Happy Friday! Unless you're Renée Zellweger, I guess, but we'll get to that. It's time for Movieline's weekly round-up of new releases here, there and everywhere, including the fall's first legit Best Picture contender and one of the moldiest shelf-dwellers of the last five years. Quite the range, eh? Let's investigate.
NATIONAL OUTLOOK
The Social Network: David Fincher's Facebook movie is finally here, and it brings pretty much every move you've heard about from a A-game playbook: Crackling dialogue by Aaron Sorkin, exquisitely calibrated performances by its entire young ensemble (led by Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake and, in two roles, Armie Hammer), and a sense of time and place that feels both immediately present and heartrendingly extinct. Of course, it all depends on if you view Facebook as the herald of end times, and 2003 as our last breath of kinder, gentler social networking. Regardless, TSN is a movie for all stops in the spectrum, and viewers should respond accordingly with a gross right in line with higher-profile October awards contenders of years past. FORECAST: $27.6 million. (See Movieline's full review here.)
Let Me In: Where did this one get lost? In the Overture shuffling en route to Relativity? In the marketing stage -- the attempt to commodify Matt Reeves' moody remake of a Swedish vampire thriller, all puppy love and loneliness and carefully conceived splatter? No one ever said this business was easy. Still, even an opening below $10 million -- which is where Let Me In is looking like it will end up -- isn't so bad; we're still talking modest-budgeted cinema here, and if it's anything like its inspiration, it'll have a long life befitting its young, undead object of affection. FORECAST: $8.9 million. (See Movieline's full review here.)
STORM WARNING
Case 39: All right, so we know where this one got lost: no less than three years ago In the unsteadying of Paramount Vantage, which spent literally every last penny on its Oscar crop while planting its Renée Zellweger/Bradley Cooper psychological thriller in a musty closet somewhere deep inside the Paramount lot. In any case, it's finally here, and still no one knows about or anticipates it, meaning we'll probably be posting one of those "Were you one of the 700 Americans who saw _Case 39 this weekend? Tell us your stories!" posts come Monday or Tuesday. For now, let's be generous. FORECAST: $2.2 million.
REGIONAL OUTLOOK
Altiplano (LA): Moral drama about Peruvian mountain villagers who backlash against Western doctors after a lethal outbreak of mercury poisoning from the nearby mine.
Barry Munday (LA): Patrick Wilson's titular slob sluts around with girl too many, winding up eunuched -- but not before becoming a father-to-be with Judy Greer. Long story, which is presumably why it needed a feature-length comedy.
Brutal Beauty (LA): Documentary profiling Portland's bruising women's roller-derby league, the Rose City Rollers.
Chain Letter (limited): Fanning out over about 400 screens, Nikki Reed headlines the horror flick about the bad things that happen to people who don't follow through with certain epistolary demands. (Insert theremin soundtrack here, maybe a swinging ax sound effect, or something.)
Douchebag (NYC): Grubby Sundance alumnus about a groom-to-be and the friend who complicates the immediate lead-up to his wedding.
Freakonomics (limited): Omnibus documentary adaptation of the bestselling book about the "hidden side of everything." (See Movieline's full review here.)
The Freebie (LA): Nifty, unpredictable drama directed by and starring Katie Aselton as a wife who attempts to spice up her marriage to Dax Shepard by agreeing to open it up to other partners for a night.
The Girl (LA): Swedish import chronicling the titular character in her coming-of-age while her drunken aunt neglects her and her naivete about her small-town surroundings gradually falls away.
Hatchet II (limited): Unrated! Splatter! Sequel! Raarrrgggghhh.
Hot Summer Days (NYC): Semi-comedic, Altmanesque ensemble tale of love, longing, loathing and more during the hottest day of the Hong Kong summer.
Howl (LA): Half-biopic/half-on-the-nose adaptation of Allen Ginsberg's seminal poem and the First Amendment firestorm around it. (See Movieline's full review here.)
The Hungry Ghosts (NYC): Making his screen directing debut, Michael Imperioli recruits his former Sopranos-mate Steve Schirippa as a strung-out talk-radio host traversing the underbelly of New York in search of his son.
Ip Man (NYC): Hyped-up, period-set, action-flick biopic about the father of Wing Chun martial arts (and the mentor responsible for Bruce Lee).
Is It Just Me? (NYC): According to our very own Michelle Orange, "Is It Just Me? is essentially a homosexually cast retread of the mistaken-identity love-triangle film The Truth About Cats And Dogs." You know you want it.
Leaving (NY, LA): Affluent doctor's wife Kristin Scott Thomas falls into an affair with a Spanish ex-con; passionate trysts and slow slides into trouble ensue. (See Movieline's full review here.)
Nuremberg (NYC): Landmark post-WWII documentary about the landmark war-crimes trial finally emerges onscreen -- remastered -- 60 years after its completion.
Release (NYC): Prison melodrama about a priest and an inmate struggling to carry on their secret love affair. Hotttt.
S&Man (NYC): Documentary examining the makers, purveyors and general sub-culture surrounding the genre of pervy, no-budget, exploitation cinema.
Speed-Dating (NYC): Light-hearted if genre-hopping tale of three pals coming to terms with their cavalier love lives after hitting it big on the speed-dating circuit.
The Temptation of St. Tony (LA): Estonian mind-blower (in gorgeous black and white) about a man's discovery that being good really isn't all its cracked up to be. And honestly, being bad isn't much better either. Utterly insane.
Zenith (NYC): Brooklyn and Queens stand in for a futuristic dystopia where everyone's genetically engineered for happiness and all anyone wants to do is try is another emotion for once. Scientology metaphors, anyone?