Unsurprisingly, the Samuel L. Jackson thriller Lakeview Terrace won box office honors last weekend with a solid $15 mil. Of the week's two wild cars, one fizzled (Ghost Town), while the other prospered (Igor). Lesson learned: Never underestimate adorable hunchbacks.

via cinematical.com

m not sure why or how it happened, but over the course of about three years I became obsessed with wearing slippers. Huge slipper nut right here! (I know there are other slipper freaks out there reading this, and if I could high five.....

via cinematical.com

While this chick flick proved that women are a box office force to be reckoned with, most critics felt this cinematic extension of HBO's hit TV series would have been better off left undone. Viewers, however, were divided. Some were captivated with Carrie and Mr. Big's convoluted trip to the altar;

via cinematical.com

It's only because Mark Young's upcoming The Killing Jar sounds like a nifty cross between hostage thriller and monster movie that I think this piece is worthy of note -- but there's also the fact that the film now has guys like Michael Madsen, Harold Perrineau, and Danny Trejo attached.

via cinematical.com

I am getting a terrible sense of deja vu -- I skimmed this Variety article very quickly, thinking as I read "Oh, I remember reading the reviews of this book, and I always meant to pick it up." But then I saw the word "preemptively" and realized it hadn't been published yet.

via cinematical.com

They've both been Mean Girls, both acted for Nick Cassavetes, both appeared in wedding movies and now both Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried will have shared the honor of being the leading lady in a Nicholas Sparks adaptation.

via cinematical.com

Many films have sought to portray the terrible damage inflicted by war against a soldier's mental and physical health, but The Lucky Ones takes this concept to new depths by depicting a trio of Army personnel who have been messed up only in amusing, sitcom-y ways.

via cinematical.com

Death is ever present at the Toronto International Film Festival, both in the movies and in the eyes of the patrons dragging themselves to 9 a.m. screenings after a night of partying. Plenty of films treat the subject seriously -- you are never far from an indie drama in which someone mourns someone else's death -- but it's played for laughs quite a bit, too.

via cinematical.com

Flash of Genius is a conventional crowdpleaser but not, I'm pleased to report, a shameless one. Chronicling the true story of a college professor's fight to reclaim his invention – the intermittent windshield wiper – from the car company that stole it, the film does many of the things you'd expect, but it may also surprise you.

via cinematical.com

You may recall that on the very weekend of its theatrical release, The Dark Knight rocketed to the top of the Internet Movie Database's user-voted Top 250 movies, with an average rating of 9.5 out of 10 after more than 47,000 votes. Observers marveled at how quickly this happened, noting that the previous #1 film, The Godfather, had held its spot for a decade.

via cinematical.com

chance, two Takashi Miike movies, Dead or Alive and Audition, opened in my town with in a week of one another in 2001. It was pretty eye opening seeing the huge difference between them, the speedy carnage of the former and the slow suspense of the latter, and I became an instant fan.

via cinematical.com

I think this'll be my last Outlander post for a while; you're probably sick of hearing about it by now. But I think I owe you this one as a matter of follow-through. You see, the buzz on the internets is that, as feared, the Weinstein Company is sending the nearly $50 million dollar Vikings-fight-aliens adventure film to direct-to-DVD oblivion.

via cinematical.com

Alejandro Martínez over at BlogHogwarts has sent us a bunch of images from the just-released Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince calender. I know, it's hard to get excited about anything associated with a movie we won't see until July, but a calender can help alleviate your pain by giving you a little dose of Harry Potter all through 2009. Right? Ok, maybe not.

via cinematical.com

It comes as little surprise whenever a studio decides to kindly remove a film from a director's hands -- the situation with Lionsgate's treatment of Punisher: War Zone still smells fishy from this end -- but while most filmmakers would proceed to bite their tongues and salvage their careers, Mathieu Kassovitz begs to differ on his own film, the Vin Diesel vehicle Babylon A.D., which opens this Friday in an all-too-familiar August dump situation (joining it on the marquee: alleged comedies Disaster Movie and College).

via cinematical.com

One of the more controversial and polarizing films at this year's Sundance Film Festival (and last year's Toronto fest) was Towelhead, a dark and uncomfortable comedy about a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl living in Texas during the first Gulf War. It was directed by Alan Ball, who showed with American Beauty (which he wrote) and HBO's Six Feet Under (which he created) that he has a knack for finding humor in the sinister corners of suburbia.

via cinematical.com