MEDIOCRE RATINGS — ER, TICKET SALES — FOR ANCHORMAN 2

Anchorman 2 didn’t make quite as big a splash as many box-office pundits had predicted. While many had praised the film’s marketing campaign and predicted that it would power the film’s debut to around $30-35 million, the Will Farrell starrer actually wound up with an estimated $26.7 million, placing second to the second week of […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

Virtually every review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug compares it with the previous installment of The Hobbit trilogy, An Unexpected Journey — mostly favorably. For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Steven Rea remarks that it “is not only eight minutes shorter than its forebear, it’s at least eight minutes better — less twee, less […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THOR: THE DARK WORLD

It’s a good thing that Thor: The Dark World is the kind of movie that’s considered critic-proof, because the nation’s leading newspaper critics are giving it an awful hammering. The movie, writes Kyle Smith in the New York Post, “is low-stakes, low-emotion, low brow.” Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal considers it “so dumb […]

BAD GRANDPA SHOOTS DOWN GRAVITY

After three weeks at the No. 1 spot at the box office, Gravity began its descent this weekend, brought down by Johnny Knoxville’s Bad Grandpa. Knoxville’s Jackass-with-a-storyline production kicked off with an estimated $32 million, while Gravity slipped to the runner-up position with $20.3 million, bringing its gross after four weekends to just under $200 […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: PRISONERS

Virtually every major critic has praised the script, direction, and performances of Prisoners. But some are suggesting that the problem with it may be that it’s just too effective — a film about kidnapped children that will leave moviegoers unsettled even as they leave the theater. “A devastating psychological thriller, Prisoners pulls us deep into […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: WORLD WAR Z

Despite arriving in theaters seemingly hobbled by horror stories about its onerous production problems, critics generally agree that World War Z amounts to, as Liam Lacey describes it in the Toronto Globe and Mail, “a perfectly decent thriller.” Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times remarks that “unless you knew about the film’s troubled past, […]

MAN OF STEEL ROARS INTO THEATERS WITH $129-MILLION DEBUT (Updated)

The Man of Steel was indeed more powerful than a locomotive as it roared into theaters over the weekend with a record-shattering $116.7 million domestically (plus another $12 million brought in at Thursday-night screenings that were part of a Walmart promotion). It was the biggest June opening in history, and, together with the $71 million […]

THE PURGE SURPRISES WITH $36.3 MILLION (IT COST $3 MILLION) (Updated)

There’s life in the old B-movie yet. Universal’s The Purge, produced on a tiny budget of $3 million, wound up at the top of the box office this weekend with an estimated $36.3 million. That’s about twice what forecasters, who have been having a lousy track record of late, had predicted. The big victory for […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE INTERNSHIP

Anyone who has ever worked for a software company has probably dreamed at one time or another about getting a job at Google, which has managed to make virtually every list of best places on earth to work. Those dreamers are likely to form a core group of moviegoers who will turn out to see […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE PURGE

The Purge is one of those B-movies made on a microbudget of $3 million whose charm principally comes from the fact that it was made on a microbudget of $3 million. It’s about a future world in which all crime is forbidden for 364 days but is permitted on day 365. It has received quite […]

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