This year’s Studio Ghibli Fest, a program running six anime classics in theaters, once a month, is apparently doing quite well. We’re just about halfway through, with Castle in the Sky, the third, airing this coming weekend, and Fathom Events has announced that, “due to the overwhelming success of My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service“, they will add a third night to each showing. Previously, the plan was for Sunday shows of the dubbed version, shown at 12:55 PM […]

Hans and Margret Rey created Curious George, that standby of children’s books, in the late 1930s, but their lives were interesting beyond that, as I’ve learned from the trailer for Monkey Business: The Adventures of Curious George’s Creators. This documentary, directed by Ema Ryan Yamazaki and narrated by Sam Waterston, tells of how this couple of German Jews (and their manuscript!) living in Paris narrowly escaped the Nazis to bring their charming little monkey to children all over the world. […]

It’s not unusual for Hollywood to put out two movies with similar concepts at the same time. The latest example is a pair of female-starring R-rated comedies about bachelorette party weekends. Rough Night, starring Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, and Zoë Kravitz, came out last month from Columbia/Sony. It cost about $20 million to make and made only $8 million its first weekend, so it’s considered a bomb. Good cast, but the plot, about these women killing a stripper, sounded like […]

If you want to go see Valerian and the City of Thousand Planets, based on a European comic book series, on the big screen, you’d better do it soon. Luc Besson’s visual extravaganza, made for somewhere between $170 and $200 million, just opened in the US, and it took in only $17 million, coming in fifth for the weekend. With more digital projection systems, it’s a lot easier to swap out underperformers and give more screens to, say, Wonder Woman […]

It’s San Diego Comic-Con weekend, so a bunch of comic book movie trailers (and posters) have been released. Here are the ones I’m most interested in talking about. The Justice League trailer is a lot of unconnected scenes, but they open with Wonder Woman, showing that maybe they learned something from the success of her film. (I do wish Gal Godot would stop looking so puzzled when her character’s supposed to be concentrating, though.) Oh! Don’t watch this if you […]

Oooh, set the DVR! This month, Comet TV will be airing the two theatrical Dr. Who movies, starring Peter Cushing as the time traveler. Now, bear in mind, they aren’t actually very good, but if you’re a fan, there’s still an understandable desire to check them out. Dr. Who and The Daleks, loosely based on the second TV story, The Daleks, debuted in 1965. In it, Dr. Who is a human inventor, accompanied by his two granddaughters, Susan (Roberta Tovey, […]

Some worried whether the Wonder Woman movie was getting enough marketing, but qualms were set aside after its opening weekend set records: Wonder Woman was a box office smash on its opening weekend, raking in more than $100 million domestically — a new record for a movie directed by a woman [Patty Jenkins]…. And it compares well to similar movies — that is, superhero flicks that aren’t sequels or ensemble films. While it’s not as big as the opening weekend […]

The first trailer for Kenneth Branagh’s version of the classic Agatha Christie mystery Murder on the Orient Express has been released, and … mmmm … probably not a good sign that when he starts speaking, in his role as Hercule Poirot, I wanted to giggle. The accent, you see, is just so exaggerated. But not as much as that mustache! As with the 1974 classic (which won Ingrid Bergman an Oscar and sets a very high bar to meet), this […]