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Entries in Loveless (9)

Tuesday
Dec182018

100 Most Popular Foreign Films of 2018 + the Oscar Hopefuls!

Our year in review party begins TODAY. A different list each day! Here's Nathaniel R...

Time for an annual look back at subtitled fare in cinemas. As with 2017 and the year before India, China, Mexico, and South Korea dominate with a smattering of Oscar contenders and random other countries faring much less well in the American marketplace. Much of the imbalance is due to dedicated distributors who saw a underserved market and focus specifically on it. Here in Manhattan, it's interesting to watch how this plays out. Generally speaking some big multiplexes reserve one or two screens for super specific distributors (Bollywood and mainstream Asian features for example are often at the Empire in Times Square which has 25 screens). Meanwhile the traditional "arthouse theaters" continue to rely on the decades-long practice of programming festival hits, docs, and arthouse style cinema which leans heavily European with a few buzzy Asian titles thrown in; in other words they're Oscar-aligned in their tastes.

For the purposes of the following list we skipped documentaries and animated films to keep the list more focused (and avoid arguments about dubbed versions or whatnot). The numbers are pulled from Box Office Mojo.

TOP 100 FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILMS FOR 2018
Domestic Box Office Grosses Only - Figures as of March 2nd, 2019

The $1 Million Plus Club
(The Success Stories) 

01 Padmaavat $11.8 (India) Jan 25th
This lux nearly 3 hour medieval epic is about an ambitious Sultan who becomes obsessed with a beautiful Queen. Available to stream on Amazon Prime.

02 Sanju $7.9 (India) June 29th
Biopic of a famous controversial actor. Available to stream on Netflix.

Click to read more ...

Wednesday
Feb212018

Podcast: Pre Oscar Grab-All 

The gang gets back together as Oscar approaches. Nathaniel RNick DavisKatey Rich, and Joe Reid discuss what they've been watching as they prep for Oscar night. How many movies do YOU still have left to see? (Or are you not a completist?)

Index (41 minutes)
00:01 What we still haven't seen
02:30 Loving Vincent & Animated Feature
08:40 Andrey Zvyagintsev's Loveless, Russia's nominee
12:00 Short Film categories
15:00 A Fantastic Woman & Foreign Film
20:00 Acting Categories
23:00 Lady Bird, actressy movies, messy trivia
29:30 Preferential ballot theories
33:00 Director/Pic splits and The Shape of Water
37:00 Who will present Best Picture?
38:30 RED ALERT: NICK IS GOING TO THE OSCARS !!!
40:30 The End

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunesContinue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Grab-All Oscar Talk

Monday
Feb192018

Box Office: T'Challa Reigns

by Nathaniel R

Holiday Weekend Box Office (Feb 15th-18th) Estimates
W I D E
800+ screens
L I M I T E D
excluding prev. wide
1.🔺 Black Panther (pictured) $235 NEW PODCAST
1. 🔺 Detective Chinatown 2 (pictured) $862k on 115 screens NEW 
2. Peter Rabbit $23.1 (cum. $54) 2.  The Oscar Nominated Short Films  $780k on 272 screens (cum. $1.8) 
3. Fifty Shades Freed $19.4 (cum. $78.6) REVIEW
3. La Boda de Valentina $642k on 331 screens (cum. $2.1)
4. Jumanji $10 (cum. $379.6)
4.  Pad Man $435k on 152 screens (cum. $1.4)
5. The 15:17 to Paris $9.1 (cum. $26.8) REVIEW 
5. 🔺 Monster Hunt 2  $401k on 69 screens NEW 

 

Black Panther just had a record-smashing holiday weekend. It's the biggest President's Day Weekend haul of all time and the 5th biggest opening ever. And in a single weekend (even if you don't count the holiday) it became 2018's biggest hit. That's thus far of course. Three dependably behemoth franchises that, like Black Panther, will have no trouble whatsoever raking up their first 1/2 billion globally (even if people don't love them) are still to come. We're talking Solo: A Star Wars Story, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and Avengers: Infinity War which could threaten King T'Challa for #1 of the year dominance. 

But at least until the summer movie season begins "Wakanda Forever!" is the rallying cry for moviegoers, so there wasn't much talk of anything else...

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Thursday
Feb152018

Review: Loveless

Seán McGovern on Russia's Foreign Film Oscar nominee opening tomorrow in select US cities 

There's a moment in Andrey Zvyagintsev's masterful film Loveless when a volunteer search and rescue venture into the forest to look for missing boy, Alexey. Tipped-off by the boy's classmate, the team, flanked in their fluorescent jackets, comb over every inch of a massive, abandoned building in the forest. Fixtures and furniture are freezing and rotting in the building. Art deco detailing crumbling around them. Burst pipes, detritus. No sign of life. As I was watching I kept asking what this building was. Why was it built? When? Was it still here? These questions were not even addressed, let alone any kind of answer. And this is Loveless: A fog of cold indifference shrouds these characters and their world of empty-hearted progress. This is a film about loss, and not only the loss of a child...

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Friday
Dec152017

9 Foreign Film Finalists for the Oscar Race

by Nathaniel R

"The Wound" from South Africa might be the biggest surprise on the finalist list.The Academy's foreign film nominating committees have whittled down the 92 contenders to 9. If you've forgotten or never heard the procedure it involves multiple volunteers watching a certain number of entries to be eliglble to vote on them. The top six films advance from those ballots and the executive committee chooses another three which makes the 9 finalists. Then a final committee watches the nine finalists and votes to determine the five nominations. We correctly predicted 7 of the 9 finalist (you can peak here though we'll be updating that chart to reflect the official standings shortly)

A Fantastic Woman directed by Sebastián Lelio for Chile
In the Fade directed by Fatih Akin for Germany
On Body and Soul Ildikó Enyedi for Hungary
Foxtrot directed by Samuel Maoz for Israel
The Insult directed by Ziad Doueiri for Lebanon
Loveless directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev for Russia
Félicité directed by Alain Gomis for Senegal
The Wound directed by John Trengove for South Africa
The Square directed by Ruben Östlund for Sweden MORE AFTER THE JUMP...

Click to read more ...