The Bottom Line: July 21, 2017: Christopher Nolan Returns With DUNKIRK

The Bottom Line: July 21, 2017

One of the great modern directors returns to theaters this weekend with the new World War II thriller Dunkirk. Find out how it will do in this week’s edition of The Bottom Line!

Box Office Top Five

War for the Planet of the Apes topped the box office, proving humans will continue to pay money to see monkeys destroy them. The movie took first place with $56.5 million. Meanwhile, Spider-Man: Homecoming dropped to second place, taking in $45.2 million. Despicable Me 3 occupied the kiddie audience enough to take third place with $19 million. Baby Driver landed in fourth with $8.8 million, and The Big Sick rose to fifth place in its first wide-release weekend with $7.7 million, which is awesome.

A Closer Look at Some of this Week’s Films.

Dunkirk (PG-13) 107 mins.

Christopher Nolan. Those are the only two words you should have to hear before deciding to go see Dunkirk. The man made Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, and oh yeah, a Batman movie or three. No director working today is consistently operating on the same scale and delivering the goods like Nolan. His movies are always an event, to the point where it might not even matter if critics were on board with it or not.

But, they definitely seem to be. Dunkirk is getting phenomenal reviews, and I’ve seen several people call it the best of Nolan’s career. The movie features an ensemble cast that includes Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, and even One Direction’s Harry Styles, and I imagine this will do great business at the box office. The Nolan fans and the One Direction fans all in one place? It will be unstoppable. Expect it to easily take number one this weekend.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (PG-13) 137 mins.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are on board with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and crazy people. I don’t know about you, but I’m pumped for this movie. Director Luc Besson returns to the realm of imaginative, inventive science fiction that he once brought to The Fifth Element for another movie that just looks totally bonkers. A $200 million sci-fi epic based on a property no one in America knows centered on Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevigne? This movie will make zero dollars. But it will almost definitely get a cult following, and I will likely be in that cult. Care to join me?

Girls Trip (R) 122 mins.

A new R-rated comedy from Malcolm Lee, who directed The Best Man, Girls Trip looks to bring women of color to mainstream comedy. That’s a great thing, and the cast is terrific, with Regina Hall, Tiffany Haddish, Queen Latifah, and Jada Pinkett Smith rounding out the main four (Netflix’s Luke Cage, Mike Colter, also appears in the movie). This is getting strong reviews and I think this movie has the potential to be the next surprise hit – though we should stop being surprised when female-fronted comedy films are hits, because there’s clearly an audience for it. The good reviews and the strides forward for representation will likely be great for the movie, which I’m going to predict opens at number two.

The Bottom Line

Dunkirk will open at number one by a wide margin, while Girls Trip will open in second. Spider-Man: Homecoming will take third place, while War for the Planet of the Apes will drop to fourth. Baby Driver will round out the top five. Valerian will barely crack the top ten, but that will only make its fans even more devoted to it.

Movies To Look Forward To:

Atomic Blonde, The Emoji Movie, An Inconvenient Sequel (July 28th)

Leave your thoughts on The Bottom Line, War for the Planet of the Apes, The Big Sick, and Wish Upon below in the comments section. Readers seeking more The Bottom Line can visit our The Bottom Line Page. Want up-to-the-minute notification? Want up-to-the-minute notifications? FilmBook staff members publish articles by Email, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, and Facebook.