Winners
Rachel Getting Married (Sony Pictures Classics)
The Duchess (Paramount Vantage)
Fireproof (Samuel Goldwyn)

Riding a wave of positive buzz and the rising stardom of Anne Hathaway, Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married crushed all comers, earning $33,667 per screen at nine theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. Hathaway appeared everywhere to promote it, even gamely spoofing herself as host on Saturday Night Live. (Loved her as Mary Poppins!)

Too much attention may be paid to Keira Knightley's ribs, but she was undoubtedly the reason that The Duchess made $7,047 per screen as it expanded to 127 locations in its third week. Keira and costume dramas seem to be the right fit; I wouldn't be surprised if this one drew an older audience that consistently attends British historical flicks.

Still ignored by the mainstream press (in contrast to Bill Maher's Religulous), faith-based Fireproof dropped just 40.5% (about the same as Eagle Eye) and took in $4,776 per screen at 852 theaters in its second week. So far the film has grossed more than $12 million. Was it ever advertised on TV? Or was the marketing done entirely through church groups? Whatever the case, with a reported budget of only half a million dollars, Fireproof appears to be a healthy success story.

Sex Still Sells
Elegy (Samuel Goldwyn)
Frozen River (Sony Pictures Classics)

Elegy, the 'old professor in love with a younger woman' adaptation of a Philip Roth novel starring Ben Kingsley and a sometimes naked Penelope Cruz, is in its ninth week of release and still playing in 70 theaters. The theater count is dropping, but the film has grossed more than $3.3 million.

Isabel Coixet's Elegy (92 screens) is a "disease-of-the-week" movie. I hate "disease-of-the-week" movies, but I really liked Elegy. I also liked Coixet's previous film, My Life Without Me, which was also a "disease-of-the-week" movie. Sarah Polley's beautiful Away from Her from last year was another excellent example. This begs three questions: What is a "disease-of-the-week" movie? Why do I hate them? And what makes Elegy so good? The phrase "disease-of-the-week" was coined to describe a certain type of TV movie some decades ago, which had addicted housewives sniveling and crumbling up tissues at their TV tubes for two hours every seven days. But filmmakers quickly snatched upon the formula as a quick and easy way to weasel their way into film critics' hearts, and probably win an Oscar or two.

Disease is an unfortunate part of life, but it's a part of life that no one likes to think about. What usually happens when we get sick? We avoid going to the doctor! We hope it'll go away. So why do people like these kinds of movies, movies that acknowledge our own mortality and frailty? I think the secret is that the most successful of these movies play up the disease angle, but the real subject is the heroism of the others, the people who are not sick. That way, the disease gets center stage, and some "courageous" actor gets to show off, while the audience gets to identify with the other characters, the ones who stand by their friends and family. The ones who don't give up.

The dog days of summer hit the indie box office this weekend, as the top earner was a film in its third week of release. Elegy, directed by Isabel Coixet and starring Ben Kingsley and Penélope Cruz, expanded from six to 92 theaters and grossed $5,546 per screen, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. The adaptation of a novel by Philip Roth has not been universally praised, but maintains a strong 74% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes. I can't help but conclude that Penélope Cruz is the art house crowd's answer to Megan Fox, because . . .

. . . Cruz also stars in Vicky Christina Barcelona (pictured), which made $4,339 per screen in its fairly wide (692 theaters) second week. Woody Allen's latest features other pretty people such as Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson, of course, and has very good reviews behind it, yet it's silly to ignore the current Cruz heat factor.

As Eugene has already noted, Andrew Fleming's Hamlet 2 got a jump start on its wide release by opening on 103 screens, but its average of $4,223 "doesn't inspire confidence for the expansion." Will this slow down star Steve Coogan?

Suspense drama Transsiberian ($4,157 per screen, 38 theaters, 6th week), tense drama Frozen River ($4,048 per screen, 41 theaters, 4th week), and mystery thriller Tell No One ($3,643 per screen, 101 theaters, 8th week, $3.8 million total) continued to draw well, while debuting debt doc I.O.U.S.A. made $3,461 per screen at 18 locations.

Do you really want to get an IRA mole mad? British spy drama Fifty Dead Men Walking has stirred the ire of Martin McGartland, its real-life inspiration, according to The Hollywood Reporter. McGartland "threatened legal action against the Canadian-British co-production ... on grounds that the feature infringes his moral rights." On the same day that McGartland made his threat, a scheduled press screening was canceled by Canadian distributor TVA Films, which claimed "a print problem."

The film is scheduled to have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on September 10 -- a splashy, red carpet Gala Presentation. But McGartland says that the film "is an entirely false and distorted account of what took place." He is also "reserving all [his] legal rights and remedies in this matter." But one has to wonder -- didn't he already sign off by selling the film rights? Or was that out of his hands and up to his publisher (Hastings House)?

McGartland infiltrated the IRA for the British police in the 1980s and then had to go on the run when his true identity was uncovered. Kari Skogland (Chicks with Sticks, The Stone Angel) adapted McGartland's 1998 book for the screen and also directed. Ben Kingsley, Rose McGowan, Jim Sturgess (21) star. The prospect of Kingsley (in a bad hair piece) and Sturgess facing off somehow -- is Kingsley his police "control"? a member of the IRA? -- sounds very enticing, as does the prospect of Sturgess tackling a serious subject, so let's hope this gets resolved quickly.

With all due respect to my esteemed colleague Elisabeth Rappe, geeks are not the only ones who learned important lessons from watching movies this summer. Herewith is my personal, arthouse summer school summary.

Werner Herzog cast a disapproving eye on the ugliness he discovered at Antarctica's McMurdo Station ("they even have a yoga studio and an ATM!") and was skeptical about the sanity of some of the real-life characters he met, which is partly why Encounters at the End of the World was so entrancing. What I learned: Evidence for gay penguins is skimpy, but they have been known to have threesomes.

The Wackness (pictured) didn't became the breakout hit that some had hoped for, but it did showcase the talents of rising star Olivia Thirlby and director Jonathan Levine. What I learned: Never kiss Ben Kingsley in a telephone booth.

Nanette Burstein's filmmaking techniques were much more off-putting than her ultimately winning subjects in American Teen, another would-be smash that didn't live up to box office expectations. What I learned: Never break up with your girlfriend via text message, especially when a documentary filmmaker is interviewing her.

Unexpectedly, Tell No One became the breakout limited-release mystery thrill ride of the summer, and Man on Wire proved that impassioned high wire walkers can make dreams come true and enthrall audiences to boot. What I learned: It's good to be French.

Now it's your turn, all you indie-loving, doc-devoted, world cinema aficionados: what did you learn from the movies this summer?

I'm not partial to overtly subjective reviews, yet I can't seem to find any better way of relating my response to Isabel Coixet's latest film, Elegy, an adaptation of Philip Roth's novel "The Dying Animal," which follows the romance between a college professor and his much younger former student. First, though, a note of appropriateness: early in the film, this professor, the Roth regular David Kepesh, who previously appeared in the novels "The Breast" and "The Professor of Desire," is lecturing about how literature, specifically Tolstoy's "War and Peace," will be appreciated differently by a reader at different points in his or her life. In ten years, for example, it may seem like a new book entirely.

Perhaps in ten years, then, or more likely in thirty, I will be able to watch Elegy again and have a new perspective. Maybe I will be able to relate to Kepesh, here portrayed by Ben Kingsley, when I am in my sixties and have similarly lived and experienced as much. Yet the fact that Coixet's film is so depressing makes me almost hope that I never actually live so long to find out. I should have known, what with the filmmaker's past films, such as My Life Without Me, with their gray atmospheres and dreary dealings with illness and death. While appearing on the outside to be a sexy drama about how one lecherous old man discovers love, Elegy is on the inside really just a slow, uninteresting depiction of a selfish fool who possibly too-late realizes that he's grown old before he's actually grown up.

This never occurred to me before, but "train" movies are a really interesting sub-genre. You could program an entire two-week film festival of train movies, from comedies (The "Three Stooges" shorts, The General, The Darjeeling Limited) to suspense movies (James Bond, Strangers on a Train, Murder on the Orient Express, Runaway Train) and tons of others. It's the perfect setting for a movie: it's a limited space, but long -- for chases -- and it moves through the frame as opposed to sitting still like a hospital room or a warehouse. Plus, unlike an airplane, there are plenty of beautiful views going by outside. And so, if the train movie is a genre, it follows that it needs a solid genre director to add another potential classic to the list.

Brad Anderson (no relation to me, by the way) is such a director. Like Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder, he has been able to effortlessly leap between dark, genre films (Session 9, The Machinist) and romances (Next Stop Wonderland), and even weird combinations of the two (Happy Accidents). His films may not reach the pinnacles of great art, but each and every one of them represents a good, sturdy, entertaining example of sheer, joyful craftsmanship. Anderson's fifth feature (not counting his early, hard-to-find The Darien Gap) is Transsiberian, a film that I would be proud to add to the list of recommended train movies. The title train runs from Beijing to Moscow and crosses through some pretty remote, snowy terrain; it's a great place for something devious and sinister to happen. (The 1973 Peter Cushing / Christopher Lee film Horror Express took place on the same train!)

A little over a year ago, I was assigned a "Cinematical Seven" on the most overrated actors in Hollywood. I stand by five of my choices, but things have changed for two of the others. Heath Ledger (#4) was one, and his amazing performances in both I'm Not There and The Dark Knight proved me wrong, not to mention that he's no longer alive to be overrated, underrated or any kind of rated. The other was Ben Kingsley (#1). For some reason I have seen five Ben Kingsley movies in the past three months. Seeing such a wide range of performance in such a short time has caused me to re-think my opinion on him. The first Kingsley film I saw this year was The Wackness (31 screens), as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. I didn't much like the film; I found it to be a rather bland, tame coming-of-age picture disguised as a daring snapshot-of-an-era movie. And Kingsley's performance as a pot-smoking shrink struck me as yet another piece of overacting, with lots of weird pauses and run-on sentences in his dialogue.

His turn as the villain in War, Inc. (20 screens) didn't fare much better. I liked the film, but strapped to a wheelchair, his immobile body only increased his tendency to overdo it in his line readings. The third movie, Transsiberian (opening this week on 2 screens), proved somewhat more interesting. He played a Russian narcotics detective, complete with an accent, but somehow his performance perfectly clicked with that sturdy suspense film. The fourth film, The Love Guru (over 400 screens), was by far the worst of the lot but also proved the most revealing.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Elegy (click image to enlarge), starring Penélope Cruz, Ben Kingsley, Peter Sarsgaard, Patricia Clarkson and Dennis Hopper. Sweet cast, huh? Based on the novel The Dying Animal by Philip Roth, and directed by Isabel Coixet (My Life Without Me), Elegy follows a cultural critic (Kingsley) who views his life as being in a state of "emancipated manhood" until, one day, a well-mannered student (Cruz) waltzes in and awakens a sense of sexual possessiveness in her teacher, the critic. In other words, her touch is toxic ... to him, at least. Seems rather exotic, and with two dynamos like Kingsley and Cruz in the lead, here's hoping Elegy awakens the sexual possessiveness in all of us. Wait ... that would be a bad thing, right? Okay, keep the sex and remove the possessiveness. There ya go -- I'm seeing it. Check out the trailer over on Moviefone.

Elegy hits theaters in limited release on August 8.

Here it is, the groove, slightly transformed ... and another trailer for The Wackness has hit the net. I'm not sure why folks were all over Sony Pictures Classics when they picked this flick up at Sundance, because, not for nothing, but they've promoted the hell out of it ever since. This is, like, the fifth or sixth trailer I'm seeing ... for a Sundance film! They've done viral videos, photos, posters -- props definitely go out to the fine folks over at SPC, and now it's our turn to tell all you crackerjacks to go see this dope show when it hits theaters on July 3rd.

Featuring one of the best soundtracks I've heard in quite some time, The Wackness tells of the quirky relationship between a pot dealer (Josh Peck) and his therapist (Ben Kingsley) -- both of whom have no friends and no sex life. There's a cute summer crush (Olivia Thirlby), an ex wife who's barely "there" (Famke Janssen) and a hippie chick (Mary-Kate Olsen) who likes to swing her arms a lot. The film takes place in 1994, so if you grew up in the '90s, there's a ton here to relate to. I had fun with it, I know a lot of other people had fun with it, so if you're just chillin' over Fourth of July weekend, take it over to the theater and settle in for some dopeness, er, wackness.

Red Band trailer (which is also available over at IGN in a larger size) posted after the jump due to random drug use and a little foul language.