DECEMBER 3

Black Swan
DW: It’s a little surprising, but not unwelcome, to see an American writer and director make a film that looks and seems so much like a European thriller. I’m happy with this, as my taste in the genre veers more towards the stylized approach and psychological themes of the European thrillers than the violent and gruesome approach that seems to be dominant in the American approach. Portman has been getting a lot of praise for her role as a repressed ballerina who can’t quite rise to the demands of her …

November! The leaves are turning, the air is chilling, and the last of the Halloween cash-in movies are wrapping up their time in our movie theaters and we’re making way for one of the two most profitable movie-going days of the year: Thanksgiving. Here we have a grab bag of stuff the studios hold in good esteem: high-profile comedies, sci-fi epics, high-octane action flicks, the beginning of the end of a major franchise, and a new Disney princess film.
Bureau Chiefs Ken Lowery and Dorian Wright take a look at what …

And now we tread headlong into the limbo between summer blockbuster season and Oscar season (with a quick stop over in Horror Town in late October). What do September’s offerings have in common? Not a whole lot: there’s some serious highbrow stuff alongside lower-end fare, horror films and biopics and even a bit of Mexploitation.
No, the only thing September’s releases have in common are maddeningly non-specific titles that make it hard to quickly search for relevant images on Google.
SEPTEMBER 1
The American
KL: George Clooney remains one of the true “stars” left …

As summer winds down to August, all those movies that studios either couldn’t make sense of or otherwise couldn’t cut it get unleashed on the public. Consequently August is a kind of limbo; most of the releases have the hallmark of a blockbuster but aren’t quite “award season” material. They’re somewhere in between. As with February, some serious gems can slip in under the radar. But there’s a lot of chaff to get through to find that wheat.
Bureau Chiefs Dorian Wright and Ken Lowery take a look at the upcoming …

Folks, let’s be real: this summer pretty well sucks. Not only is general quality of movies quite low, but movie-goers are noticing–and across the board, opening weekends just ain’t what they used to be… and no matter how much the studios stuff every month with a new 3D release, the higher ticket prices are just turning people off.
And it is another summer stuffed with sequels, but as A.O. Scott pointed out in The New York Times, that’s certainly nothing new. What does seem new, however, is the sheer volume of …

Summer is here, and much like last year, the buffet of blockbusters and crowd-pleasers before us seems both grim and meager. There are a few bright lights–The Killer Inside Me seems like such an unlikely release for June–but for the most part it’s a lot of noise and movies that don’t get screened for critics. (Honestly, studios, that sends only one message, and we all know it.)

We’re edging ever closer to the summer blockbuster season now, and as April trudges into May the studios are firing their first major salvos: Iron Man 2, Prince of Persia, and Robin Hood all look poised to take in big bucks, carefully spaced out as they are so as not to infringe on each others’ business. And unlike last year’s never-ending festival of crap, this year’s crop of summer flicks looks to be pretty promising.
And not just among the blockbusters, either. As in previous In a World entries, Bureau Chiefs …

It used to be that summer releases stayed confined to, well, the summer months for their release. Come June, July and (reluctantly) August, you’d get your choice of tentpole movies meant to prop up a studio’s revenue for a few months before the quick rush to the home market right around Christmas time.
But as studios shift comfortably into their unspoken non-complete clauses, where only one big movie seems allowed to open every weekend (and we do mean EVERY weekend), those summer movies have begun creeping into May and now, finally, …