By most accounts, Astro Bot, the incredible PlayStation 5 platformer that pays a loving tribute to Sony’s (spotty) gaming legacy, is a pretty straightforward game. Team Asobi has created an excellent experience that is able to communicate a lot without words or hand-holding. However, we do have some tips to hopefully…
The Brutalist has immediately left its mark as a trying, heavy epic…so it’s really no shock that A24 has landed distribution rights. While no release date has been announced yet, the film will no doubt be headed into awards season in full force.
The Brutalist was a sensation at this year’s Venice Film Festival, garnering a 12-minute standing ovation and winning the Silver Lion, which goes to the film’s director, in this case Brady Corbet. Although originally known as an actor (notably giving a terrific performance in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games remake), Corbet has been making his mark behind the camera. He co-wrote The Brutalist with longtime partner Mona Fastvold.
Here is the film’s plot: “The Brutalist chronicles the journey of Hungarian-born Jewish architect, László Tóth, who emigrates to the United States of America in 1947. Initially forced to toil in poverty, he soon wins a contract that will change the course of the next 30 years of his life.”
With A24 distributing The Brutalist, here’s hoping the film can get the presentation it deserves. A 70mm film that runs over three and a half hours can be a tough sell, but by all accounts, this is one that absolutely needs to be seen, preferably in that format. (It could very well benefit from the success of Oppenheimer.) Our own Chris Bumbray saw the film at the Toronto International Film Festival and confirmed just this, concluding his 9/10 review by writing, “…It’s been designed to be enjoyed as a cinematic event – and those belong on the big screen. Hopefully, audiences can see it how [it was] intended, as this is pretty close to being a masterpiece.”
The Brutalist stars Adrien Brody as Tóth, giving a performance that is being considered his best since 2002’s The Pianist. Considering he earned the Best Actor Oscar for that role, we can now consider him to be in the race once again, which would be great since his post-Oscar career too rarely lived up to his potential. The cast also features Guy Pearce and Felicity Huffman.
Will you be seeing The Brutalist when it arrives in theaters?
The post A24 nabs epic The Brutalist for distribution appeared first on JoBlo.
Even though summer is officially out of the way, the box office was still something to keep an eye on this weekend. Labor Day proved to have a pretty lackluster outing at the movies but as we near spooky season, we knew one movie would help bridge the gap between the beaches and the haunted houses.
After strong daily outings and major buzz, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice expectedly took the #1 spot this weekend, pulling in $110 million and marking not only the third-best opening weekend of the year but one of Tim Burton’s biggest box office openings ever, trailing only Alice in Wonderland. For the record, 1988’s Beetlejuice took in $8 million on its opening weekend. Even when adjusted for inflation, the sequel pulled in more than five times that over the course of just one weekend.
Since we all pretty much knew that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice would be the ghost with the most at the box office this weekend, it became a bit more fun trying to figure out how the rest of the top 10 would pad out. So, let’s take a look…
The second-highest-grossing movie of the year, Deadpool & Wolverine, is still holding remarkably strong at the box office, with the MCU entry taking in an additional $7.2 million at the #2 spot, further securing it as the biggest money maker of any R-rated film, with over $1.27 billion worldwide so far. Coming in at #3 is a movie of a very different tone: biopic Reagan, which bumped up a spot from last week via another $5.2 million. Rounding out the top five this week were Alien: Romulus, which is crawling towards the $100 million domestic mark courtesy of another $3.9 million, and It Ends With Us, the Colleen Hoover adaptation which took in nearly as much this weekend and has done quite well despite some behind-the-scenes controversy.
The bottom half of the top 10 at the box office was led by The Forge, which made $2.9 million, just enough to beat Twisters, which has yet to fall from the top 10 even though it has been eight weeks. The only other movie to break the measly $2 million mark this week was Blink Twice, which made $2.1 million and came in at #8. Despicable Me 4 also held on, although its $1.8 million won’t do anything to get it near the $1 billion worldwide mark, which is officially out of reach. Coming in at #10 was A24’s The Front Room, which took in just $1.6 million on more than 2,000 screens, with audiences clearly disinterested in Brandy leading a horror movie in 2024 (although we will always dig her in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer).
Next week will see a handful of new releases, including the American remake of Danish thriller Speak No Evil, the Dave Bautista-headed actioner The Killer’s Game, Sundance hit My Old Ass, and Kevin Smith’s The 4:30 Movie. These will probably have fairly calm outings at the box office as we await the noise of Transformers One, with the Demi Moore sensation The Substance and Clooney-Pitt pairing Wolfs also coming out on September 20th, although you can expect the latter to suffer because it heads to Apple TV+ the following week.
Did you catch anything at the cinema this weekend? Which movie did you help bump the box office numbers for?
The post Weekend Box Office: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice scares up $110m, easily surpassing original’s total run appeared first on JoBlo.
This Halloween, Chipotle wants to spice things up and do more than just feed customers; it wants to dress them, too.
This Halloween, Chipotle wants to spice things up and do more than just feed customers; it wants to dress them, too.
It’s been a big month for Sonic the Hedgehog fans. Now that we finally have the first trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the third movie in Paramount’s push to give the blue blur a cinematic universe, fans are going feral with theories and finally have a place to release all their pent-up excitement for Shadow the…
It’s been a big month for Sonic the Hedgehog fans. Now that we finally have the first trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the third movie in Paramount’s push to give the blue blur a cinematic universe, fans are going feral with theories and finally have a place to release all their pent-up excitement for Shadow the…
It took over a decade, but we finally got a Space Marine sequel, and it’s wonderful. Released this week on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 is bigger and better than its predecessor. This sci-fi third-person shooter features an action-packed campaign, giant waves of enemy Xenos to kill, tons…
It took over a decade, but we finally got a Space Marine sequel, and it’s wonderful. Released this week on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 is bigger and better than its predecessor. This sci-fi third-person shooter features an action-packed campaign, giant waves of enemy Xenos to kill, tons…
PLOT: An apocalyptic event and the life of a mild-mannered accountant named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) have an odd correlation.
REVIEW: Two kinds of folks will be checking out this review of The Life of Chuck—those who have read the short story and those who haven’t. To be transparent, I’m one of those who have not. I was tempted to read it before making the trip to TIFF to see Mike Flanagan’s big-screen adaptation, but in the end, I didn’t because I wanted to experience the film as its own thing without any preconceived notions.
Pretty much right off the bat, I was intrigued by Flanagan’s first feature since his last Stephen King adaptation, Doctor Sleep. The film begins in one of King’s sleepy small towns, where a schoolteacher (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) tries to keep his students engaged even though they seem to be living through an apocalyptic event. California and many other major cities are no more, the internet is down (including – most cruelly of all – PornHub), and even their town seems to be falling apart. The lovelorn teacher and his ex-wife (Karen Gillan) begin to reconnect as the world falls to pieces around them (with it all explained in one of Flanagan’s trademark monologues by Matthew Lillard in a small role). But, in the meantime, everywhere they look, there are billboards thanking Chuck for thirty-nine years of great service.
Who the heck is Chuck?
Flanagan’s film is divided into three acts, and the second two acts (or rather the first two as the movie takes place in reverse chronological order) answer those questions. Chuck, as played by Tom Hiddleston, is a kindly, mild-mannered accountant with an inoperable brain tumor who starts to find the poetry in life and reflects on how he ended up where he is now. It’s an affecting tale that will cut close to the bone to those of us who’ve realized that our time on earth is finite and that the end, often, is closer than you might think.
It all sounds quite dark, but like in adaptations of many of King’s other stories, such as The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Stand By Me, and even Hearts of Atlantis, the story has a lot of sweetness. Indeed, Hiddleston has rarely been as likable as he is here, with him expertly portraying a man wrestling with his own sense that the clock is running out while finding joy in unexpected moments. The big show-stopper is a set piece where Hiddleston and a young woman (Annalise Basso) have an impromptu dance in front of a busker just because the urge hits them in the right way.
Given that it’s King and Flanagan together, you might wonder where the horror aspect comes in. It needs to be said – this isn’t that film. Life of Chuck’s is not at all scary, even if it touches on the supernatural, the apocalypse, and other classic King themes. But it’s optimistic, sporting a cast of Mike Flanagan regulars. They include Mark Hamil in a meaty role as Chuck’s loving grandfather, the long-absent Mia Sara in a lovely role as his wife, Rahul Kohli, Kate Siegel, Samantha Sloyan, Carl Lumbly, and even A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Heather Langenkamp in an unexpected (and effective) cameo. So yeah, it’s not really horror, but it has a lot of people in it that horror fans love.
Ultimately, Life of Chuck is different for Flanagan because he can fully explore the rich characterizations that define his work without hitting those genre beats. While that might limit his audiences, his fans (of which I am one) will undoubtedly appreciate this detour and find The Life of Chuck a bittersweet tearjerker. More than anything, it’s a warning that our time on earth is limited and that it’s best to find joy wherever we can, even in the most fleeting moments.
The post The Life of Chuck (TIFF) Review: Mike Flanagan and Stephen King’s latest! appeared first on JoBlo.