Tuesday, January 8, 2019 at 2:20PM by Nathaniel R
This awards season keeps throwing us unpleasant curveballs. First Bohemian Rhapsody took the top prize at the Globes and now, the Director's Guild of America has decided to up and agree with the Globes exactly on the Best Director list.
Their nominations and statistical hand-wringing after the jump...
Wednesday, November 21, 2018 at 8:00AM 
My oh my but awards season is speeding up. Today ballots go out to the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation. Better known as those crazies that give out the Golden Globes. We adore the Globes here at TFE because if you look back at their history many great films and performances and TV series have won that were never honored at the Oscars or Emmys, particularly those of the comic or musical persuasion.
10 dream nominations we're rooting for, however likely or unlikely after the jump...
1. Crazy Rich Asians and A Simple Favor for Best Picture, Comedy or Musical
2. Toni Collette (Hereditary) and Nicole Kidman (Destroyer) both in Best Actress, Drama because we need some Aussie Actress power celebrated especially since Oscar might stiff them...
Monday, September 10, 2018 at 12:00PM by Nathaniel R
| Weekend Box Office Estimates (September 7-9) 🔺 = New or Expanded Theater Count |
|
| W I D E 800+ screens |
PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide |
 The Nun |
 The Wife |
| 1. 🔺THE NUN $53.5*NEW* Nun movies |
1. YA VEREMOS $770K on 369 screens (cum. $3.3) Review |
| 2. CRAZY RICH ASIANS $13.6 (cum. $136.2) Review, Yeoh, Podcast | 2. 🔺THE WIFE $712k on 153 screens (cum. $2) Review, Poster Blurb, Glenn's Oscar |
| 3. 🔺 PEPPERMINT $13.1 *NEW* |
3. 🔺JULIET, NAKED $670k on 467 screens (cum. $2.4) |
| 4. THE MEG $6 (cum. $131.5) Review |
4. THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS $155k on 132 screens (cum. $11.9) Review |
| 5.🔺SEARCHING $4.5 (cum. $14.3) Review |
5. PUZZLE $121k on 131 screens (cum. $1.8) |
What did you see this weekend? I'm in Toronto cramming movies into my eyeballs (just screened: First Man and If Beale Street Could Talk). Reviews soon... thankfully Chris at least is keeping up with the reviews immediately after his screenings. I'm slower - apologies!
In box office news this week: The Nun had the biggest opening weekend of its Conjuring franchise; Fallout became the #1 in the Mission: Impossible franchise globally; BlacKkKlansman is now Spike Lee's third biggest narrative feature (behind Inside Man and Malcolm X... though if you dont adjust for inflation its also behind Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing); Crazy Rich Asians finally showed a bit of a slowdown after a month in release but hasn't started to lose theaters yet and is already well on its way to being very profitable ( $160+ million globally thus far on a $30 million budget); And The Wife is expanding well with a still healthy per screen average and now crossing $2 million which bodes well for Close's Oscar campaign if it's a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kind of year. We'll see.
Spike Lee, The Nun, box office, moviegoing Friday, August 17, 2018 at 2:00PM This week Nathaniel R, Murtada Elfadl, and Chris Feil talk Oscar changes and Spike Lee's new joint.
Index (1 Hour and 2 minutes)
00:01 Spike Lee's new joint BlacKkKlansman. He's still got it. Also we talk about how he uses Gone With the Wind, and Birth of a Nation.
15:30 Oscar's recent announcement about the "popular achievement category" and all the problems we imagine it will cause. We are not pleased but we do offer our own fixes to issues of audience's being more into the Oscars.
40:00 Film Festival excitement TIFF and NYFF plus The Favourite, and Peterloo rumors.
47:00 We return to Spike Lee and list our three favorite scenes in BlacKkKlansman.
54:00 Fall film chatter: On the Basis of Sex, Mary Queen of Scots, and The Miseducation of Cameron Post versus Boy Erased
60:00 Goodbyes!
You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you?
Sunday, August 12, 2018 at 10:49AM by Nathaniel R
Currently in love with this image of Spike Lee and Topher Grace on the set of BlacKkKlansman. But let's get to the point. After a long hiatus, we're back with a new season of our Friday series "Posterized"... I know it's Sunday. Shush. What better way to kick off than with the films of Honorary Oscar Winner Spike Lee? His latest joint, BlacKkKlansman, which we've reviewed, is new in theaters. We hope you'll go as it will surely prove to be one of 2018's defining films. But for now on to his filmography as a whole.
People often disagree on what his best work is aside from Do The Right Thing (1989), his consensus masterpiece. That's probably because he's a natural risk taker so naturally his output is uneven. For the purposes of this exercize we had to limit it to traditional features because Spike Lee has always done everything: short films, commercials, music videos, tv movies, miniseries, documentaries, segments within movies, filmed stage shows. The two most acclaimed pieces not included below are his Emmy-winning docuseries When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) for HBO and his Oscar-nominated documentary4 Little Girls (1997). How many of his joints have you seen? All the posters are after the jump...
