August 29th, 2016
We are in the heart of TV on DVD season with a dozen such releases on this week’s list. Unfortunately, while there are a few that are worth picking up, none of them have the extras needed to be Pick of the Week contenders. The biggest release of the week is The Jungle Book, which is one of the biggest hits of the year. I got a chance to review it, so you can compare my opinion to the critics. As for the best of the best, there weren’t a lot to choose from. In the end, I went with The Commitments, which is making its Blu-ray debut this week.
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April 17th, 2016
Veep stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who at the beginning of the show, was the Vice President of the United States. Things have changed. So far during the show's four-year run, it has earned excellent reviews and this past year was one of the biggest winners at the Emmys. Does it deserve this praise? Or am I in the minority here?
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May 1st, 2015
April is over and there was good news and bad news. Good news: Furious 7 crushed the competition, and broke records along the way. Bad news: Furious 7 crushed the competition and no other April release will earn as much in total as Furious 7 earned during its opening day. Fortunately, Furious 7 was so strong that it carried April of 2015 to a draw when compared to April of 2014. May has a lot of similarities to April. The Avengers: Age of Ultron is expected to break records during its opening weekend and even the low end has it earning more than $1 billion worldwide. Unfortunately, no other film is going to come close to that figure. There are five other films with a potential to reach $100 million at the box office. The keyword there is "potential". There's a chance less than half of those five films will get to that milestone. And like last April, last May had much better depth with five films that reached $100 million, including four that surpassed $200 million. Age of Ultron will earn more than the combined totals of Maleficent, last month's winner, and X-Men: Days of Future Past, which placed second for the month. I am a little concerned about the lack of depth this month and this could cause May to lose in the month-over-month comparison in the end.
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November 7th, 2014
There are a ton of limited releases coming out this week, including
The Theory of Everything, which many people think will be an Awards Season contender. There are also a couple of foreign-language films worth checking out,
Why Don't You Play in Hell and
The Way He Looks. And finally, there are a trio of documentaries,
Actress,
Death Metal Angola, and
National Gallery. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of films earning mixed or weaker reviews, so hopefully the good films don't get squeezed out.
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October 4th, 2012
There are a large number of limited releases on this week's list, but very few have a serious shot at box office success. There are several films with casts with strong name recognition that were earning pre-release buzz, Butter, The Oranges, and The Paperboy, but none of them are earning strong enough reviews to suggest they will thrive in limited release. Fat Kid Rules the World might be the film with the best chance at mainstream success on this week's list, while Escape Fire might do well for a documentary.
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