I just came across the new poster for Whatever Works on IMP Awards (check it by clicking the image below), and beyond the too-perfect Larry David pose, I'm struck by the utter lack of Woody Allen on the thing. Beyond the billing block and maybe an especially sharp sense of font, how would anyone know that this was the latest film from the guy who made Annie Hall and Manhattan?

It was the same thing with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and I'm wondering if potentially interested people would find themselves turned off upon finding out just whose movie they've been lured into. It's the same sense of un-branding (non-branding? anti-branding?) that kept most passersby from realizing that Zack and Miri Make a Porno was a Kevin Smith joint, and really, if you're already past that title, is his presence in the trailers and posters going to keep you away?

If anything, might the name recognition lure a couple of more people to either film (not that Larry David fans probably aren't already fans of Woody Allen, and not that Kevin Smith films probably already know which new movie is his)? Have you ever been sold on a movie until you got a glimpse of the name at the helm? When? Where? Why?

Pictured (clockwise from upper left): Pride and Glory, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, RockNRolla, Hulk Vs.

I'm shocked -- shocked!! -- that I can recommend a rental on all four featured titles. I'll search more diligently for titles to skip in coming weeks.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Woody Allen's sojourn across Europe continues in this critically-praised comedy / drama / romance, featuring the Academy Award-nominated Penélope Cruz, plus Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, and Rebecca Hall. James Rocchi called it "a bright, cool comedy of manners and mores, as refreshing and subtly intoxicating as a tall drink of sangria." Also on Blu-ray. Rent it.

Pride and Glory
Though some unfavorably compared it with We Own the Night, I much preferred Gavin O'Connor's striking, stirring New York City police 'brothers and father at odds' drama. Sure, it's familiar territory, but it struck me as piercing and emotionally authentic. With Colin Farrell, Edward Norton, Jon Voight, and Noah Emmerich. Also on Blu-ray. Rent it.

RocknRolla
As a friend surmised, Guy Ritchie returns to form with another fast-paced criminal misandventure. Ritchie at top form is still not my favorite cup of tea -- this movie slid out of my memory as painlessly as it went in -- but Ritchie die-hards and fans of Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Thandie Newton, and incomprehensible slang can satisfy their curiosity. Also on Blu-ray. Rent it.

Hulk Vs.
Two new animated features: Hulk vs. Wolverine and Hulk vs. Thor. Let me repeat: Hulk vs. Wolverine! Hulk vs. Thor! Hulk vs. Wolverine! Hulk vs. Thor! Total running time: 78 minutes. Also on Blu-ray. Rent it.

Also out: Closing the Ring (the one with Mischa Barton naked), College, Lakeview Terrace, The Lucky Ones, Open Season 2, The Rocker, and Sharks in Venice.

After the jump: Indies on DVD, New on Blu-ray (Bourne!), and Collector's Corner.

Nominations for the 61st annual Writers Guild of America awards are in, with a lot of names that will probably come up again in two weeks, when the Oscar nominations are announced.

In the original screenplay category, the films and their authors are Burn After Reading (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen), Milk (Dustin Lance Black), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen), The Visitor (Tom McCarthy), and The Wrestler (Robert Siegel). The Coens won WGA awards for Fargo and No Country for Old Men, and Allen has won four times, most recently for 1990's Crimes & Misdemeanors.

For adapted screenplay, the nominees are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Eric Roth), The Dark Knight (Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan), Doubt (John Patrick Shanley), Frost/Nixon (Peter Morgan), and Slumdog Millionaire (Simon Beaufoy). Roth previously won this award for Forrest Gump, and Shanley won for Moonstruck. If you're wondering, The Dark Knight counts as "adapted" because it uses pre-existing characters. (The Oscars have the same rule.)

What does this mean for Oscar-watchers? In the adapted category, of the 120 nominees since 1984 (prior to that the WGA had separate categories for drama and comedy), 90 of them -- 75% -- have also been nominated for Oscars. But 11 of those WGA-but-not-Oscar nominees have happened in the last eight years alone, and some folks think the WGA-omitted Revolutionary Road and/or The Reader might get some Oscar love.

The original screenplay category is almost exactly the same story, with 31 WGA nominees not getting Oscar nods, 14 of those in the last eight years. Among the much-praised original screenplays that might get Oscar attention despite being overlooked by the WGA are Rachel Getting Married and Synecdoche, New York.

The WGA awards will be announced Feb. 7. You can see the entire list of nominees, including documentaries and TV shows (yay 30 Rock!), here.

400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.

I'm thankful for Rachel Getting Married (300 screens), for making me feel as if I were at an excruciating wedding without actually having to be there, and for making me feel as if I knew the extraordinarily wounded lead character, Kym (Anne Hathaway), no matter how monstrous she acts sometimes. But most of all for making me feel something.

I'm thankful for The Dark Knight (345 screens), for being like a 1940s film noir, reflecting the utter despair we feel about the world in 2008, but for making it entertaining and making us feel as if there's still a tiny scrap of hope left. Mainly, I'm thankful for movies that took on despair as a theme, but didn't show it.

I'm thankful for smart villains, like Heath Ledger's Joker. But I'm also thankful for quiet villains, like Ralph Fiennes in The Duchess (154 screens), who does all those terrible things for what he thinks are pretty good reasons, not simply because he's hateful or evil. I'm especially thankful for no moustache-twisting (and no moustaches).

400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.

Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (221 screens) has earned some good reviews, but not particularly great ones. I'm not sure many critics have really understood its significance. I think they just stayed on their usual pro- or anti-Woody Allen bandwagon and reviewed it according to how funny or not funny it was, or how Woody Allen-ish the dialogue sounded. Or worse, they brought Allen's private life into it and attacked it for its supposedly twisted sexuality. But Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a major step in the career of this tricky artist, more so than the critical darling Match Point three years ago.

One drawback to Allen's career is that he started out as a blatant comic filmmaker with films like Bananas, Sleeper and Love and Death. Then, movies like Annie Hall, Manhattan and Crimes and Misdemeanors cleverly melded comedy into dramatic situations, but the damage had been done: he was once and always "just" a comedian, forever lower on the scale than his contemporaries (Altman, Scorsese, Coppola, etc.). His other drawback is that he keeps making "Woody Allen" movies, in which the credits always look the same, the musical choices are always the same, the cinematography always looks great, and everyone talks the same. Often, but not always, the same actors appear. Who does this remind you of?

Is everyone in Toronto for the festival? Has everyone caught up with everything they want to see? Are arthouse movie lovers football fans too? I'm not sure how else to explain the downturn in the indie box office this weekend, in which Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django continued its stay at the top, per estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. Sukiyaki made $5,100 at its single Gotham engagement; now let's see what happens when it expands beyond New York City.

Also holding up decently in its second weekend was I Served the King of England, which increased to 17 theaters and earned $4,241 per location. Everyone Wants to Be Italian was the only debuting indie to crack the Top 10, but its tepid $2,224 per-screen average at 98 locations indicates that not everyone wants be Italian. No word on what happened with The Pool (which I loved), August Evening, Ping Pong Playa, Mister Foe, or the other new indies.

Speaking of poor performances, Hamlet 2 earned just $520 per screen at 1,575 theaters. Yikes! That's a lot of empty auditoriums. The film's cumulative total is $4.3 million, though, so perhaps it can break even on the DVD release.

Among the holdovers, Frozen River and Transsiberian pushed past $1 million dollars in earnings, Elegy broke past $2 million dollars total, Tell No One reached $4.7 million dollars, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona soared past $16 million in its fourth week.

The most exciting news from Labor Day weekend at the box-office -- traditionally a slow period -- is that America seems to have caught on to the scam that Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have been running for... what is it now? Almost three years? (I'm not counting the Scary Movie franchise, which always retained some redeeming value despite their idiocy.) Anyway, their latest travesty, Disaster Movie, opened to $6.9 million over four days, just over a third of the (nearly identical to each other) first three-day weekends for Date Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans. Could that be the end of that?

Not that any of Disaster Movie's competitors did spectacularly better. The strongest of them -- the poorly-reviewed sci-fi flick Babylon A.D. -- only managed second place and a $12 million four-day. Don Cheadle's Traitor came in fifth with $10 million, which I actually think is robust for an barely-marketed film opening on just over 2,000 screens. College crashed and burned, landing outside the top 10 with $2.6 million. The best explanation is that there simply wasn't any reason to see it.

The holdovers did well. Mamma Mia!, now in its seventh weekend of release, continues to lurk in the bottom half of the top 10; its take actually grew compared to last weekend, even if you use the 3-day numbers. It's up to $133 million. The Dark Knight barely lost steam, going from fourth place to third and breaking the $500 million threshold. Vicky Cristina Barcelona also continues to do very well on under 700 screens. And of course, Tropic Thunder managed a third weekend atop the charts, leapfrogging past Pineapple Express.

The full estimates after the jump.

In the earlier part of this decade, Woody Allen seemed to specialize in comedy alone -- 2000's Small Time Crooks, 2001's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, 2002's Hollywood Ending, 2003's Anything Else -- and then he opted to switch gears after 2005's genre-divided Melinda and Melinda, following that up with dramas Match Point later that year, and both Cassandra's Dream and Vicky Crisitina Barcelona in 2008. (We'll skip 2006's Scoop, since everyone else did.)

Whew. My point is, even with a comedic prospect on the horizon with next year's Whatever Works, now is as good a time as ever to relish this New York Times piece he did in the manner of a production diary on the set of Barcelona. Mind you, only "excerpts" are provided, so instead of botching them all, let me just share one favorite portion:

"JUNE 20 - Barcelona is a marvelous city. Crowds turn out in the streets to watch us work. Mercifully they realize I've no time to give autographs, and so they ask only the cast members..."

See? There's the self-deprecating filmmaker we know and love and moderately miss. I for one will take this as a sign of funnier things to come.

Woody Allen's latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, has earned mostly rave reviews, and it's doing well at the box office -- or, that is, it's doing well for a Woody Allen film. It opened in 10th place for the weekend of Aug. 15-17, the first time an Allen film has cracked the top 10 at all (let alone opened there) since Small Time Crooks, eight years and eight movies ago. And Small Time Crooks was the first one since Husbands and Wives, eight years and eight movies before that.

I wouldn't say there's ever been a time when Allen's films routinely made the top 10 -- he's always managed to release a total flop here and there to break up the streak -- but it certainly used to occur much more frequently than it does now. Manhattan opened at #1 in 1979, possibly the only Allen film ever to do so. (I can't find specific weekend data on Annie Hall, which is the only other likely candidate.) Various others have spent at least a couple weekends in the top 10. Still, no Allen film has ever been what you'd call a "blockbuster." His biggest hit, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), made $40 million and never got higher than 5th place at the box office. Granted, if you adjust for inflation, Annie Hall's $38 million would be about $120 million today, and that would be considered fantastic for a low-budget indie. But it's still not commensurate with how beloved and acclaimed Allen is.

Consider this: Woody Allen has directed 38 theatrical features. The Dark Knight has made more money than all 38 of them combined. Isn't it strange that one of the most iconic American filmmakers of all time can barely scrape together a crowd to actually watch his movies?

The French are at it again! After last month's unexpected breakout success of French thriller Tell No One, surely it's no surprise that French thriller A Girl Cut in Two opened on top, grossing $9,750 per screens at the two theaters in New York where it opened, according to Box Office Mojo. Claude Chabrol's latest (and perhaps last) has delighted critics, including our own Jeffrey M. Anderson ("superbly made ... highly enjoyable").

Amidst a hailstorm of reviews, interviews, and offers of threesomes, Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona debuted to $5,361 per-screen at 692 engagements, while would-be inspirational drama Henry Poole is Here failed to inspire much box office, drawing just $1,518 per screen at 527 theaters. People were evidently more interested in sin than salvation this weekend.

Two films in their second week of release continued to draw well, with literary adaptation Elegy scoring $9,000 per screen at six locations and music doc Patti Smith: Dream of Life drawing $7,000 at its sole Manhattan engagement. Meanwhile, the quiet thriller Frozen River saw an uptick in business as it expanded to 15 theaters in its third week of release, earning $4,086 per screen.

American Teen withered on the vine in its fourth week, its per-screen average shrinking to $980 as it further expanded into 105 theaters, with a cumulative total of $656,000. Brideshead Revisited slowed to $1,489 per screen during its expansion into 501 theaters, though its total has passed $4.6 million.