Jake Gittes

Yeah, I love Fargo too.

That's atrocious for Seven Psychopaths.

It's not going to make $50m post ceremony having been released in October. The Departed, a BP winner, only managed $10m post-nominations. And 5+ miltiplier is never, ever a lock for widely-appealing fall dramas no matter how much the audiences loved them. The Social Network, The Town, Moneyball never came close to that. Even The Departed, with its incredible legs, fell short in the end. A 4+ multiplier is very likely for Argo, but at this point, that's it.

There's only one minor thing I didn't like about Angel Heart - the glowing eyes thing, which was more silly than scary. As a whole, though, it's a fantastic mix of a supernatural thriller and a noir mystery (set in New Orleans in 1955 no less). Rourke is pitch perfect in it and De Niro's performance is one of the creepiest (yet very subtle) I've ever seen. I listen to the soundtrack constantly, too. An excellent, very underseen and underappreciated movie.

The Shining is my favourite and it will almost certainly remain that way. IOtherwise I don't think I've seen enough horror films to put together an adequate Top 10 (I haven't seen Suspiria, Halloween and The Haunting, for example), but The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, Jaws, Angel Heart, The Woman in Black (1989), Dead of Night and the first Paranormal Activity are all definitely some of the best horrors/thrillers I've seen.

I'm sticking with Phoenix for now, that is until Jackman's work hasn't yet been seen and Day-Lewis won his second Best Actor Oscar just five years ago.

The home movies themselves were the best and the scariest part. "The Family Barbeque" was unsettling as all hell.Otherwise Hawke is good in a bit of an unconventional main role (his character behaves like a careless asshole more than once, but you still want to see him get out of the predicament he's in), the atmosphere is good as well. The thing I didn't like the most was definitely the way the characters NEVER turned on the light when walking around the dark, obviously creepy house - it became ridiculous pretty quickly and really had me looking forward to any daylight scenes. The jump scares are there and vary from effective (the girl's face appearing alongside Hawke's) to completely unneeded (the very final one). Another thing I didn't like was how the secondary characters (the deputy, the sheriff, the professor) were set up and then left with no payoff in the end... made them all a bit of a luggage. On the other hand, I really liked the ending in a sense that the main character ultimately died in just as hopeless fashion as all the other victims. Not only didn't he get to fight the demon or get safely away from him, he never even had a single chance against him, and it didn't matter that he was the protagonist of this particular movie. And that's how it should be.

I'll go with Les Miserables, Argo, Silver Linings Playbook, The Master, Life of Pi and Lincoln as locks / near-locks for now. Other possibilities are The Hobbit if it's good enough to fill the blockbuster void, Django if it's an IB-like certain success, Amour if the academy loves it and doesn't get turned off by the unfliching harshness of the material, Flight if it fulfills its promise as Zemeckis' live-action comeback, Moonrise Kingdom as the summer indie hit which will remain one of the most critically acclaimed of the year no matter what, and The Sessions as a script and performance-driven, small but strong all-around The Kids Are All Right sort of film. At this point I'd be really surprised if some other movie I haven't mentioned here ultimately got in, unless ZDT and Promised Land are surprisingly great. So that should mean a minimum of 6 BP nominees with a very potentially hard choice of directors (I think Hooper, Affleck, Russell, PTA, Spielberg and Lee all have similarly strong chances right now, and what if QT and/or Haneke manage to muscle in as well?)

WB is going to get TDKR to $450m, no doubt about it.

Argo could easily challenge Taken 2 next weekend if it goes for Contagion/TSN/Town like opening. All it's going to need is a $7k PTA.

Agreed, it has everything to be a crowd-pleaser. Maybe Summit wanted it to build WOM a la Juno, but Perks' PTA took a much worse dip in its second weekend.

Perks needs to go wide ASAP. This is a pretty good PTA hold from last week, but it can't afford to stay in several hundred theaters if it wants to make any real money. The problem is too much competition - the four movies opening wide on the 12th all go after certain audiences, and Pitch Perfect isn't making things any easier. I think Summit should have just opened it wide on Sept 7 or Sept 14, I see no reason why it wouldn't have made over $10m on OW and finished with $35m at the very least. The momentum is getting lost.

You aren't comparing Stallone and Neeson there, you are comparing the whole cast of Expendables and Neeson. If Bullet to the Head outgrosses Unknown or at least The Grey domestically and/or WW, you'll have an argument.

How so? It might not even land in the top 3 for the month.

Frankenweenie won't be facing any direct competition until Wreck-It Ralph, so I think it'll still make its budget back comfortably in the US and maybe even approach $50m.

The Grey is great and Neeson is great in it, but I don't know why there should be Wrath of the Titans, Battleship and Taken 2 for every The Grey.

Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper vs. Jeremy Renner from the director of The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook in the heart of the awards season definitely sounds like it's got $100m DOM potential.

Life of Pi, The Master and Les Mis are the locks/near-locks here... I don't know what should happen in order for one of them to miss. After that there is a ton of hopefuls/possibilities with roughly the same chances - Lincoln, Skyfall, Cloud Atlas, TDKR, Django Unchained, The Hobbit, Beasts and Anna Karenina... that's it, I think. TDKR, Django and Lincoln seem like the safer picks because the Academy has loved Pfister, Richardson and Kaminski since forever, but my hope is that Skyfall and Cloud Atlas get in.

Argo? Why?

Two good Shrek movies (the first two) vs. one good IA movie (the first one). Not hard to choose.

At this point:1. Moonrise Kingdom2. The Perks of Being a Wallflower3. Marley4. The Grey5. The Avengers6. Dredd...everything else

Cuba Gooding Jr.

The cinematography in Skyfall looks like it's on a completely different level from MI4.

I'd pick Moonrise over Amour for Screenplay any day of the week. And we still need to see exactly how well Django fairs.