Melania documentary struggles in UK cinemas as Vue admits sales are ‘soft’

Only one ticket sold for premiere of film about US first lady at Vue’s flagship London branch as insiders question launch strategy As film exhibitor strategies go, counter-programming is one of the most reliable. It worked for The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia!, released in the US on the same day in 2008, as well as for Dunkirk and Girls Trip in 2017 . In 2023, Barbie and Oppenheimer leveraged the tactic to the tune of $2.5bn in combined box office takings. This week we could see another example as Amazon releases its authorised documentary about Melania Trump in more than 100 UK cinemas. There it will compete against an already-eclectic slate of releases including the Jason Statham action film Shelter, the ape horror Primate , Bradley Cooper’s comedy-drama Is This Thing On? and Richard Linklater’s Jean-Luc Godard fictionalisation Nouvelle Vague . Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/KZHyf0R via IFTTT

Jules review – Ben Kingsley helps an alien in likably folksy twist on ET

As a widower with dementia, no one believes a UFO has crashed in Milton’s back yard or that he’s caring for an extraterrestrial – until his neighbours find out

Screenwriter Gavin Steckler and director Marc Turtletaub have given us this goofy, likable new twist on ET. In the Mathison/Spielberg classic from 1982, the visiting extraterrestrial found safety within the secret world of children, whose existence is beneath the grownups’ notice. Now the space alien finds himself protected by old people, who are used to being patronised and ignored.

Chief among the alien’s allies is Milton, played by Ben Kingsley, an ageing widower in whose back garden his spaceship crash-lands, and who, with instinctive neighbourly kindness, welcomes the mute, hairless naked interplanetary creature into his house. Milton has dementia, and so when he tells locals that he is having to get extra food in for the alien, no one pays much attention other than to relay this apparently sad and upsetting news to Milton’s grownup daughter Denise (played by Zoë Winters, who plays Logan Roy’s assistant and mistress Kerry in TV’s Succession). The scene in which Milton fails the dementia test in the doctor’s office is genuinely sweet and sad due to the fact that it could have taken place in an entirely different, serious film.

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