 The top per-theater earner was New Line's The New World, which opened on Christmas day in three theaters in New York and Los Angeles. It took in an estimated $10,333 per theater on its first day, Sunday. No estimates were provided for Monday. The film, director Terence Malick's take on the romance between Pocahontas and John Smith, has initially received some rhapsodic reviews. "The New World is a work of breathtaking imagination, less a movie than a mode of transport, and in every sense a masterpiece." raved Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "In Mr. Malick's telling, Pocahontas is a woman whose story has the reach of myth and the tragic dimension of life," wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News was equally profuse in her praise for the film, writing: "Malick is a writer-director of extraordinary vision who is like an endangered species. Sightings of him are rare. The New World is only his fourth movie in 32 years, and it's up there with Days of Heaven in terms of ravishing visuals and a story that bundles the fate of its powerfully conflicted characters with that of the land they vainly try to tame." Jan Stuart in Newsday commented that the movie "blows centuries of dust and schoolkid romanticism from the oft-mythologized tale of Pocahontas and the English settlers, relaying old news with an abundantly poetic and visually startling point of view that makes us feel as if we're bearing witness for the very first time." But Lou Lumenick in the New York Post was not among those poetically transported by the film, concluding, "This lavish coffee-table-book of a movie gradually reveals itself as an uninvolving, crashing bore." |
