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.

According to Variety, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has landed some more top-notch talent. Alfred Molina and Sir Ben Kingsley have joined Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton in the video game adaptation.

Molina will be playing Sheik Amar, who becomes a mentor to Gyllenhaal's prince. No word on who Kingsley is playing, but popular consensus is that it will be the villainous Vizir. Of course, since they aren't sticking to the video game storyline, it could be anyone -- but Kingsley is one of those go-to actors for villains.

Jerry Bruckheimer definitely knows how to guide a good cast. There are shades of Pirates of the Caribbean in this line-up, and that perks my interest. I do find myself amused by the addition of Molina, an actor of Italian-Spanish descent, as a shiek. That isn't going to help claims that the casting is ethnically insensitive.

I've been hankering for a good crime flick with a women in the lead for a long time (I can't be the only one who thinks that Catherine Zeta Jones' pregnant drug runner deserved way more screen time in Traffic). But, in the grand tradition of most crime movies, women are relegated to the sidelines as either 'the downfall of the anti-hero', or, 'sexy punching bag' -- neither of which is very flattering, but hopefully that will change with Queen of the South. Variety reports that Eva Mendes has signed to star in the big screen adaptation of Arturo Perez Reverte's crime novel, La reina del sur (Queen of the South).

The story is being touted as a "female Scarface," and centers on a woman who flees to Spain when her drug-dealing boyfriend is murdered. Once she arrives, she starts her own narcotics operation to finance revenge against her lover's murderers -- and quickly becomes top dog. Joining Mendes in the cast are Josh Hartnett and Ben Kingsley in as-yet unnamed roles.

News of the flick first surfaced last year, with Mendes, Jennifer Lopez, and Penelope Cruz on the short list for the role, but in the end Mendes won out. Personally I would have liked to see Lopez take on the role (it's been too long since we had the chance to see her be a bad ass), but I guess in a pinch Mendes will do.

Do you think Warners made the right choice with Mendes? Or is there anyone else out there who would have liked to watch Lopez 'tussle' just one more time?

Cinematical is absolutely stoked to have received this exclusive poster for The Wackness (click on the image to enlarge), which just enjoyed its New Yawk premiere at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival earlier this week. Directed by the very talented Jonathan Levine (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane), The Wackness centers on the relationship between a pot dealer with no friends (Josh Peck) and a therapist (Ben Kingsley) on the verge of a mid-life crisis. And did I mention that neither one is getting laid? Set in 1994 New York City, the film just oozes mid-nineties and definitely captures every ounce of what it was like to grow up during that particular time period. Olivia Thirlby, Famke Janssen and Mary-Kate Olsen also star (as the three lovely ladies our two heroes really want to get with).

I managed to catch The Wackness at a screening a few days ago with a young, hip New York crowd who absolutely devoured the flick. It's dope, it's mad funny and it brings just enough nostalgia to help you remember what it was like when you were unlucky and in love with not a clue what to do. Seriously, go see this one with a group of friends and have a blast. The Wackness arrives in theaters on July 3.

Give Joshua Seftel some credit; he didn't pull any punches on War, Inc. In his first feature film, written by star/producer John Cusack, Jeremy Pisker, and Mark Leyner, Seftel attempts to make a scathing commentary on the War on Terror, the privatization of the military, the commercialization of societies all over the world, and other shenanigans. In a former life, Seftel was a former network news producer, and became known around Hollywood circles for directing documentaries like Breaking the Mold: The Kee Malesky Story.

He was nice enough to speak to me about the experience from a very blue room at the Tribeca Film Festival press office. Text and video are after the jump.

Finally, a film for kids of the 90's!

This is a hard review to write because it feels as if The Wackness was tailor-made for people like me: a male who grew up in New York City and graduated high school in 1994; the year this film was set. (Actually, I graduated in 1995, but it doesn't matter much: same kids, same lingo, same music, same surroundings). How do you review your childhood? These were all kids I hung out with, this was the music we listened to, these were the mix tapes we made and these were the girls we tried to hook up with ... but didn't. And, to some extent, it actually surprises me that so many people have loved The Wackness -- not because it's a terrible movie, mind you, but because kids who grew up in New York City during the '90s were annoying as all hell, with their "Yo, that was mad good" and their "He's got da skillz, kid!" Trust me, I know -- I was one of them.

It's 1994, New York City. Luke (Josh Peck) just graduated high school, and now he's perfectly content with spending his summer fantasizing about girls on the subway, staying away from his parents constant bickering and selling pot out of an ices cart to a wide range of characters, including a free-spirited hippie chick (Mary-Kate Olsen) and his own therapist. Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), or as Luke calls him, Mr. Dr. Squires, has his own problems: His much younger wife (Famke Janssen) emotionally checked out of their marriage years ago, and a mid-life crisis is slowly creeping up from around the corner. Luke's the pot dealer with no friends, and Squires is the therapist with more issues than most of his patients. Together, they're a perfect match.

What do you say when a film is so bad that you actually feel physical pain for everyone involved? You literally sit there for an hour-and-a-half and feel sorry for everyone who put such a hard effort into the making of the film, only to see it lay there like a lox when it's finally projected on the big screen. As a reviewer, there's not much more you can do than just endure it and hope to see a fleeting moment or two of quality, just so you don't think you've completely wasted your time.

That's all the thoughts that were going through my head as I watched War, Inc., an ambitious film that fails miserably at everything it attempts to be. As a comedy, it's not funny. As a satire, it's as subtle as a sledgehammer. And as a treatise on war, the corporatization of the military, and the horrors of pop stardom, it doesn't tell you anything that you don't already know if you just watch the 24-hour news channels or read the news online even a little bit.

Known in some circles as "that movie where Sir Ben Kingsley hooks up with Mary-Kate Olsen," The Wackness premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival where it was met with an unbelievable online reception. Just about everyone I spoke to fell in love with this quirky drug-related dramedy from director Jonathan Levine (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane). While I didn't get the chance to see it (our own Scott Weinberg did), these good vibes have me all antsy to check out The Wackness when it hits the Tribeca Film Festival later this month.

Here's a bit from the synopsis: "... Luke (Josh Peck) is a socially uncomfortable teenage pot dealer with no friends, issues with his parents, and a whopping lack of confidence with girls. He trades weed for sessions with his therapist, Dr. Squires (Sir Ben Kingsley), whose much-younger wife (Famke Janssen) is slipping away from him. Squires, a drug-addled shrink with a hairline retreating to the back of his neck and a state of mind slouching back to adolescence, is an unlikely role model-but the two of them forge a friendship based on a mutual need: neither one is getting laid."

Check out both exclusive photos (including a larger version of the image above) from the film in the gallery below. The Wackness arrives in theaters on July 3rd. (And is it me, or does Kingsley have a little Keitel going on in that pic?)

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