Word: films
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...season. Martin Scorsese's last three features - Gangs of New York, The Aviator and The Departed, all starring Leonardo DiCaprio - all followed that rule. The latest Scorsese-DiCaprio pairing, Shutter Island, was originally to come out last October, in plenty of time to beat the Academy drum. When the film's distributor, Paramount, abruptly switched the release date to February 2010, the move was taken as an admission that the movie lacked either Oscar gravitas or box-office clout. In vain did Paramount point out that mid-February was when The Silence of the Lambs opened...
...Departed was his previous top opener), and any DiCaprio (yes, including Titanic). Turns out the R-rated whodunit - with Leo playing a U.S. marshal searching for a killer in an insane asylum - benefited from an effective ad spot on the Super Bowl and a week with no other new films in wide release. Scorsese's very limited competition came from fellow world-class auteur Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, another conspiracy thriller set on a windy Massachusetts island. The film took in $179,000 in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles, reaped encouraging reviews and, yesterday...
Shutter Island's success was bad news for last weekend's top three films. Valentine's Day lost 70% of last week's audience, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief 51% and The Wolfman, an expensive flop, 69%. Percy Jackson could be the only film of the trio that isn't a one-week wonder. Of the returning films in the weekend's top 15, the one with the most modest drop, 26%, was Dwayne Johnson's kid comedy Tooth Fairy, which shows how little staying power the other movies have...
Back on the weekend before Christmas, when Avatar opened to a $77 million gross, another film made its debut with $82,664 on four screens. That was Crazy Heart, an ordinary little movie that was at first scheduled to go direct to DVD. But the appealing performance by Jeff Bridges as a country-music star on the downalator charmed critics and started piling up best actor awards: from the L.A. film critics, the broadcast film critics, the Golden Globes gang and, most important, the Screen Actors Guild. Bridges is now the front runner for a Best Actor Oscar, and audiences...
...mostly in Massachusetts, the movie was shot at Berlin's Babelsburg studio, where Polanski earlier created the Warsaw Ghetto for his most explicitly autobiographical film, The Pianist, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2003. The Ghost Writer is unlikely to earn him such acclaim. The villainy surrounding its hero is vast but not, in Oscar terms, important; and there are a few giggle moments, as when one of Lang's women pops into the Ghost's bed. But we should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some...