'The Croods: A New Age': Film Review

Refresh for more analysis, chart, etc. Even in a normal, healthy economy, the major studios are typically skittish about opening big movies before Christmas with many busy with holiday activities, so it comes as no surprise during a pandemic where just north of 40% of all 5,500 domestic movie theaters are open that there wouldn’t be any new wide openings this weekend.

I was born with a speech impediment. For years, I received speech therapy in special education.

Also Read: Steve McQueen Calls His New 'Small Axe' Cinematographer 'a Skater and a Sailor'(There’s a sequence in which a “teacher” subjects the class to his atonal guitar-playing and vocals on a rendition of “House of the Rising Sun” that goes on and on, achieving an Andy Kaufman-like level of hilarity and discomfort.)When Kingsley tries to tell his parents what’s going on, they are resistant; his mother Agnes (Sharlene Whyte), exhausted from working multiple jobs, isn’t listening at first, and

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe portmanteau of five roughly hourlong films centered on racial issues in second-half 20th century UK wraps up with Education, which, at the end of the day, is what the series is all about: education in terms of the efforts of different segments of the population to begin understand each other, to cast off ill-informed presumptions and long-entrenched prejudices, creating more opportunities and learning that the “other” should ideally create more possibilities than

I was born with a speech impediment. For years, I received speech therapy in special education.

Refresh for latest…: Sunday’s international box office reporting looks vastly different to what was expected coming into the weekend. A Friday gross that portended a high-teens launch for Monster Hunter in China was quickly thwarted when local authorities pulled the feature game adaptation from the country’s cinemas.

Dave McNary Film ReporterUniversal and DreamWorks’ “The Croods: A New Age” repeated as winner of a mild post-Thanksgiving weekend with $4.4 million at 2,205 North American locations.The animated comedy sequel, featuring a voice cast of Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone and Ryan Reynolds, has been dominating the seriously subdued moviegoing business since its Nov. 25 launch with $20.3 million in its first dozen days.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city,” went the voiceover in Jules Dassin’s classic Big Apple-set film noir. Two such stories make up the crux of the documentary Five Years North, which follows a pair of New Yorkers who couldn’t be more incompatible, even if their lives are connected in larger, more meaningful ways.

This late fall has been a treat because we’ve received a new Steve McQueen (“12 Years A Slave,” “Widows“) week every week for the last three weeks; when does that happen? And they are all part of McQueen’s new five-film anthology series, “Small Axe,” based on the Jamaican proverb, “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” Three films have debuted at the New York Film Festival earlier this fall, and those three have now aired on Amazon Prime Video.

Watch Video: 'Small Axe' Trailer: John Boyega, Letitia Wright Tackle London Racism in Anthology SeriesWhen Alex arrives in Brixton, he’s a fish out of water in the neighborhood; neighbor Dennis (Jonathan Jules, “Fighting With My Family”) takes it upon himself to fix Alex’s wardrobe, hair and inability to speak the Jamaican dialect. “I’m not African,” Alex tells the barber who has referred to him as such.

With the arrival of Alex Wheatle, the fourth of five installments that make up Small Axe, Steve McQueen’s adamant and penetrating series of roughly hourlong dramas centering on the Black immigrant community experience in post-World War II Britain, the emerging core concern is the hypocrisy involved in the nation laying out the welcome mat to newcomers in the first place while denying opportunity once they’ve arrived.

Refresh for latest…: DreamWorks Animation/Universal’s The Croods: A New Age led the weekend in China with a $19.2M debut, outpacing local titles One Second and Caught In Time. This is the third best bow for a studio movie in the Middle Kingdom during the pandemic era (behind Tenet and Mulan).

While the pandemic is continuing to sap the box office of its strength, Universal/DreamWorks Animation’s “The Croods: A New Age” is showing opening weekend numbers similar to what “Tenet” showed nearly three months ago, earning a three-day opening weekend of $9.7 million and an extended 5-day Thanksgiving opening of $14.2 million from 2,211 screens.By comparison, “Tenet” earned a $20.2 million extended opening on Labor Day weekend, though that figure included additional days of preview

DreamWorks Animation/Universal’s The Croods: A New Age looks set to lead the weekend in China where the cume an estimated $11.6M through its first two days, and pre-sales are solid. This portends an FSS frame of $20M, per Uni, with family uptick throught the weekend . Six other markets are also getting a first look at the prehistoric family pic that’s directed by Joel Crawford, and are expected to round out the global session total to $21.3M.

Also Read: 'The Croods: A New Age' Film Review: The Laughs Keep Evolving in Animated SequelWhile “Croods 2” will provide a small degree of revenue for theaters that are still trying to fend off closures, this Thanksgiving weekend is a far cry from last year’s, which saw “Frozen II” top the charts with a $125 million 5-day total while newcomer “Knives Out” contributed $41 million.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorIn the animated feature “The Croods: A New Age,” which bowed Nov. 25 in select theaters, the first prehistoric family encounters the Bettermans, a family a few steps evolved beyond the cave people.

Universal’s release of DreamWorks Animation’s The Croods: A New Age stayed on target from what we saw yesterday with an opening Wednesday of $1.85M in a very broken exhibition landscape where there’s only 2,650 theaters open right now out of national footprint of 5,5K. Croods 2 is booked at 2,211 theaters.

Also Read: See Johnny Flynn as David Bowie in First Look at Unauthorized Biopic 'Stardust'For better and for worse, “Stardust” grapples with those issues as it follows a 24-year-old Bowie on a promotional tour through the United States in 1971, accompanied by a long-suffering Mercury Records publicist named Ron Oberman.Johnny Flynn plays Bowie, Marc Maron plays Oberman, and the point of director and cowriter Gabriel Range’s film is to trace the seeds of Bowie’s breakthrough character, Ziggy

EXCLUSIVE: Despite the severe ratcheting down of movie theaters during the pandemic in recent weeks, Universal is standing strong with a robust global promotional campaign behind their DreamWorks Animation sequel The Croods: A New Age which opens today at 2,211 theaters.