Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror: No 7 best horror film of all time (2010)

Nosferatu (1921) Dir: FW Murnau

Anne Billson: The Guardian 22/10/10

Sex and death, those two great mainstays of the horror genre, have rarely been as poetically evoked as in FW Murnau's silent masterpiece. If Nosferatu wasn't quite the first vampire movie, it was the first adaptation of Dracula, albeit an unofficial one; Bram Stoker's estate sued the producers and all copies of the film were ordered to be destroyed.

Fortunately for the history of cinema it was an order that could not be enforced in Germany. The film follows the story of Dracula closely, though names have been changed. The Dracula character, Graf Orlok, was played by Max Schreck as a hideous walking corpse with a bald head, pointy teeth and long fingernails; Jonathan Harker becomes Thomas Hutter, Mina Harker is Ellen, Renfield is Knock and Van Helsing becomes Professor Bulwer.

As Hutter travels to Carpathia to meet Orlok for the first time, his crossing of the boundary between the real world and the nightmare one is marked by the famous inter-title, so beloved of André Breton and the surrealists: "And when he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him." After glimpsing Hutter's portrait of Ellen, Orlok makes his way, with a stash of earth-filled coffins, from Varna on the Black Sea to Bremen (called Wisborg in the film) in north Germany – an epic voyage by sea, and the sort of vast geographical distance that has been diminished by subsequent Dracula films as the globe has been shrunk by air travel and telecommunications.

Many of what would become conventions of vampire pictures were established here – the vampire's thirst for blood, the power of sunlight to destroy the creature and vampirism as a metaphor for sexuality, contagion and xenophobia.

Despite Orlok's hideousness, the Mina character sacrifices herself to him with an erotic abandon notably absent from her relations with her human husband, and the vampire is unable to tear himself away from her neck before sunrise. Orlok, like so many monsters before and since, is finally undone by his all-too-human desire.

See the rest of the top 25 here.

Avengers proves blockbusters no longer have to make it big in America first

The superhero film is just one recent mega-release to open in the States last – does this spell an end to the US's cultural dominance?

Last weekend, film fans in 39 countries spent $185m watching Avengers Assemble: a superheroic start to blockbuster season. But one nation was conspicuously missing from the list: the US. Captain America was embraced by Swedes and Peruvians before his countrymen had the chance to see the film known simply as The Avengers in the States. It was a similar story for Battleship, an alien attack movie as American as McDonald's apple pie, which dropped anchor in 26 territories on 11 April, five weeks before it will dock on US shores.

Ten years ago, the landscape looked very different. The mission to combat piracy led to simultaneous global rollouts – "day and date" releases, in Hollywood lingo – and that was the policy picked for Star Wars: Attack of the Clones back in 2002. But "America first" was still the industry standard. That summer, Spider-Man arrived in UK cinemas six weeks after US release, Men in Black II four weeks after, and Minority Report two weeks after. The Sum of All Fears took nearly two months to wash up in Europe. Billing a film as "the No 1 US hit" was a classic marketing strategy; pictures that flopped at home could have their overseas budgets slashed … or be dumped.

This year, sport fogs the picture; not just the Olympics, but Euro 2012, which kicks off on 8 June. Twentieth Century Fox has scheduled Prometheus to arrive in US cinemas on that exact date, but will release Ridley Scott's film the week before in 17 other countries, including the UK. Yet footie has nothing to do with the studio's strategy on Ice Age: Continental Drift, which starts its international run on 27 June, more than a fortnight before it appears in US cinemas. Why? Well: the last Ice Age movie, Dawn of the Dinosaurs, took $197m in the US and $691m elsewhere. Domestic US box-office used to be the focus of Hollywood studios; but now international has overtaken, particularly for tentpole movies. Those foreign markets are surging upwards, particularly in Brazil, Russia, India and China, but also in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Last year, the latest Transfomers movie took $172m in China alone, nearly half its US tally. Avatar-alike John Carter (budget: $250m) has been widely reported as a pricey flop – but it would have been a lot worse had overseas not added $200m to the $69m US take.

Big shifts have been triggered on the ground, too, with several Hollywood studios getting seriously involved in local productions. Fox, for one, is producing films in Germany, Japan, Korea, India and Brazil, primarily for native consumption.

But some things never change: despite James Bond and Harry Potter, most of the major studios' output remains culturally, if not physically, rooted in the States. That's certainly true of this month's big movies: American Pie: Reunion, Dark Shadows, The Dictator, Men in Black III and What To Expect When You're Expecting. Sure, casting Brits in American superhero roles such as Batman (Christian Bale), Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) and Superman (Henry Cavill) is a nice compliment. But we'll know there has been a real attitude adjustment when actors are encouraged to use their natural accents in stories that never set foot on US soil.

The Guardian filmblog: 3/5/12

'The Shining': the film that frightened me most (The Guardian)

No matter how hard things might become, you can always trust your own perceptions. It’s the bottom line, the safety net, the final refuge. It’s sanity. Well, that’s what I’d always told myself. But when I first saw The Shining on TV as a teenager, I felt like I’d been hit by a bus. Or possibly a snow cat. And Jack Nicholson was probably waiting for me behind a door - with an axe.

Admittedly I was going through a bad patch. I’d just had an angry falling out with my best friend. And a girl I really liked was blowing hot and cold. It was really upsetting me. I was having rows with my family, and there were always fights, not only at home, but at school, and the night before I’d seen someone getting knifed outside a club in central Manchester. I can still picture the blood on the pavement. The whole world is going mad, I said to myself. But it’s still OK, I know what I see, and I know who I am. But then, in this very challenged state of teenage alienation, I was suddenly at home, alone, on Saturday night, and with the perfect storm in film experience, about to break.

The dream-like opening of The Shining

All at once I am flying across a Colorado lake and mountains, with a yellow VW Beetle down below, heading towards the vast, bleak, Overlook hotel. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is calmly agreeing to be caretaker with wife Wendy and son Danny over the winter period, but everybody else is heading in the other direction. He’s grinning, and says he hopes to get some writing done. In my experience that’s already a bad sign. And alongside the splendour of the setting, there’s a blandness about the packing away, the end-of-season closing down. It’s a normality, with aura of something not right. This, and the early part of the score, really gets under your skin. There’s a powerful sense of foreboding. The combination is dream-like, inexorable, and as Stanley Kubrick undoubtedly planned, makes you feel vulnerable. 

Would you trust this man? He’s scary enough in this shot. Stanley Kubrick on the set of The Shining, 1980. Photograph: Everett Collection/REX

There are many terrifying things in Kubrick’s horror masterpiece. There’s the rattling, stabbing, jagged violins at key moments using music from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia. Then there’s little Danny’s imaginary friend, Tony, who lives in his finger, or mouth or wherever, and speaks in Exorcist-type robotic tones, climaxing in the REDRUM /MURDER mantra written on the bedroom door. There’s the horrible death of amiable head chef Mr Halloran, Danny’s psychic shine friend, chopped down when all he does is to drive through the snow to see if they’re alright. No! He killed Scatman Crothers, the voice of Hong Kong Fooey and occasionally on Scooby Doo. Then there’s the woman in room 237, who commits the mortal sin of turning old and rotting very quickly in the middle of a naked snog. Urrgh. Shiver! And then, after the brilliantly innovative floor-level Steadicam footage of Danny tricycling through the corridors, there’s the terrible twins. OK, Let’s play it.

Come play with us, Danny. For ever and ever.

Yet the scariest thing about The Shining is how it always plays with your perceptions. The most shocking revelation comes in the typewriter scene, where Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, who does frightened like nobody else and is film’s answer to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, discovers that her husband has typed, over and over, nothing but reams of the same phrase: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” As she glances through, the typing also contains fleeting glimpses of the phrase mutate into “dolt boy” to “adult boy”.

But even before this catastrophic moment, Kubrick seems to have been playing subliminal games. I did not notice this until years later, but in a precursor scene in the same Colorado lounge, when Jack tells Wendy not to disturb him when he is writing, the typewriter changes from a small white model to a large grey one, and a chair in in the background disappears, reappears and disappears. The film is full of other object and hotel layout anomalies which subconsciously cause us disquiet. They simply cannot be continuity errors from a director so well known to be painstakingly meticulous. So, after Wendy’s discovery, a central scene unfurls in which Jack explains his “obligations”.

Things go a bit batty for Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in The Shining.

Although there’s nothing friendly about a river of blood in a corridor, mental breakdown can be just as frightening as physical horror. Much has been said about the hidden messages in the film, that it plausibly refers to the killing of native Americans, or more obscurely the Holocaust, or perhaps even less likely, clues that Kubrick helped create false footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Much of this is discussed in the Rodney Ascher’s interesting 2012 documentary, Room 237. 

But the dialogue in the bat-swinging scene for me hits the heart of the horror, the centre of this maze of corridors, hedges and carpet patterns, and Jack’s so-called minotaur within it. Jack seems to turn on his family not because of visions or demons, but because he cannot find a proper job, a role, an identity, and balance this with ordinary family life, and adulthood. He has driven himself mad from an obsession with his contractual obligation at the Overlook hotel. The feeling is shaped by his offbeat, surreal encounters in the dining room with the ghosts of barman Lloyd and caretaker Grady. He tells his wife “I gave my word’ - and that she doesn’t understand his “responsibilities”. Here is the banality of evil from everyday life, out of drudgery, and that is key to why it’s all so frightening.

But that doesn’t deny me being absolutely terrified by such scenes as when Wendy glimpses a man dressed as a rabbit appearing to give another man a blowjob in the 1920s. The scariness, the first time, came because it happens quickly, the camera zooms as they look back at you, and because you’re not really sure what you’re seeing. I found myself doubting my own perceptions.

Was that a rabbit?

While it isn’t the actual plot climax to the film, the absolutely most chilling moment is also the funniest. I’m referring, of course, to the door-chopping scene, with Nicholson’s twisting nursery rhymes and where he improvised a phrase from the Johnny Carson show. Kubrick, living in the UK at the time, didn’t get the reference at first, and nearly cut it. It still makes me jump, even though I know what’s coming up.

Here he is, then.

The film ended. And as Jack sat frozen in the maze, I sat frozen in a cold sweat to the sofa. I didn’t sleep at all that night. My parents came home and I locked my bedroom door, but that wouldn’t have stopped Jack. And when I eventually did sleep the next night, it was far from restful then, or for several weeks. Why? Not so much due to scenes of bloody horror, but more because I wasn’t really sure what I was seeing, and it several years for me to understand why. Is this a shared experience, or was I going slightly mad?

Source: The Guardian

'Room 237': Documentary film about The Shining

Some films are significant, some achieve significance, and some have significance thrust upon them. Stanley Kubrick's mystery horror film The Shining, first seen in 1980, has generated a cult of interpreters and clue-hunters who have extracted – or imposed – meanings unsuspected by the rest of us.

Director Rodney Ascher has spliced together interviews with various Shining theorists, though in voice only, never in appearance, for 'Room 237' a film about what Henry James called the figure in the carpet, the mysterious meaning hidden in plain sight. It's an essay in interpretive heresy and critical dissent.

Ascher declines to approach it in terms of the conventional consensus established by reviewers and pundits. Instead, he talks to fanatical Shining obsessives who have developed outlandish theories and found sensational occult clues in the tiny, subliminally glimpsed details, in the strange perspectives, continuity errors and Escher-like physical inconsistencies in the layout of the Overlook Hotel. Kubrick was himself a detail obsessive, and that fact makes these theories very seductive.

It raises very interesting ideas about how we view a film, about what happens if we take the act of viewing down to a deeper, molecular level, and about how a movie's significance and effect need not be those intentionally willed by the director.

It's pretty enthralling and it will either ruin The Shining forever or else drag you into its obsessive web of conspiracies.

Compiled from reviews: the independent/guardian

Amazing Spider-Man 2 swings to the top of UK box office

Superhero sequel posts biggest opening at the UK box office of the year so far, £1m ahead of The Lego Movie's bow

The winner

Whichever way you look at it, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has just posted the biggest opening of 2014. Including previews from Wednesday and Thursday last week, the superhero sequel has earned five-day takings of £9.01m, which is ahead of The Lego Movie's previews-inclusive opening tally of £8.05m. Strip out the previews, andThe Amazing Spider-Man 2 comes in at £6.13m, which compares with Lego's £5.9m over the Friday-to-Sunday period.

Back in July 2012, the first Amazing Spider-Man film opened with £11.09m, including three days' worth of previews, totalling £4.36m. That six-day figure is very similar to the sequel's tally over the same period, also including Easter Monday. The first Amazing Spider-Man rapidly faced stiff competition from the likes of The Dark Knight Rises, and ended up with £26m here. With significantly less blockbuster competition in the offing, Sony will be hoping that Amazing Spider-Man 2 will show sturdier legs, pushing up towards £30m. On the other hand, most kids are now back at school, which will limit the film midweek to primarily adult audiences.The official weekend box-office chart does not include takings for Easter Monday. However, distributor Sony reports these as £1.72m, taking Spidey's total to £10.73m for the six days.

Among existing films in the market, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 had the strongest impact on Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which falls a hefty 53% from the previous weekend. But its gross of £16.75m so far is well ahead of the £9.48m achieved here by the first Captain America.

The runner-up

Moving up a place to second position, Rio 2 declined a relatively slim 27% from the previous weekend, and has added a nifty £3.03m over the past seven days. Weekend takings only contributed £1.13m of that total, meaning that the film performed particularly impressively on weekdays last week, in the run-up to Good Friday. School holidays and animation make happy bedfellows for UK cinemas. The original Rio film stood at £8.02m after three weeks of play, compared with £9.79m for Rio 2currently, a disparity that should give distributor Fox encouragement.

The alternatives

Several titles were positioned as counter-programming to Amazing Spidey, with mixed results. The Love Punch certainly offered an alternative to the teen characters foregrounded in the Marvel actioner, via lead actors aged 55 (Emma Thompson) and 60 (Pierce Brosnan). The European romantic caper rung up an OK £613,000 from UK cinemas, although with an aggressive rollout on 371 screens, the number translates to a lacklustre site average of £1,653.

Nurtured at a more selective 118 cinemas, Locke relied almost entirely on the star power of Tom Hardy, the only actor who appears on the screen. A debut of £251,000 and a decent screen average of £2,128 resulted. Distributor Lionsgate will be happy that its gross held steady across the weekend (Fri-Sat-Sun: £80,000, £82,000, £81,000), while the market overall dipped (Fri-Sat-Sun: £4.8m, £4.3m, £4.0m). Including Easter Monday, Locke is up to £316,000. Relevant comparisons are hard to identify, but the last film largely resting on Hardy's shoulders was 2011's Warrior, which kicked off with £808,000 from 383 screens, including £186,000 in previews. Before that, Bronson debuted in 2009 with £258,000 from 85 venues.

The big fallers

The arrival of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 saw hefty falls for a fair few titles, but not many matched the plummets of 67% for Hammer's The Quiet Ones and 69% for action sequel The Raid 2. Genre cinema is traditionally front-loaded, with receptive audiences keen to be the first to see, before attention quickly moves on. The original Raid also fell hard on its second weekend, by 70%.

The art-house battle

Seven weeks after the arrival of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the art-house sector has yet to deliver another clear winner. John Michael McDonagh's Calvary posted a strong second session, with a decline from the previous weekend of just 30%, and £1.39m so far, but this figure is boosted by big numbers in Ireland, which are always included in reports of UK box-office.

Thanks to an expanded screen count (from 28 to 42), Ritesh Batra crowdpleaser The Lunchbox saw its box-office rise by 18% in its second session, and has now grossed £229,000, putting it on course to be one of the bigger art-house foreign language films of the year. Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel is still hanging on at number 12 in the chart, and has now pushed through into eight figures with £10.29m.

New arrival We Are the Best!, from Lukas Moodysson, disappointed relative to its mostly adulatory reviews, with £42,000 from 40 cinemas. That's about level with the debut takings of Lilya 4-Ever (£39,000), but the earlier film managed that tally from only 13 cinemas. Moodysson's best opening remains his crowdpleasing Together (£70,000 from 16 screens), and it was hoped that We Are the Best! would place him back on that commercial trajectory. Including Easter Monday, We Are the Best! stands at £53,000. 

Bums on seats

Admissions figures – the number of tickets sold – have been announced for March, and are 5% down on March 2013. Admissions for the first quarter (January-March) are also 5% down on a year ago. Easter fell late this year, delaying the release of big titles such as Captain America 2, Rio 2 and Noah, so admissions figures should bounce back in April. Whether they can close the gap of 2.05 million – the disparity between 2014 and 2013 after the first quarter – remains to be seen.

The future

Thanks to the arrival of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, UK box office bounced back from the doldrums, rising 61% from the previous weekend, and 85% from the equivalent session a year ago, when Gerard Butler's Olympus Has Fallen knocked Tom Cruises's Oblivion off the top spot. For the immediate future, the picture looks less rosy, since there are no more slam-dunk blockbusters coming for a while. This week sees the arrival of Cameron Diaz comedy The Other Woman, plus Johnny Depp in Transcendence (which played paid previews over the Easter weekend) and Mia Wasikowska in Tracks, the true tale of one woman's solo trek across the Australian outback. None are likely to prove too troubling to Amazing Spider-Man.

Top 10 films April 18-20

1. The Amazing Spider-Man 2, £9,011,114 from 548 sites (New)

3. Rio 2, £1,132,641 from 550 sites. Total: £9,790,565

3. Noah, £920,803 from 476 sites. Total: £7,839,969

4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, £831,901 from 460 sites. Total: £16,748,625

5. The Love Punch, £613,424 from 371 sites (New)

6. Divergent, £500,206 from 412 sites. Total: £5,445,854

7. Calvary, £394,095 from 165 sites. Total: £1,394,543

8. Muppets Most Wanted, £366,312 from 500 sites. Total: £6,159,978

9. Locke, £251,063 from 118 sites (New)

10. 2 States, £208,578 from 63 sites (New)

Source: The Guardian

Skyfall smashes UK box office records

Latest James Bond film Skyfall enjoys a stratospheric opening weekend, with largest ever Saturday attendance figure.

Skyfall, the new James Bond film, which has received a rapturous response from critics, smashed opening records at the UK box office this weekend. Sam Mendes's film, which stars Daniel Craig opposite villain Javier Bardem, regular "M" Judi Dench and newcomers Naomie Harris, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw, took £20.1m – the biggest opening of the year so far and the largest gross ever after last year's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. It broke records for the biggest opening for a 2D film and the largest ever Saturday attendance figure, according to Deadline.

The film was also No 1 in another 24 overseas markets and is still due to open in the US, where it arrives on 9 November. Skyfall is the biggest ever Bond opening (ahead of Quantum of Solace with £14.4m), and is on course to easily outpace 2006's Casino Royale (with $586m) as the most successful Bond film of all time at the box office.

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Bond's next outing will be based on a two-part original story from the screenwriter of Hugo, John Logan. Logan, who co-wrote Skyfall with retiring series regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, has been hired to oversee the scripts for Bond films 24 and 25 by production company Eon after pitching his idea to series producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson. As with the vast majority of recent efforts – the exception being debut Daniel Craig outing Casino Royale – the two films are not based on any particular book by Ian Fleming, the creator of the suave British spy; Casino Royale and its successor, 2008's Quantum of Solace, form the only previous two-part story in the long-running series.

As well as Hugo, Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning tribute to the earliest days of film, Logan's credits include Ridley Scott's Gladiator, Scorsese's The Aviator and the Oscar-winning animated movie Rango. Reports suggest Craig has already signed on to play Bond at least twice more, implying that he will appear in both of Logan's films.

guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 October 2012

'Moonrise Kingdom' triumphs at Gotham awards

Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson's Cannes smash about two runaway child lovers living on a remote New England island, won the top prize at the 2012 Gotham independent film awards on Monday night.

Young leads Jared Gilman, 13, and Kaya Howard, 14, accepted the best feature award at a ceremony in New York attended by Oscar winners and Hollywood glitterati. Marion Cotillard and Matt Damon received honorary awards celebrating their careers, and there was a tribute to The Fighter director David O Russell. The awards are held annually to celebrate independent film-making and represent a prelude to the coming awards season.

Of the films currently tipped for Oscars success, Benh Zeitlin won the breakthrough director prize for his sun-kissed, rain-drenched tale of life on the flood-threatened Louisiana bayou, Beasts of the Southern Wild. Zeitlin also took home the Bingham Ray award for his micro-budget drama, which used an entirely untrained cast.

Russell's own Silver Linings Playbook, which is tipped to be a rare romantic comedy success at next year's Academy Awards, lost out toYour Sister's Sister, starring Emily Blunt. The British actor was on hand to pick up the ensemble acting award with co-stars Mark Duplass and Rosemarie DeWitt. Duplass also produced the comedy – about a man who sleeps with his girlfriend's sibling – and he thanked the cast for working for just $100 a day.

The audience award went to Jared Leto's documentary Artifact, about the making of the album This Is War by the actor's band 30 Seconds to Mars and their battle with record label Virgin/EMI in 2008 and 2009. Breakthrough actor went to Emayatzy Corinealdi for Sundance-winning drama The Middle of Nowhere, ahead of Beasts of the Southern Wild's six-year-old (at the time of filming), Oscar-tipped Quvenzhané Wallis.

David France's Aids-themed How to Survive a Plague won best documentary feature, while Terence Nance's romance An Oversimplication of Her Beauty won the "best film not playing at a theater near you" award.

The Gotham awards are staged each year by the non-profit-making Independent Feature Project, which supports independent film-making. Last year's winners (sharing best feature) included Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life and Mike Mills' romantic comedy Beginners, about an octogenarian who comes out as gay. Malick went home empty handed at the Oscars earlier this year despite three nominations, but Beginners' Christopher Plummer won best supporting actor.

guardian.co.uk/film/2012

Skyfall breaks UK seven-day box-office record

Sam Mendes's film posts $287m worldwide in first 10 days and has already made half Casino Royale's total before US release.

The latest James Bond film, Skyfall, is on course to be the series' highest-grossing film so far after breaking the UK seven-day box-office record and posting $287m (£180m) in its first 10 days across the globe.

The figures are all the more remarkable for Sam Mendes's film because the 23rd Bond adventure has not yet opened in the US, the world's largest market, where it is due to arrive on 8 November. Nevertheless, Daniel Craig's third turn as 007 is already almost halfway to the $594m total posted by the British actor's debut, Casino Royale, in 2006 – the previous highest Bond gross.

Skyfall had made £37.2m in the UK in its first seven days – by Friday – to overtake previous record holder Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Its domestic haul is thus far so impressive that the film is already 2012's third highest grossing movie behind The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers. It may now be on course to break the record for the highest-grossing film in UK cinemas of all time, currently held by Avatar with £93.5m.

Skyfall is well ahead of the figures posted by previous Craig instalments Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace in almost all countries where it has been released, and is currently No 1 in Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Germany. In the latter two countries, it made the year's biggest debuts at the weekend. Mendes's film, which stars Daniel Craig opposite villain Javier Bardem, Judi Dench as "M" and newcomers Naomie Harris, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw, had already opened at No 1 in another 24 overseas markets last weekend.

The new film, which sees 007 crisscrossing the globe as MI6 and M come under threat from a cyberterrorist plot, is one of the best-reviewed Bond films since the Sean Connery era. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian praised Mendes's ability to pull off "a hugely enjoyable action spectacular" in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the series, which began in 1962 with Dr No.

"From the opening in Istanbul to the final siege shootout in the Scottish Highlands, this film is a supremely enjoyable and even sentimental spectacle, giving us an attractively human (though never humane) Bond," he wrote. "Despite the title, he is a hero who just keeps on defying gravity."

guardian.co.uk

The Master - video review

The Master is a 2012 American drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. It tells the story of Freddie Quell (Phoenix), a World War II veteran struggling to adjust to a post-war society who meets Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), a leader of a philosophical movement known as "The Cause" who sees something in Quell and accepts him into the movement. Freddie takes a liking to "The Cause" and begins traveling with Dodd along the East Coast to spread the teachings.

It was produced by Annapurna Pictures and Ghoulardi Film Company, and distributed by The Weinstein Company. With a budget of $30 million, filming began in June 2011. Cinematography was provided by Mihai Malaimare, Jr., Jonny Greenwood composed the score, and Leslie Jones and Peter McNulty worked as editors. The film was partly inspired by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, but also used early drafts of There Will Be Blood, stories Jason Robards had told Anderson about his drinking days in the Navy during the war, and the life stories of John Steinbeck.

Initially the film was set up with Universal, but fell through due to problems with the scripts and the budget. It was first publicly shown on August 3, 2012 at the American Cinematheque in 70 mm and screened in various other cities in the format prior to its official premiere. The film officially premiered on September 1, 2012 at the Venice Film Festival where it won the FIPRESCI Award for Best Film. The Master was released on September 14, 2012, in the United States to critical acclaim.

The Skyfall's the limit on James Bond marketing

From Heineken to the Olympics, the producers of the 23rd Bond movie have exploited every possible brand connection.

When Skyfall, the 23rd entry in the James Bond series, finally hits UK screens on Friday, the British public will be divided into two factions: those planning to see it, and those assuming it had been out months ago. Even by the unsubtle standards of studio tentpoles, the marketing push for Skyfall has been a long-haul assault, stretching far beyond the standard (if especially ubiquitous) bus-side billboards, and trailers that have been on rotation since the spring.

Though not a man averse to material pleasures, Bond himself might balk at the amount of promotional tie-ins being attached to his name this time around. The new film raises the bar for onscreen product placement, from 007's Tom Ford-tailored suits to Q's Sony Vaio hardware, as well as offscreen alliances ranging from Coke Zero to perfume retailers. (Yes, if you've always wanted to smell like Bond – presumably not after an intense chase sequence – the option is yours.) His new tipple of choice, Heineken, has proved an ongoing sticking point with fans, particularly after a big-budget ad that actually roped Daniel Craig into the action.

However, with the Dutch beer having stumped up over £28m for the privilege of seeing Bond sip from a green bottle in an early scene – coolly covering almost a third of the film's estimated £93.7m ($150m) production budget in the process – the producers are willing to endure that indignity. Craig himself has been a diplomatic spokesman on the issue, acknowledging that their reliance on brand associations is "unfortunate," before countering: "This movie costs a lot of money to make [and] nearly as much again to promote, so we go where we can."

That quote is about as close as we're going to get to learning the film's actual marketing budget, given Sony Pictures International's customary reluctance to divulge such details. It would be a grey area in any case, since it's more difficult than usual to tell where this film's marketing begins and ends – particularly in this year of the Bond films' golden anniversary, when any number of external forces are collaborating to sanctify the franchise as a great British institution. 007 practically received a knighthood in his amiably goofy skit with the Queen in July's Olympic opening ceremony – a stunt that may not have had Skyfall's enigmatic name anywhere on it, but pointedly raised awareness of the agent's return to a global audience of a billion.

Indeed, while few of Bond's brands of choice – the venerable Aston Martin notwithstanding – are British, much of the marketing has worked towards underlining his UK heritage. Most prominent in this regard is a joint campaign with Visit Britain, which will be using the film to hawk British tourism to international audiences through viral and print advertising, as well as its first ever cinema ad, all united under the slogan "Bond is Great … Britain."

That's hardly an incidental affiliation for a film that, unusually for latter-day 007 entries, was largely shot on home soil in the wake of budget cuts at MGM, which filed for bankruptcy in 2010: climactic scenes may take place in London and the Highlands, but keen-eyed Londoners will also notice the capital doubling for Shanghai elsewhere. It may not look it, but the high-gloss, name-heavy Skyfall came in significantly cheaper than 2008's £125m Quantum of Solace.

The budget may be lower this time around, but the stakes are arguably higher. With a UK gross of almost £51m and a global total of around £369m, Quantum of Solace fell short of the numbers attained by the series' first Craig-led outing, Casino Royale, in 2006. It was far from a flop, but it disappointingly failed to build on its predecessor's gutsy brand reinvention – except, that is, in China, where it significantly outpaced the previous film. Industry journalist Ian Sandwell, who recently studied the film's release strategy for trade magazine Screen International, describes the film's Shanghai-set sequences as the film's "ace in the pack": given the vast Chinese market's sympathy toward blockbusters with local involvement, the decision to locate a major stretch of Skyfall's action there is no accident.

With Skyfall looking to right the ship and exceed Casino Royale's global gross, the marketing materials haven't taken many chances, with posters chiefly highlighting the 007 brand and not bothering to name its starrier-than-usual cast or its unusually A-list director Sam Mendes, the first Oscar-winner to helm a Bond film. Sandwell believes this focus on fundamentals is the right approach: "This could be a reaction to the perception of the Craig era to date, where perhaps the grittiness might have attracted the Bourne fans, yet alienated the Bond diehards. Skyfall's marketing has primarily been aimed at reassuring the traditional audience that they haven't been forgotten."

So far, Skyfall is tracking well enough to suggest that the approach has paid off, buoyed by one factor the marketing men couldn't control: the overwhelmingly positive reviews that greeted its first screening nearly two weeks ago, which had some excitable journalists even predicting Oscar glory. The Guardian's box office expert, Charles Gant, tweeted a prediction that the film will top Casino Royale to become the highest-grossing Bond film at the UK box office. That appears to be the expectation in the US too: the number-crunchers at BoxOffice.com are forecasting a Stateside gross of $216m. As it turns out, the lyrics of Adele's theme song (another marketing coup, as the series' first chart hit in years) aren't strictly accurate: the film's standing tall, all right, but the sky isn't falling.

The Guardian

Paranormal Activity 4 is US box-office hit for horror genre fans

As expected, the fourth entry in Hollywood's most high-profile genre franchise ruled the roost in the US after a relatively easy launch.Paranormal Activity 4 was in dominant form outside North America too, as it edged out Taken 2 thanks to a $26.5m weekend debut in 22 countries, which contributed to a $56.7m (£35.4m) worldwide opening weekend.

That's a decent start for a movie with no name stars and an uninspiring response from reviewers (in territories where the film actually received a press showing). Heck, the musings of critics mean little to genre fans and indeed the franchise's supporters the world over were champing at the bit to see this in opening weekends from the UK to Russia. Paramount's top brass will be keen to focus on the global haul and play down the fact that this is, in real terms, the lowest release of the series so far –PA3 opened exactly one year ago on $52.6m domestic and PA2 launched exactly one year before that on $40.7m. Neither figure is adjusted for inflation.

Paranormal Activity, the big daddy that started it all, doesn't count as a comparable because Paramount wasn't too sure what to expect after buying distribution rights to the then unknown $15,000 horror movie. They released it in 12 theatres on 25 September 2009, word of mouth spread like wildfire and then came that extraordinary third weekend when the studio expanded the theatre count to 160 and it took a whopping $7.9m. The following weekend it was up to 760 and grossed $19.6m, and the weekend after that was the high point, when it reached No 1 on $21.1m from 1,945 venues. The first movie finished on $107.9m and remains the biggest result of the franchise, even though PA3, which ended on $104m, is surely the best of the lot.

Paranormal Activity came from outside the studio system, which is by no means unusual. The independent space is churning out some great stuff these days and it's been an engine at the US box office. The exit from the top 10 of Seven Psychopaths and The Perks of Being a Wallflower has diluted independent cinema's representation in the upper echelons.

North American top 10, 19-21 October 2012

1. Paranormal Activity 4, $30.2m
2. Argo, $16.6m. Total: $43.2m
3. Hotel Transylvania, $113.5m. Total: $119m
4. Taken 2, $13.4m. Total: $105.9m
5. Alex Cross, $11.8m
6. Sinister, $9m. Total: $31.9m
7. Here Comes the Boom, $8.5m. Total: $23.2m
8. Pitch Perfect, $7m. Total: $45.8m
9. Frankenweenie, $4.4m. Total: $28.3m
10. Looper, $4.2m. Total: $57.8m

The Guardian