NOLAN’S FIRST TWO BATMAN MOVIES RETURN TO VIDEO CHARTS

Moviegoers who were planning on taking in The Dark Knight Rises, the finale of director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, apparently decided to take a refresher course on Nolan’s earlier Batman movies, making them the top two sellers on the Blu-ray Disc Chart and Nos. 2 and 3 on the DVD chart, according to Nielsen VideoScan […]

SURVEY SEZ — NO. 1: THINK LIKE A MAN

Who wudda thunk Think wudda done it — open in first place with $33 million, that is? Certainly not Think Like a Man‘s studio, Sony, which thought it might wind up in the neighborhood of $17 million. Not industry forecasters, who had projected it to take in $15-20 million. Yet the movie, based on Family […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE LUCKY ONE

“Sweet but not too syrupy” may not sound like much of a recommendation for The Lucky One, starring Zac Efron and Taylor Schilling. But that is Betsy Sharkey’s description of the movie in the Los Angeles Times, and it is one of the better reviews it has received. (Compare that with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Steven […]

HUNGER GAMES SLAYS RIVALS AGAIN

The Hunger Games killed off all competitors in its fourth week, retaining the crown as the No. 1 film at the box office with a total weekend take of $21.1 million, according to final figures released on Monday. It was challenged by the debut of the Farrelly Bros.’ The Three Stooges, which raked in a […]

HUNGER GAMES IN 4TH WIN — FIRST TO DO SO SINCE AVATAR (Update)

Lionsgate’s Hunger Games has become the first film since Avatar to win four weekends in a row. (Avatar remained at No. 1 for seven weeks.) With an estimated gross of $21.5 million, it easily held off challenges from three newcomers. Its closest rival was Fox’s The Three Stooges, which nevertheless performed far better than industry […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE THREE STOOGES

It’s likely that moviegoers’ reaction to The Three Stooges will depend a lot on how they regarded the original shorts that the Stooges turned out with assembly-line rapidity more than a half century ago, because, as Rafer Guzmán puts it in Newsday, The Three Stooges “is a virtual clone job.” Guzmán praises “the inspired impersonations […]

SO, CAN THE STOOGES BE RESURRECTED IN 2012?

The upcoming Three Stooges movie from the Farelly Brothers, Peter and Bobby, has received an endorsement from Deadline.com columnist Mike Fleming, who wrote a biography about the Stooges (The Three Stooges: An Illustrated History, From Amalgamated Morons to American Icons) in 2002. Fleming wrote on Tuesday that he “laughed hard and often” and “was surprised […]