars and actual big hits on their resume. 

Their seventeenth feature is only their second movie about movies. The first was the rather discomfiting Barton Fink (1991) which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Will Hail, Caesar! age as well? How many of their films have you seen? 

all the posters after after the jump...

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