Latest in The Master

Hollywood runs on perception, and the vibe on the recently completed Toronto Film Festival is that the marketplace was a smashing success because of the high volume of acquisitions. The festival itself reported there were 29 major sales to U.S. distributors. While the sales volume was certainly high, the numbers weren…

With today’s wrap of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, the Fall festival trifecta of Venice, Telluride and Toronto officially kicked off the six-month movie awards season. What does it say, if anything, about where the race for Oscar is at this early point? As it turns out, quite a bit. It is very early in…

Brian Brooks is Managing Editor of MovieLine. It’s not every weekend that a specialty film can claim a record, but The Master opened with an incredible $145,949 per-theater average, the best limited release ever for a live-action film, topping another record-breaker from earlier this year, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise King…

SUNDAY AM, 5TH UPDATE: It was a revived box office at the start of the domestic weekend with respectable grosses for both opening but non-original pics. That’s a relief for Hollywood after weeks of lackluster threatrical sales and the lowest-grossing weekend in at least four years. But  total moviegoing this…

Brian Brooks is managing editor of MovieLine. After making a splash in both Toronto and Venice (where it picked up awards, but not without controversy), The Weinstein Company’s The Master takes to screens amidst festival Oscar buzz this weekend. Joining the anticipated title are Sundance Film Festival heavyweights Arbi…

Last night, as I was talking with director Juan Antonio Bayona and producer Ghislain Barrois at a Soho House afterparty, they asked me how the Toronto Film Festival crowd reacted at the end of their tsunami survival tale The Impossible. I had to be honest: Once a picture of the actual family that survived the 2004…

As the Toronto International Film Festival maintains its intense pace, the race for Oscar is clearly heating up. And after last night’s rousing world premiere for David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, you can chalk up yet another major Best Picture contender. The tweets about its inevitable awards potential…

I spoke to Harvey Weinstein in Toronto after The Weinstein Company’s  The Master won 3 big awards at the Venice Film Festival and about the latest jury scandal there. Weinstein explained that the panel wanted to give The Master the top Golden Lion prize and also acting awards. But when the jury found out they couldn’t…

Two years ago Quentin Tarantino's Venice jury gave his ex-girlfriend Sofia Coppola's Somewhere the top prize Golden Lion. An uproar followed and the film did not figure in that year’s awards season. This year's Lido scandal turns around Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, a picture that rocked, and then haunted, Venice…

The closing of the 69th Venice Film Festival this evening was awash in scandal, and the preamble to the prizes appears to have had its share of confusion as well. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master took the most kudos with the Silver Lion for directing and a shared best actor Volpi Cup for Philip Seymour Hoffman and…

Toronto’s film festival isn’t content to do just one, or even two, major gala premieres a night like, say, Cannes. No, it has about 10 of them and Friday night was really buzzing with at least four major ‘must-see’ events all coinciding. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master premiered in North American to a sold-out crowd…

Some people are still parsing Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, but it's emerging as a favorite among festgoers and the press here in Venice. Of 8 films that have officially screened, Anderson's lush post-war relationship opus, set against the backdrop of a religion that resembles Scientology, has received the best…