Here THE TOP 5
are the top five movies at the North American box office:
Three new openers dominated the box office this weekend — each with its own robust audience.
The animated Lego Movie spinoff The Lego Batman Movie topped the charts with $53 million, slightly less than the studio estimates from Sunday, while the Fifty Shades of Grey sequel Fifty Shades Darker opened in second with $46.6 million.
Fifty Shades Darker didn’t come close to the heights of the first film’s $85.2 million debut in 2015 when Valentine’s Day fell on a Saturday, but it still managed to entice a significant audience to the cinema.
In third place, John Wick: Chapter Two earned $30.4 million — more than double what the first film made in its opening weekend.
The thriller Split and the NASA drama Hidden Figures, both holdovers, rounded out the top five.
The Lego Batman Movie:
Will Arnett provides the voice of the least bleak Dark Knight since Adam West’s TV Batman. Which is just one of the in-jokes in this frantic, funny, fast-paced story of Batman’s love/hate relationship with The Joker, and with relationships in general. (Chris Knight)
Fifty Shades Darker:
This film presents a distorted view of love wherein a rich, hunky stalker and control freak manipulates a romance-challenged young woman, using beautiful baubles and a new MacBook. It would seem that even though your sugar daddy may be a handsome creep, not to worry, diamonds are forever. (Tina Hassannia)
John Wick:
Chapter 2: Keanu Reeves mostly runs, jumps, shoots and punches his way through this sequel to the 2014 original about a reluctant hit man called out of retirement. There’s enough winking that the violence often plays as comedy, while Reeves plays to his inscrutable strengths. (Chris Knight)
Split:
The latest from M. Night Shyamalan takes the notion of multiple personalities to the extreme with a character with 23 of them, one of whom abducts three teens. Overly long and not as clever as it thinks, there is nonetheless some fun to be had in James McAvoy’s multiple performance, and in Anya TaylorJoy as one of the victims. 1/2 (Chris Knight)
Hidden Figures:
This wellmeaning biopic tells the story of brilliant mathematician Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), and two of her colleagues who worked as “coloured computers” for NASA in the early days of the space race. But the racism and sexism they faced is iced with melodrama; these brave pioneers deserve a better movie. 1/2 (Chris Knight)