Movie News & Gossip

LOS ANGELES - Moviegoers have shown a willingness to be entangled by Spider-Man's web over and over again. Now, as Disney prepares to buy the comic-book powerhouse Marvel, it faces the question of whether fans will also get attached to characters as obscure as Ant-Man and Iron Fist.

The Walt Disney Co. is making a $4.2 billion bet that they will as it nears completion of its acquisition of Marvel Entertainment Inc. this week. The cash-and-stock deal brings those characters and thousands of others to an entertainment empire that already includes Mickey Mouse, Kermit the Frog and Hannah Montana.

BEVERLY HILLS, California - For 81 years, she has amassed movie memorabilia. Her collection now includes more than 10 million photographs, 80,000 screenplays and 35,000 movie posters dating back to when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded in 1927.

So it's fitting that the Margaret Herrick Library played host to the future of the film industry when it welcomed this year's crop of Oscar voters at a private reception honoring the newest members of the academy.

PARIS -- Filmmaker Roman Polanski says letters from supporters that he received in a Swiss prison and while under house arrest at his Alpine chalet have been "full of comfort and reason to hope."

Polanski's first public comments since his Sept. 26 arrest at Zurich airport came in a letter transmitted to French philosopher and friend Bernard-Henri Levy, who put them online Sunday at the director's request.

- As they did during the Depression and World War II, movie audiences today have found a respite from hard times with light, fanciful tales that help them forget their troubles for a couple of hours.

Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon" isn't one of those films.

Sleepers come seemingly out of nowhere. They are the little films that confound expectations, attracting enthusiastic audiences that happily spread the word. Sometimes they come from the studio system, produced almost as an afterthought, but mostly they're produced well off the radar. On occasion, they upend the established order by opening at No. 1 at the boxoffice. But more typically they start small, building over time, hanging on in theaters as more heralded movies come and go. Often the filmmakers involved meet with initial rejection before wildly triumphing in the end. And in the process, they expose the limitations of Hollywood's conventional thinking about what makes a hit. Sleepers, when everyone wakes up to their potential, tend to be wildly successful, resulting in boxoffice returns that dwarf their modest budgets. And so, top sleepers of the past decade, take another bow.

10. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (Sony Pictures Classics, 2000)
Budget: $17 million
Domestic gross: $128 million

Except for a handful of martial arts fans, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was indeed hidden from sight during its production. Most Westerners weren't familiar with stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh. Taiwanese director Ang Lee, coming off the commercial failure of "Ride With the Devil," wasn't exactly known for burning up the boxoffice, either. Even its rollout was uneventful: "Tiger" was first shown out of competition at the Festival de Cannes and made its U.S. premiere at the Hawaii International Film Festival. But after an Oscar-qualifying run in December 2000, it opened wide Jan. 12, 2001, to $8.6 million. And then, the subtitled movie became a sensation. While it never made more than $10.5 million during a single boxoffice weekend, it clawed its way to a $128 million domestic cume. It became the highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. history, won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, made an international star of Zhang Ziyi and ushered in an Asian movie revival in the West.

- Capsule reviews of films opening this week:

"The White Ribbon" — Michael Haneke's masterpiece immerses viewers, making squeamish voyeurs of them as they watch a small German town come unhinged amid unexplained violence and tragedy as World War I approaches. The Austrian writer-director has crafted a gorgeously gloomy parable exploring the origins of hatred, malice and communal barbarity, the sort of madness of the masses that would explode in Germany a generation later. The film is grim even by Haneke's normal dour and disturbing standards, with exquisite black-and-white images by cinematographer Christian Berger that help create the illusion of a window in time looking back to the early 20th century. The film hints that the town's young ones might be responsible for the dark deeds, children reared in tyrannical devotion to a puritanism their lustful, abusive parents fail to follow, children who will emerge from this incubator of malevolence as the generation unleashing the atrocities of Nazi Germany. But Haneke's not the sort of storyteller to make things easy on the audience by spelling out anything for sure. R for some disturbing content involving violence and sexuality. 144 minutes. Four stars out of four.

LOS ANGELES - Tom Waits has given the devil his due with wry song lyrics, asking if the devil made the "world while God was sleeping" or musing "don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk."

Now Waits is the devil incarnate in Terry Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus," playing a dapper demon with a bowler hat, trim suit and pencil-thin mustache who loves nothing better than gambling with people's souls.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Before "Sherlock Holmes" was a movie opening on Christmas Day, it was a comic.

Sort of.