January 9th, 2016
The BAFTA nominations were announced and you can read them on their site... in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order is very useful in most circumstances, but not here. On the other hand, the nominees within each category are not presented in alphabetical order. ... Are the BAFTAs trolling us? As for the actual nominees, the big winners here are Bridge of Spies and Carol, both of which earned nine nominations. For Carol, this is just another impressive score, but this was a pleasant surprise for Bridge of Spies.
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June 23rd, 2015
As I've mentioned countless times in the past, the summer is the worst time of year for the home market. Outside of an occasional spring hit, there's very little worth talking about. It's much too late for last year's holiday hits, it's much too early for the summer blockbusters, and there are not even a lot of TV on DVD releases to pick up the slack. However, as bad as the average is, this week is much, much worse. There are no first-run releases of note. There's no real limited releases, TV on DVD releases, or classics coming out either. I had nothing to review this week. The top contender for Pick of the Week is Ex Machina, which is only coming out on Video on Demand. It's that slow on the home market. The other two contenders are Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro on Blu-ray and Timbuktu on Blu-ray.
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February 3rd, 2015
Timbuktu was the only film in the $10,000 club this weekend earning an estimated average of $12,500 in four theaters. Running Man came close with an average of $9,246 in 20 theaters. Impressively, Game Of Thrones: The IMAX Experience earned 15th place on the overall chart with $1.46 million in just over 200 theaters for an average of $7,142. This is enough to expect this to happen again, but I don't know if it will be a regular thing.
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February 1st, 2015
With only some relatively lightweight competition, American Sniper will cruise to another weekend win, with Warner Bros. projecting a $31.85m weekend, down 51% from last weekend thanks to an expected steep decline on Super Bowl Sunday. Without the big football game, the film would most likely be down closer to 40% in its third weekend in limited release.
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January 30th, 2015
The list is a little shorter than usual, not because there are few limited releases coming out this week, but because we have a spotlight review for one of them. So to keep things a little more manageable, I'm going to focus on films that are either earning great reviews, or that earned some pre-release buzz. Speaking of great reviews, Timbuktu is living up to its Oscar nomination with 97% positive reviews. Also coming out this week are the Oscar Nominated Shorts, so fans of short films should rush out to theaters.
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January 17th, 2015
The Oscar nominations were announced early in the morning, when all sensible people were asleep. There were some surprises, as well as some results that would have been surprises had it not been for the previous Awards Season nominations. Seventeen films earned two or more nods, led by Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel, both of which picked up nine nominations, while The Imitation Game was right behind with eight.
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