Sometimes bad breaks can bring great fortune. A few years ago, Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings movies, planned a big-screen version of the Halo video-game universe and tapped Neill Blomkamp to direct it. When that project collapsed after a few months, Jackson proposed that Blomkamp turn his science-fiction short Alive in Joburg into his first feature film. It would be set in Blomkamp's native South Africa, focus on the country's traumatic tradition of apartheid, have characters who ...

The new Judd Apatow movie carried the perky title Funny People, but audiences quickly figured out it should really be called The Guy Who Thinks He's Gonna Die and Isn't Very Nice. Or Funny. It managed a decent $8.7 million on opening day, dropped 15% on Saturday and is expected to finish the weekend at $23.4 million. The good news for Apatow and his long-ago roomie Adam Sandler is that their film topped the weekend box office at domestic ...

The wise old men and their young colleagues gave the world all the entertainment it needed this weekend. While 59-year-old, self-proclaimed "geezer" golfer Tom Watson mounted a heroic effort to win the British Open, only to fall short in a four-hole playoff against a much younger rival, that great gray sorcerer Albus Dumbledore led Harry Potter to the biggest opening for any film in the series. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will have taken in nearly $80 million ...

Fans of Harry Potter lined up at theaters all over the world early Wednesday, pushing the new film about the boy wizard to near-record ticket sales. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" -- the sixth movie in the series based on J.K. Rowling's seven Harry Potter books -- had more than 2,700 sold-out screenings, according to MovieTickets.com. The film had more than 1,500 midnight screening sellouts in the United States and finished as the No. 2 all-time movie for advance ...

The mood is dark. Death Eaters blight the skies, sent on their sorties by the fiendish Lord Voldemort, and in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a grim fate encircles one teenage boy like a noose around his soul. The adult he reveres most in the world has given him a mission to destroy a hugely powerful wizard, yet as he gazes in a mirror, the quivering face staring back at him belies his resolve to do the deed. ...

The end is closer than the beginning. Harry Potter and his friends at Hogwarts are now in their sixth year of seven at the school. They've seen a lot of changes, particularly as the influence of the reawakened Voldemort (that is, He Who Must Not Be Named) has made itself known. And the movie series itself is now nearing its conclusion. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," which comes out Wednesday, is likewise the sixth movie in the ...

If Potions Professor Horace Slughorn had mixed a brew to conjure up torrential rain, the weather could not have been worse for the premiere of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Dedicated fans braved thunder, lightning and Biblical downpours in London's Leicester Square to catch a glimpse of the film's stars arriving at the opening of the sixth film in the wildly popular "Harry Potter" franchise. While dreadful weather has become an unfortunate tradition at Potter premieres (it rained during ...