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Hot Take: Would have been a decent Saturday afternoon made-for-basic cable movie.

Locally, Valley of Bones had a 1 week run. It’s still playing in a few theaters in its second week but while it was in 8 theaters within 50 miles of my house in its opening week, it will drop to 1 theater tomorrow unless there’s a last minute change to the local theater schedules. They did have to make run for It, after all. Over the weekend, Valley of Bones made 134,076 or $447. At an average of 5 showings per day on a 4-day holiday weekend, that’s less than $30 per showing. So, the 2 other strangers in the theater and myself for the final Sunday showing was actually an average crowd for the drama/thriller about a dinosaur bone hunter (Autumn Reeser) and a T-Rex dig in the North Dakota Badlands spawned by the discovery of a meth addict (Steve Molony) who was busy killing someone on his sponsor’s (Alexandra Billings) ranch. Sound a little far-fetched? Yup.Read More →

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Hot Take: Not sexy enough to be a torrid erotic thriller. (Actually, it goes out of it’s way to cancel out sexy moments.) Not terrible enough to be a trashy B-movie. (Actually, it achieves mediocrity for the most part.)

The long, painful odyssey that was the release of Tulip Fever is finally over. The acclaimed 2000 novel by Deborah Moggach was a highly sought after commodity at one point. In 2004, the project was attached to Steven Spielberg as the producer, John Madden as director and Keira Knightley, Jude Law and Jim Broadbent as the lead actors. A change in the tax rules in the UK put a halt to the proposed $48 million production thus putting the project in limbo. In 2013, the film was resurrected. This time it was attached to Harvey Weinstein and Alison Owens as producers with Alicia Vikander and Matthias Schoenaerts in the prominent roles. In 2014, the project was officially acquired by The Weinstein Company away from Paramount Pictures, Schoenaerts was no longer included in the project now expected to be directed by Justin Chadwick and a strong cast including Christoph Waltz, Judi Dench, Dane DeHaan, Zach Galifianakis, Jack O’Connell, Cara Delevingne, Holliday Grainger and others joined the cast. Production began on the Tom Stoppard script and the film was shot in two months… in 2014.Read More →

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Hot Take: Awful title. Far-fetched, well acted thriller about a botched bank robbery and what happens afterward, I guess. Robert Pattinson shows some acting chops though.

Do you consider yourself a hipster? If you answer “yes” or “no”, it doesn’t speak to what you’ll think of Good Time, the 2017 urban drama/thriller starring Robert Pattinson. If, however, you said, “What the hell kind of question is that?” it actually means two things. (1) You’re probably a hipster and (2) you’ll probably love Good Time. Personally, I’m on the fence with the film. There was enough to like about Good Time to lock in my interest until the end but, afterward, it left me feeling a little bit hollow about the whole viewing experience. A little too much was left on the table for me to call the film anything more than mediocre.Read More →

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Hot Take: The best movie of 2017 so far! For the second straight year, writer/director Taylor Sheridan has delivered a hidden gem.

As we head into Labor Day weekend, all reports are expecting this weekend’s box office to be the slowest in over 2 decades. It’s easy to figure out why since the two new wide releases are the 40th anniversary re-release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Tulip Fever which is finally making it to theaters on its 4th announced release date after over 2 years in limbo. Just because the releases are soft and we’re far away from the release of a $100 million box office film (Girls Trip and Dunkirk on July 21) doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth seeing. That brings us to Wind River, a film from writer/director Taylor Sheridan who was also the the writer behind last year’s Hell or High Water. The two films share some similarities as they both came to theaters with little fanfare in August and were both small budget films (Hell or High Water had an announced $12 million budget while Wind River had an $11 million budget). After seeing Wind River, I recommend it make your “Must See” list of films of 2017 which, at this point, isn’t longer than a few films.Read More →