A sci-fi comedy by Mel Eslyn and a literary noir by Alice Troughton – who are, respectively, the longtime producer for the Duplass brothers, and an award-winning UK television director (Dr. Who, Cucumber, The Living And The Dead) — debut in limited release this weekend, alongside Adele Lim’s Joy Ride, a Lionsgate wide-release – marking
Specialty Preview
A trio of docs and a wider-than-usual run for a Vertical thriller populate a specialty weekend with fewer new openings as theaters stick with Asteroid City and devote screens to Indiana Jones and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken. Call it jittery Friday as the indie community like the rest of Hollywood awaits news from SAG-AFTRA as
Two of the most successful specialty films of the year expand this weekend and a handful of others jump into an arthouse market that’s seen few new entrants in recent weeks as wide release piled on wide release. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City jumps from a blockbuster six-theater opening ($800k over three days) last weekend for
Big news in specialty this weekend as Asteroid City arrives in theaters with Wes Anderson and his army of fans behind it and a major marketing campaign by Focus Features. The director’s latest opens at six locations in New York and Los Angeles, where Focus has partnered with Landmark for the reopening of Sunset, the
Two from Magnolia Pictures, the story of an iconic record album design firm back and a sighting of Brian Cox usher in a specialty weekend with smoke clearing over New York City. Acrid plumes from Canadian wildfires have smothered the key arthouse market over the past few days in an unusual air quality event that
A24 follows You Hurt My Feelings last weekend with dual-language romance Past Lives, starting a platform release on four screens in New York and LA including Q&As led by talent who have been champions of the film, including Steve Buscemi, Jodie Turner-Smith and Lulu Wang. Expanding this month. The Sundance premiering pic by Celine Song,
“It was a contributor to the specialty box office, and I hope it will be again,” says Laemmle CEO Greg Laemmle of MoviePass, the subscription service that unsurprisingly went bankrupt in early 2020 after offering a movie a day for ten bucks a month. A co-founder Stacy Spikes, who was pushed out amid strategic differences
As Sanctuary, Zachary Wigon’s twisted tale of a dominatrix and her wealthy client, opens in NY and LA, David Lancaster of producer Rumble Films recalls a speedy 18-day shoot on a custom-made set in Brownsville, Brooklyn in late summer of 2021. It was Covid, so not the easiest time for indie financing. It world premiered
A beloved ballplayer and an iconic consumer device join a Hollywood satire by Charlie Day, an Emanuele Crialese film with Penelope Cruz and debuts from Sundance and Venice in a potentially strong specialty weekend that will test the appetite for indie film with no new franchise wide releases. Sony Pictures Classics opens Sean Mullin’s Yogi
A sleek theater from Look Dine-In Cinemas opened this weekend in NYC (or reopened at the former Landmark) on West 57th Street. With wood, windows and well-stocked bar, it’s the face of exhibition that wants to grab moviegoers and keep them. The look is midcentury modern. Each Look location — there are 12 — “is
Focus Features’ Sundance-premiering Polite Society opens on 927 screens, the feature debut of writer/director Nida Manzoor, creator of We Are Lady Parts, the Peacock comedy about the eponymous British punk rock band. This comedic mash-up of sisterly affection, parental disappointment and bold action, where martial artist-in-training Ria Khan tryies to save her older sister from
After posting giant per screen numbers at four theaters last weekend, A24’s Beau Is Afraid jumps to 926 for the distributor’s third outing with Ari Aster. It’s a very different film from his horror favorites Hereditary and Midsommar but one the distributor hopes will cement the director’s place as a modern auteur. According to one
Ari Aster, the horror maestro behind Hereditary and Midsommar, is out with Beau Is Afraid on four screens as A24 presents the SXSW-premiering film In LA (AMC Century City and Burbank) and New York (AMC Lincoln Square, Alamo Brooklyn), in Imax on both coasts, followed next week by a regional Imax expansion and into to
Owen Wilson is back, with brushes, as the longtime host of a beloved but fading Burlington, Vermont-based PBS instructional art show. Paint from IFC Films opens on 800+ screens. Public television is always ripe for parody and happens to be a world Wilson knows. His father Robert Wilson helped launch, and ran, Dallas PBS station
As the new crop of 2023 festival favorites roll out, Focus Features presents A Thousand And One in over 900 carefully curated theaters, testing the appetite for specialty fare at a challenging moment. Short film and video director A.V. Rockwell’s feature-length debut stars Teyana Taylor as free-spirited Inez, who kidnaps her six-year-old son Terry from
Much maligned Richard III finally gets the royal treatment in Stephen Frears’ The Lost King as amateur historian Philippa Langley unearths the monarch’s five century-old remains in a parking lot in Leicester, England in 2012. Two books and a documentary later, IFC Films presents the feature film version in 750+ theaters. “It took eight years
Two icons are back in action this weekend as Roadside Attractions presents the comedy Moving On with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin on close to 800 screens, hoping it will connect with female audiences.Focus Features also opens Willem Dafoe-starring Inside from Vasilis Katsoupis on 350+ screens. It’s been relatively quiet on the specialty front. “There’s
Shout! Studios presents The Magic Flute by Florian Zigl, executive produced by Roland Emmerich, at 325 theaters with expansion likely. A reimagining of the Mozart opera, it follows a present-day teen sent from London to the Austrian Alps on singing scholarship at the legendary Mozart boarding school. There, he discovers a century old forgotten passageway
They’re back. RLJE Films presents the Stephen King reboot Children of the Corn by Kurt Wimmer on 500+ screens. It’s a redo of the classic 1984 slasher-horror film about kids possessed by a demonic spirit in a dying cornfield, with bloody, rampaging results. King’s iconic short story features a 12-year-old Nebraska girl who recruits the
Super LTD presents Best International Feature Oscar nominee The Quiet Girl and, as the Academy Awards approach, RRR ramps up again and Navalny returns to theaters for one-week run. Also opening, Aaron Eckhart in Ambush, Charlotte Rampling in Juniper and comedian Jim Gaffigan as the host of a failing children’s science TV show in Linoleum.
The title that saw Riz Ahmed stifle laughter, the press room crack up and Allison Williams murmur “no comment” at Oscar nominations last month hits theaters today as ShortsTV presents Oscar Nominated Short Films at circa 380 locations in 75 markets. The program, three feature-length presentations of the five nominees for Live Action, Animated and
Three films opening this weekend highlight women’s rights, class and racism — nothing ripped from today’s headlines exactly, but features with a distinctive moment and point of view that appear particularly relevant today. Call Jane, Holy Spider and Armageddon Time join Tár, Till, The Banshees of Inisherin and others already in theaters as it gets
The Banshees of Inisherin, which won writer-director Martin McDonagh Best Screenplay and Colin Farrell the Volpi Cup for Best Actor in Venice last month, hits theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, expanding to 10 more markets/50 locations next weekend, and to 600-800 screens November 4. If standing ovations say anything, the comedy-drama had a
Specialty film rollouts continues to accelerate with Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, Park Chan-wook’s Decision To Leave and A24’s Stars At Noon joining releases from previous weeks to populate theaters as awards season gathers steam. Till, from United Artists Releasing, world premiered at the ongoing New York Film Festival to stellar reviews (100% on Rotten Tomatoes,
Today Focus Features opens Tár, the strikingly original return of Todd Field, in four locations in NY and LA. The film premiered at Venice winning star Cate Blanchett Best Actress as musician and conductor Lydia Tár. Early this week, it seemed to mesmerize a sold-out Allice Tully Hall at the New York Film Festival. A 97%
Imax is out this Sunday with Brandi Carlile: In The Canyon Haze – Live from Laurel Canyon on 31 screens nationwide, an encore of a live event that reps a milestone for the large format exhibitor. The concert was broadcast Thursday from LA’s storied Laurel Canyon neighborhood to 87 Imax theaters (there would have been
The sequel to a beloved British family film, a heavy metal re-release, an Apple title from TIFF and Abigail Disney’s takedown of the American Dream populate the specialty film weekend in a market that may have found sturdier footing ahead of awards season and amid a dearth of blockbuster fare. “I think there’s a lot
A steady flow of specialty films starts this weekend with the return of a key player to cinemas and a broader arthouse slate that will expand steadily into awards season. This is still a weird theatrical landscape but independent distributors and theater owners have agreed for months that there’s no recovery without a brisker pace
The Story of Film: A New Generation opens at two dozen theaters this weekend — Laemmle Royal in LA, Museum of the Moving Image in NY, Music Box Theatre in Chicago and Brattle in Cambridge. It’s a mix of arthouses, cinematheques, museums and even a few multiplexes for Mark Cousins’ follow-up to his 15-hour, 2011
Film premieres and headlines spilling from a trio of festivals either in full swing (Venice), just starting (Telluride) or queued up (Toronto) have indie exhibitors and distributors the most hopeful since Covid hit that a stream of new films could fire up the arthouse market. Todd Field’s Cate Blanchett-starrer TÁR (debuted to a six-minute standing ovation