Featured flicks: Billy Elliot, The Contender

"No one can predict the fate of a picture, since it often depends on some gimmick which seemed relatively insignificant while the picture was being made. Good pictures fail and bad ones succeed. The shrewdest minds are never quite sure why. Sometime it seems that a good picture has to fail (example Night Must Fall) in order that the whole trend of pictures later on may succeed by the same formula...."

Raymond Chandler to Alfred Hitchcock