I.S.S

Box office weekend: Teen queen plastics took the crown with Mean Girls. Meanwhile, a sci-fi thriller about cosmic adventures crash-landed with a thud, while an unexpected buzzworthy contender, Beekeeper, made a sticky-sweet second-place debut. Reneé Rapp starrer, maintained its dominance at the box office, securing the top spot with $11.7 million in ticket sales, as reported by studio estimates on Sunday. Meanwhile, Warner Bros.' holiday success, Wonka, maintained its position at number 3, earning $6.4 million in…

Oh, January: it's hard to be disappointed because expectations are perpetually oh so very low. While history has shown that this month is capable of producing box office surprises, we didn't see any trace of that happening in the last three days. In my column last week, I noted that there was a lack of notable new wide releases coming on Friday and that a high weekend-to-weekend drop for Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr.'s Mean Girls would be a pretty bad look. Seven days later, that observation has turned into…

Gabriela Cowperthwaite is the first to admit her new film, I.S.S., is out of step with her career to date.The director of Blackfish (a documentary about the cruel treatment of orcas in captivity, Children of the Underground (about a covert network built to smuggle families away from abusive partners) and Our Friend (a true story of friendship in the face of terminal cancer), Cowperthwaite might be expected to focus on tales inspired by real events. Instead, an unrealized love for thrillers, horror and blockbusters took…

At a glance, it would be easy to write I.S.S. off as just another trope-heavy sci-fi thriller; a crew stranded together in space? Tensions rising? Bodies dropping one by one? All pretty par for the course, right? It’s all the more impressive, then, that by just twisting a few tiny narrative knobs on a road well-traveled, I.S.S. scribe Nick Shafir has managed to elevate what would otherwise be a cop-out movie idea into something miles more captivating, all held together by Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s masterful direction and…

By Jake Coyle | Associated Press With war raging in Ukraine and U.S.-Russia relations below freezing, the Cold War movie may be alive, again, too. After decades when fears of mutual destruction and nuclear fallout filtered into movies from “Fail Safe” to “WarGames,” anxiety over current Russian-American geopolitics plays a provocative role in the new space thriller “I.S.S.” Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s film, opening in theaters Friday, is set aboard the International Space Station, which the opening credits note is a symbol…