Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side (top); Taylor Lautner, Kristen Stewart in The Twilight Saga: New Moon (bottom) With $20 million, Sandra Bullock’s The Blind Side did indeed lead the pack at the domestic box office last weekend, earning nearly $5 million — or about 30% — more than The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Robert Pattinson’s vampire, Kristen Stewart’s teen, and Taylor Lautner’s werewolf had to settle for the second spot after three weeks at the top. Among other box-office news were the results for five new movies: Brothers, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, and Natalie Portman in a love triangle that is an indirect result of the war in Afghanistan (Now, get real. Don’t expect any...

Ulrich Tukur in John Rabe (top); City of Life and Death (middle); Lebanon (bottom) A record 69 foreign language films are in the running for the 2010 Golden Globes, Philip Berk, president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, has announced. Among the films in the longlist are Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, starring Penelope Cruz; Costa-Gavras socially conscious drama Eden Is West; Xavier Dolan’s I Killed My Mother, one of the Toronto Film Festival’s best Canadian films of the year; and Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere, about Mussolini’s first wife (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and child (Filippo Timi). Some of the titles, e.g., A Prophet, The White Ribbon, are also in the running for the best...

Ronald Colman in The Prisoner of Zenda: Never a dull moment, whether fighting Douglas Fairbanks Jr. or romancing Madeleine Carroll Celebrating Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s 100th birthday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will screen The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) on Wednesday, December 9, at 8 p.m. at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Oscar-winning visual-effects supervisor Craig Barron and Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt will examine the photographic and sound effects used in this Ruritanian classic directed by John Cromwell, and also starring Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll, and Mary Astor. As a plus, the evening will feature rare behind-the-scenes color footage...

The Most Beautiful (1944). For Donald Richie DB here: Cinephile communities aren’t free of peer pressure. Sometimes you must choose or be thought a waffler. In postwar France, the debate within the Cahiers du cinéma camp often came down to big dualities. Ford or Wyler? German Lang or American Lang?...

Ben Chasny, Chris Corsano, and Richard Bishop live at the Sunset Tavern in Seattle (photo by Joe Mabel)

Maison Martin Margiela, Spring 2010

Martin Margiela quietly exited the fashion house he founded not too long ago. But Diesel, which bought a majority stake in the label in 2002, has no plans to replace him. The label's chief executive, Giovanni Pungetti, said the house will...

Filene’s Basement has been floundering for a while now — the Boston-based retailer filed for Chapter 11 in May and was bought by Syms Corp. in June — but the hits keep coming: The chain will be shuttering its Sixth Avenue location this spring. The company was "unable to renegotiate the lease"...

Somers Town (2008) Direction: Shane Meadows Screenplay: Shane Meadows, Paul Fraser Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello, Elisa Lasowski, Kate Dickie, Ireneusz Czop, Perry Benson � Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello in Somers Town � The happenstance friendship central to Shane Meadows’ Somers Town buds within a small black-and-white world, an environment populated with aesthetic lines, distinct or unseen, that stretch retrograde towards an urban horizon. Convergence is not merely suggested through contrast and forms, but is realized as ubiquitous in the neighborhood around the film’s young men. A district of London in the shadows of St. Pancras railway station, Somers Town is at a point of...

First the "Bo-tax" on medically unnecessary cosmetic surgery procedures worked its way into the new health-care plan. Now Senate Democrats are considering an additional tax for the vain and insecure on their indoor-tanning habits. So people who walk into a salon to use a tanning bed or who...