Box Office (Specialty): '12 Years a Slave' Opens Big, Attracts Diverse Audience

Ocean-set drama "All Is Lost" -- starring Robert Redford -- debuts in New York and Los Angeles to more muted numbers; ditto for Daniel Radcliffe's "Kill Your Darlings."

Steve McQueen's harrowing drama 12 Years a Slave did impressive business in its theatrical debut, playing to both arthouse audiences and African-Americans as it continues to build awards momentum.

The Fox Searchlight release grossed $960,000 from 19 theaters in six top markets for an enviable location average of $50,526, by far the best of the weekend and one of the top averages ever for a movie opening in that number of theaters.

Produced by New Regency and Plan B -- Brad Pitt and Dede Gardner's company -- 12 Years a Slave has earned stellar reviews since its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. It also drew an A CinemaScore.

The film, financed by New Regency, tells the true story ofSolomon Northup, a free black man living in upstate New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. ChiwetelEjiofor, who plays Northup, stars opposite Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Lupita Nyong'o,Sarah Paulson, Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodward, Paul Dano and Pitt.

Searchlight distribution chief Frank Rodriguez said 12 Years a Slave "reached an incredibly diverse audience. Playing in theaters including Lincoln Plaza in New York and the Showcase Icon in Chicago, we have been attracting both the art/specialty cinephile crowd, as well as the African-American audience."

On Friday, 12 Years a Slave will expand into an additional six cities and increase its total theater count to more than 100.

Two other high-profile award contenders, All Is Lost and Kill Your Darlings, saw more mixed results in their debuts. They were likely hurt by the continued strength of adult dramas Gravity and Captain Phillips, as well as 12 Years a Slave.

The ocean-set All Is Lost, directed by Margin Call's J.C. Chandor and starring Robert Redford, grossed $97,350 from six theaters in Los Angeles and New York for a so-so location average of $16,225.

All Is Lost, however, could have strong sea legs thanks to Redford's star power and stellar reviews. The film -- about a sailor lost at sea -- isn't an easy sell, considering it has virtually no dialogue. Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate are distributing the film domestically.

Kill Your Darlings, from Sony Pictures Classics, opened to $57,722 from four theaters in Los Angeles and New York for a location average of $14,430. The film, set in 1944, stars Daniel Radcliffe as a young Allen Ginsberg, the iconic Beat poet, and Dane DeHaan as fellow poet William Burroughs.

Source:   THR

12 Years a Slave: Toronto film festival - first look review

Steve McQueen's much-hyped slavery drama is a brutal, excoriating and vital companion to Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained

Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave. Photograph: Allstar/NEW REGENCY PICTURES/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Stark, visceral and unrelenting, 12 Years a Slave is not just a great film but a necessary one. The phrase "long-awaited" has been much used to describe this third feature from British director Steve McQueen, which sees Chiwetel Ejiofor alongside Michael Fassbender in a star-studded cast. It's a common piece of cinematic hyperbole but it also describes the function this picture serves in confronting a practice that endured in the United States of America for nearly 250 years.

Based on a first-hand account, Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup, a violin player who lives a happy and relatively affluent life in Saratoga Springs, near New York City. It is 1841 and Northup is a free man apparently accepted as an equal by his white peers. When his wife takes a trip out of town, however, Northup is tempted into earning extra money by performing for a travelling circus. He heads to Washington with new companions only to be drugged, kidnapped and bound in chains just a stone's throw from the Capitol building.

From there Northup is severed completely from his old life. His name is changed to Platt and this urbane family man is told both to forget his identity and his skills. "Tell no one who you are and tell no one you can read or write," warns a fellow captive, "unless you want to be a dead nigger". He is shipped to Louisiana like so much chattel; one shot shows the tarpaulin pulled off a cart in which the slaves are carried like the lid being pulled from a sardine tin.

The rest of the film concerns itself with Platt's passage through the hands of several owners, each barbaric in their own way to someone they cannot stop to consider as being human. Paul Giamatti's trader Theophilus Freeman proves the strengths and reflexes of his slaves by jauntily beating them with cudgels. Benedict Cumberbatch's Master Ford considers himself a man of conscience but presides over plantation in which brutality reigns untrammeled.

Then, finally, there is Fassbender's Master Epps. He is renowned as a "nigger breaker", a sadist who keeps order through constant application of the lash. He wakes his slaves in the middle of the night and forces them to dance amid casual, liberal beatings. He is in constant fear of conspiracy and believes the ill will of his slaves to have caused God to curse his cotton crop. At the same time he has taken his most productive worker, Patsy (Lupita Nyong'o), to be a sex object.

Fassbender is brilliant in the part. Violence is always only a hair's breadth away, but his belief in his authority results in an eccentricity at times so delicate as to be even more terrifying than the temper. With his arm draped amicably over his shoulder he calmly threatens Platt with death. He goes straight from strangling a woman to softly cuddling terrified friend. Hand in hand with a child, he prances around in a smock.

Comparisons here can be made with another loquacious slaver, Leonardo Di Caprio's Calvin Candie from Django Unchained. Candie was a villain who conducted depraved acts without blinking. But, as with many of Tarantino's bad guys, he also had a rat-like cunning and a dry wit that lent him a kind of glamour. There is no such veneer on Fassbender's Master Epps however - and this is surely an important distinction.

As with the Tarantino movie there is frequent bloody violence and the word "nigger" is used as a matter of course. Not once does any of it provoke a thrill however. At first it provokes horror and disgust but ultimately there's an exasperation, a feeling that you cannot watch any more. Northup and his peers however have long since grown a callus where those sensitivities once lay. One of the most shocking things for the viewer might be how the slaves at various plantations carry calmly about their work as men and women are lynched and beaten around them.

12 Years a Slave is a scarifying, unblinking portrayal of life as it was for tens of thousands of people less than 200 years ago. It pulls no punches. But neither does it lecture. McQueen chooses to let all the actions and inactions convey their own message. As the film ends, there is no barnstorming speech, promise of change or bloody revenge fantasy, just a lingering shot of a man sobbing into the arms of his family.

Source: The Guardian