The Orphanage has one indelible image, and that’s plenty. It also has a sly current of grief and healing that hits home mostly on reflection, after cold recognitions and resonances sink in.

Directed by Spaniard J.A. Bayona and written by Sergio G. Sánchez, The Orphanage arrived in the United States under the banner of producer Guillermo del Toro, and it suffers from the expectations that name carries. Del Toro’s Spanish-language films are compact, textured, and rich with meaning. Cronos (1993) is an alluring, lethal metaphor-dispensing machine, while Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) has the ageless authenticity of a folk tale, among its many other merits. The Devil’s Backbone (2001) most closely resembles The Orphanage in his oeuvre, but with so much attention paid to milieu — physical, social, historical — it transcends its obvious genre; its spectral elements become nearly secondary.

Bayona’s movie is merely a good ghost story, which is no small thing, but it ain’t Guillermo del Toro. While the acclaimed Mexican writer/director is fundamentally a symbolist, The Orphanage approaches its story through the emotional prism of its lead character.


So the 2008 summer-movie season begins the way the last ended: with a perfect score.

Iron Man became the first movie since The Bourne Ultimatum in August to top all four of the Box Office Power Rankings criteria. That Jon Favreau’s movie will win our title next week is all but assured, and there’s a good chance that it will retain all of its 40 points — which would be a first.

The only way that won’t happen is if people actually go to see Speed Racer, and I can’t fathom living in a world in which they do.

Then again, our world is often unfathomable to me ... .

Continue reading for the week’s full rankings and the methodology.


At the Too Many Projects Film Club, Jeremy Bushnell will host the Production Design Blog-a-thon from May 19 through 25.

It’s a fantastic idea.


Roughly halfway into Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, the movie is finished. The plot involving a kidnapped youth has been apparently, tragically resolved.

But the movie still has an hour left, a clockwatcher will tell you. And even if you’re not a person regularly calculating how the anticipated remaining X plot will unfold in the remaining Y minutes, you know that there’s plenty left to come. So what will it be? What will this movie be about, having dispensed with what appeared to be its primary story?

One of the great joys of cinema is a movie that genuinely surprises you — not with a twist ending but by being something different from what you expected or (even better) different from what you’ve previously experienced. (Surprise endings are so obligatory in thrillers nowadays that the only real surprise is their absence.)

So I was seriously jazzed about Gone Baby Gone at its midpoint, wondering where it would take me and excited that it seemed to be a nearly honest drama about missing children. It might actually substantively explore grief, responsibility, repercussion, community, and healing.

It didn’t take long for it to disappoint me, for it to choose the false path I should have expected.


In the past week, two major movie writers on the Web, Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door and Raymond Young of Flickhead, hung up their stinky blogging shoes. Tim Lucas smells a trend and admits:

“I took a silent vow that I would discontinue this blog if he didn’t come out of his nine-hour surgery alive.”

So in the spirit of the week ... .




Welcome to summer movie season, now officially begun on the first weekend of May thanks to our friends at Iron Man. That blockbuster wannabe will be followed in short order by Speed Racer, Narnia’s second installment, and Indiana Jones before Memorial Day.

Closing out the ever-modest spring movie season, Forgetting Sarah Marshall notched one outright victory and one shared victory in our Box Office Power Rankings, scoring a mild upset by tying Baby Mama in last weekend’s rankings.

Looking ahead, May looks pretty safe in terms of box office; you should be able to predict the champion in our rankings with little risk of being wrong.

June, on the other hand, looks to be full of potential critical and commercial flops: The Happening, The Incredible Hulk, Get Smart, The Love Guru — and that’s just in two weekends. Even Pixar’s Wall-E looks a little risky, but then again, I thought nobody would go see a movie called Ratatouille.

Continue reading for the weeks’ full rankings and the methodology.


The turning point in The Shining comes when Jack Torrance encounters a woman in Room 237. Naked, lithe, and beautiful, she gets out of the bathtub and wordlessly approaches Jack. They kiss, but when Jack looks in the mirror, his arms are embracing a decaying old woman, flabby and with patches of her skin missing.

It’s not your typical turning point. A heretofore pedestrian movie doesn’t begin to redeem itself, and a previously engaging work doesn’t go off the rails.

Instead, things start to get muddled. The movie becomes instantly less creepy — actually uncreepy in my eyes. The horror turns mundane. As Jack goes insane — or more insane, as Jack Nicholson’s performance starts somewhere south of healthy — the casual, drunken violence of his past floods out furiously, dammed up for too long. It becomes clear that an abusive husband and father poses a graver physical danger than the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel.

More importantly, this juncture befuddles the audience’s understanding of the supernatural elements — a confusion that’s reinforced as the story progresses. And most critically, it expands the film’s scope from a haunted-hotel and haunted-child narrative to something messier and richer.


Everything new feels old.

Al Pacino, at age 67, is the lead in a thriller that was filmed in 2005. It’s called 88 Minutes but runs 108 minutes. That’s old times three, methinks.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the fifth Judd Apatow-produced movie released in the past 11 months.

And Keanu Reeves is on top of this week’s Box Office Power Rankings.

Continue reading for the week’s full rankings and the methodology.


Our Box Office Power Rankings have been grim in recent weeks. George Clooney’s Leatherheads tops this week’s rankings — breaking Horton’s three-week reign — and was the second-best-reviewed movie in the top 10 with mediocre Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores of 53 and 56, respectively. It’s a bad crop out there, people.

So it seems appropriate to get grimmer with Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own Funny Games. RogerEbert.com Editor Jim Emerson spent much of last month spilling its blood, but I think he expended far too much effort. It’s easy to prove: No matter how good Haneke’s movie is, it’s an abject failure — and it was destined to be.

In one interview cited by Emerson, Haneke said:

“Of course I’m a critic of the studio system. But that doesn’t mean that one can’t work within that system. Funny Games was always made with American audiences in mind, since its subject is Hollywood’s attitude toward violence.”

In another interview, Haneke said:

“I hope that the slap in the face that I’m trying to give works here as well.”

But for all the hullabaloo that Haneke’s shot-for-shot remake has inspired, the writer-director never got to deliver that slap. He might have gotten an American studio to finance the project, but it never gave the movie an opportunity to assault its audience. In four weeks of release, Funny Games has earned $1.3 million in the United States, and it topped out at 288 theaters in its second week.

All of Haneke’s big talk died with a whimper. He wanted to confront American audiences with their own ugliness, but Warner Independent ensured that nobody showed up. Perhaps next time his people should spend more time negotiating distribution.

Continue reading for the weeks’ full rankings and the methodology.


Philip Dickey had a burning question about the pizza place that his band, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, would be playing in January.

It was not about the size of the room, or the setup, or the acoustics.

“Is it really good pizza?” he asked.

I recommended the calzones, but the odd thing was that Dickey seemed genuinely interested in my answer. The question was offered with eager enthusiasm, and the songwriter/drummer/singer/guitarist sounded like he was trying to establish a rapport. As we ended our interview, he not only invited me to the show but suggested that we keep in touch.

The guy wanted me to like him. More than that, I think, he wanted to be my friend.

And how could I not like Dickey? In conversation, there isn’t much that can’t be described as “confusing,” and his band makes charming, lovely, and lively pop music without sacrificing its soul, hitting earnest and honest notes somewhere between the Shins and Weezer, well-suited to the soundtrack of a Wes Anderson movie. Conviction gives the music life, and keeps it from feeling the least bit derivative.


When Spoon was finishing its 2001 album Girls Can Tell, the band didn’t know what to do with “Chicago at Night,” which would close the record.

In an interview last week, drummer and co-founder Jim Eno told this story about what he and guitarist, singer, and chief songwriter Britt Daniel decided to do: “I never would have tried this, but Britt and I were so young, and we were just like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s do it.’ We had to turn all the mixes in for mastering. ... We have these two versions, and we like different things about each version ... . So Britt says, ‘Why don’t we use the left side of this mix and the right side of this mix?’”

So Eno broke out Pro Tools, put the left channel of one mix with the right channel of the other, and time-compressed one so they were the same length.

It was a moronic idea — a simple-minded, jokey cop-out.

And you can hear the strangely spectacular results on the record.


Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who dominated the Box Office Power Rankings the past two weekends, but it was Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns that taught us an important lesson: It’s good to not suck as much as everybody else.

Perry’s latest scored 29 on Rotten Tomatoes and 47 on Metacritic, and it’s still an upper-division finisher in both criteria in this week’s rankings — helping it to second place overall. The Rotten Tomatoes scores for some of its competition: 8 (Shutter), 9 (10,000 B.C.), 14 (College Road Trip), 24 (Drillbit Taylor), and 25 (Never Back Down). That’s fully half of this week’s box-office top 10 that received a favorable review from a quarter or less of surveyed critics.

Continue reading for the weeks’ full rankings and the methodology.


Candyman is an A movie desperately trying to break out of its B-movie body, like a 12-year-old boy wanting to prove his manhood. It is a slasher film, but it pushes and tugs and stretches to become something more. That it succeeds at all is pretty amazing.

As a horror movie, its primary strength is its conceit: putting a monster from urban folklore (“Candyman ... Candyman ... Candyman ... “) into a genuinely urban setting. There’s a sense of danger and dread everywhere, created by the evocative photography of the Cabrini Green public-housing complex and the cold, culturally out-of-place Philip Glass score. The polished and carefully constructed academic music clashes with the palpable poverty and decay of the setting, revealing an unexpected rigor.

Under the movie’s trashy surface, writer/director Bernard Rose (working from a story by executive producer Clive Barker) has crafted an honest meditation on race and fear in contemporary society — from both the white and black perspectives. The unease between well-to-do whites and poor blacks envelops nearly every relationship.


The Bank Job won this week’s Box Office Power Rankings title, but I’d prefer to talk about Fool’s Gold, which has the distinction of being the first three-time 10th-place finisher in the history of our calculations.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. You have to really suck — Fool’s Gold has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 10, and a Metacritic score of 29 — but you can’t suck so badly that nobody wants to see you. You must hang around in the box-office top 10.

So congratulations, Matthew and Kate! You’re actually quite accomplished at not being particularly accomplished.

Continue reading for the week’s full rankings and the methodology.


On January 28, Ed Howard at Only the Cinema demanded that I ask somebody to dinner. That’s a bit rude, but I had imposed upon Ed last year, so he was well within his rights.

(By the way, this whole have-someone-over-for-dinner business was apparently started by Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre. While I will participate, I shan’t perpetuate; socializing shouldn’t be forced on anyone.)

I’ve been otherwise occupied for a while, but I finally got around to inviting Christopher Nolan to dinner. (Not literally, of course. Still, that invitation should be clear.) He hasn’t accepted yet, but I hear he’s busy, too.


The 58th — and second-to-last — episode of The Wire, David Simon’s sociological HBO drama about Baltimore, is titled “Clarifications,” and one scene succinctly serves that purpose.

When McNulty takes his faked serial killer of homeless men to FBI profilers, they nail the detective’s character in a few sentences based on his “evidence”: The murderer, they say, is a high-functioning alcoholic who works in a bureaucracy and has a problem with authority. McNulty — in Dominic West’s performance, always lacking self-awareness — can barely cloak his petrified amusement. He seems to be thinking: Am I that easy?

The scene confirmed for me that the fifth season of the lauded show is a comedy. More crucially, it summarized The Wire’s outlook: It knows people, and believes that you can know them, too, with just a few clues. It has a storyteller’s belief in the telling detail, and the reporter’s faith that people are consistent, and reducible to a few key traits.


The lesson from this week’s Box Office Power Rankings is that sometimes the winner tells you more about its competitors than itself.

The Spiderwick Chronicles, in its third week in release, topped the rankings this week after finishing third last week. That could mean that its relative box-office fortunes have improved — that audiences have finally found it — or it could mean that it had shitty competition. It had shitty competition. (Spiderwick’s per-theater average has dropped each week.)

Semi-Pro or The Other Boleyn Girl could have easily won this week’s contest with anything better than middling reviews. Alas, “middling” is somewhat generous.

Continue reading for the week’s full rankings and the methodology.


It’s too long. We’re miffed by the nominations, and sometimes the process itself. The production numbers are cheesy and interminable. We’re displeased with the final results more often than not. Years later, we’re typically embarrassed by the outcome.

So let’s scrap the Oscars.

Even this year, when a reasonable and strong case can be made that the Best Picture winner was indeed the year’s best picture, all I heard were complaints. The ceremony was dull, and No Country for Old Men and Day-Lewis and Bardem were nearly inevitable.

So let’s replace this evil with another: We’ll choose the best movie of the year through something similar to the presidential-selection process.




Vantage Point took first place this week with the lowest winning score in Box Office Power Rankings history. Granted, that’s less than a year, but still ... .

Even though it earned 10 points (the highest possible score) in both overall and per-theatre box office, the political thriller only managed a total of 28 — one lower than There Will Be Blood’s top mark four weeks ago, when it finished in ninth place in overall box office.

The lesson? Despite claims to the contrary, the movie-going public has at least decent taste. The average winning score in our system over 33 weeks has been 33.7, which means that even if every week’s winner were the top box-office draw both overall and per-theatre, it still scored an average combined critics’ rating of 13.7 in our two measures — or nearly 7 in each on a 10-point scale.

The “average” winner in the Box Office Power Rankings has had an overall-box-office score of 8.4, a per-theatre-box-office score of 8.7, a Rotten Tomatoes score of 8.4, and a Metacritic score of 8.2. In other words, these are movies that have performed well with both audiences and critics. Except Vantage Point.

Continue reading for the week’s full rankings and the methodology.


A heretical question about Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood: Is Daniel Plainview a good person?

The inquiry is an overstatement, because the answer is obvious: Of course not.

But contrary to the assessments of many critics, I don’t think Plainview is evil, and more than that I’m not convinced he’s much different from most of us.

Plus: Michael Clayton.


Between the initial calculations and now, my Box Office Power Rankings-derived formula has not changed its Oscar conclusion: No Country for Old Men is still your Best Picture winner on Sunday.

The only movement involved the improved fortunes of There Will Be Blood and Atonement at the expense of Michael Clayton. The final standings: No Country for Old Men (15.0 points); Juno (14.3 points); There Will Be Blood (13.3 points); Atonement (10.7 points); and Michael Clayton (6.7 points).

The order feels intuitively correct, and the only thing that would surprise me (and rebuke my methodology) would be a Best Picture win by Atonement or Michael Clayton.

That said, I will defy my own carefully considered formula and predict a Juno win. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are too similar in tone, and both are too open.

You can make your own prediction at this Culture Snob poll.