The summer box-office season officially began on May Day this year as X-Men Origins: Wolverine slashed its way to the top of the chart with a huge $87M weekend. Despite generally poor reviews (even from the fanboy set), audiences filled the seats to see Hugh Jackman don the sideburns once more. The dreadful Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was a distant second with $15.3M to best last week's winner Obsessed ($12.2M/$47M). After that it was the unfunny 17 Again ($6.3M/$48.4M) and the unsinkable Monsters vs. Aliens ($5.8M/$182.4M). more ›

Despite passionately loving independent films and documentaries, I still get excited when the summer blockbuster season starts -- earlier every year it seems -- and so I'm jazzed to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine. How can anyone justify missing a cinematic rendering of the X-Men? Speaking of independent films, they don't get more so than the works of Jim Jarmusch. I loved Broken Flowers and so seeing Limits of Control is de rigueur. Early reviews are very poor, though. In fact, the awful Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is charting higher amongst a consensus of critics. What ever happened to Jennifer Garner? Wasn't she interesting once? more ›

No, really - did some memo go around saying all film festivals had to be scheduled within the same two-week period? The Polish Film Festival continues, flanked by the South-East European Film Festival & the last stands of the Los Angeles Jews & the Pacific Asian subcontinent. But with all the talk of Iran lately, the Noor ("light" in Arabic) Film Festival may prove the most noteworthy. While stark, realistic Iranian New Wave films by the likes of Abbas Kiarostami & Mohsen Makhmalbaf have nabbed accolades at Western film festivals for decades, less "artsy" films like the historical epic Flags of Kaveh's Castle & crime thriller In The Dark reveal a different side of the country. This theme of revelation & East-West conflict motivates much of the festival, coming to a most human (and most absurd) head with Donkey In Lahore, undoubtedly the first and only documentary to follow a Gothic Australian puppeteer, his teenaged Pakistani fiance & her traditional Muslim family.
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