The Help Reviews, Interviews & More

After the release of a study which indicates that most Oscar voters are wealthy white men, how smart a play does it seem to feature the host of the Academy Awards, Billy Crystal (a wealthy white man), in a sketch in which he appears in blackface?  Well, it’s a play that the Oscars ran with on Sunday night, and it’s catching a bit of criticism (beneath the cacophony about...

The process of Oscar predictions has changed completely over the last twenty years. Where there may have been favorites and hopes before that came with no sense of what could actually happen on Oscar night, blogging has turned the award ceremony into a stats game, where there are way fewer surprises than ever before. But, if you pay attention to the guilds, you have a great guide as to who is...

The Oscars may have been announced last week, but there are still a few more award shows before we get to Hollywood’s Big Night—case in point, last night’s 18th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, held at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium and honoring the best acting in television and film over the past year.  Check out the list of winners after the jump.

The award show season is probably still a mystery for some, but for those paying attention, the possible nominees have been narrowed down, and even before the Oscar nominations are announced the playing field is clear. After its Golden Globe wins, BAFTA (The British Academy of Film and Television Arts) has now cemented The Artist as the horse to beat. The film was...

The 69th annual Golden Globes nominees have been announced, and this year they're big on definite articles. The Help, The Artist and The Descendents lead the pack of nominees. Which is interesting because - if the Globes have a weakness - it's that they chase the famous names, and these noms aren't that celeb-heavy....

Steven Soderbergh's plague thriller Contagion brought down The Help this weekend, as we predicted. The Warner Brothers picture made $23.1 million during its opening weekend, conquering other new releases like Warrior and Bucky Larson: Born to Be A Star. Contagion hit strong, winning over both...

After a couple of weeks of super weak titles, Contagion is the first A-lister vehicle in quite some time. You'd think summer would be loaded with them, but you can't really call The Help or Rise of the Planet of the Apes star vehicles. Then again, look at the business Larry Crowne did. That...

This Labor Day weekend marked the end of the 2011 summer movie season, and it all belonged to The Help. For three weeks now, newcomers have been no competition for the Disney and Dreamworks' movie. The film brought in $14.2 million, bringing its total to a staggering $118.6 million. From the pile of new releases, The...

It's September now, so summer is officially over. Labor Day is Monday, which makes this a four day weekend at the box office, but while summer movies try to take advantage of holiday schedules, this weekend is the beginning of the fall slump (even if Summer A titles dried up nearly a month ago). There may be some money movies in the next two months, but big business titles won't get released...

In the mist of power outages and evacuation alerts, The Help was able to stay on top of the box office (as we predicted). But overall, this weekend hurt the studios harder than the hurricane hit the cities. This weekend was the release of big pictures like Colombiana and Guillermo Del Toro's Don't Be Afraid of the...

The Help had a busy weekend. After being overshadowed by Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Help came back strong and claimed the No. 1 spot in its second week, as we predicted. In that time, the $25 million budget film has managed to pull in a grand $71.8 million. But the success of one film, means the lack of to another...

It's the dog days of summer. This weekend four movies are coming out and - realistically - only one has a shot at taking the top slot. Last weekend saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes hold well enough to fend off The Help, but this weekend it's more than likely that The Help will take the top slot. Conan...

Four new movies crowd this end of summer weekend. As TV and radio are bombarded with back to school ads, Final Destination 5, The Help, 30 Minutes or Less, and Glee the 3D Concert Movie hit the big screen. It's a weekend that becomes a theater palette-cleanser, as the hangers-on's that have...

Racism is still a hot button issue in America, and though the civil rights movement was a previous generation's struggle, it's hard to address those issues cinematically and still make an entertaining film. 2011's The Help comes at a time when issue pictures are out of fashion, and so it seems slightly fresher than it might have had it come out in any other decade....

For Tate Taylor, working on a studio movie had to be a dream. That he adapted the book The Help, which was written by his high school buddy Kathryn Stockett, likely made every day seem like a dream. As we sat down to do the interview Kathryn passed around a picture of the two of them at prom together. Both had very intimate feelings for the material, and it shows....

It’s always a bit difficult when two stars are paired together in that you always want more out of them. And for The Help’s press Viola Davis was partnered with Emma Stone. At once you wanted to talk to the ubiquitous Stone about her upcoming work in films like The Amazing Spider-Man (which we did), but then with Davis there’s so much...

In The Help, Bryce Dallas Howard’s Hilly Hollbrook is the villain, a woman who insists that the Black maids who help raise their children and feed their families should have their own toilets as to not infect the white people. This is her cause, and it’s easy to root against her, but Howard makes her character fascinating, in spite of our modern understandings of...

Tate Taylor’s The Help offers a number of great roles for women, which is somewhat rare, and a number for older actress, which is rarer these days. Allison Janney and Sissy Spacek play the mothers of the two leads, and the two got on immediately, both while making the film (they don’t have any scenes together, though) and in our interview, where the two often...

The first photos from the feature adaptation of the Kathryn Stockett novel The Help have been released. The film stars Emma Stone as the main character and features a plethora of talented actresses ranging from film, television, and theater vets. There's even a Twilight star in the mix with Bryce Dallas Howard. Check out the rest of the cast...

DreamWorks has just revealed its upcoming release state for 2011. It features some highly anticipated films like Steven Spielberg's period piece, War Horse, the Craig Gillespie remake of Fright Night, the Tate Taylor drama The Help, and many more. Some of the dates have been shuffled, while others...