Analyzing the weekend box office returns, Leonard Klady of Movie City News saw "no great Oscar box office surge," though No Country for Old Men enjoyed an upward swing; based on his estimates, Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar winner The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics) topped the indie charts. Hailing from Austria, The Counterfeiters tells "one of the most interesting stories to come out of World War II," wrote Christopher Campbell, though he felt it was "not quite a great film." The Counterfeiters averaged $12,330 per-screen at the seven locations where it played. French master Jacques Rivette's latest, The Duchess of Langeais (IFC Films) struck Ryan Stewart as similar to La Vie en Rose "in that it works just well enough to support a dynamic performance but contains too many structural oddities, fights too many directorial idiosyncracies and stifles its own momentum too much to succeed on the whole." Rivette's fans came out at both theaters where it opened, averaging $11,250 per screen, according to Box Office Mojo.
In its third week of release, Israeli comedy-drama The Band's Visit (Sony Pictures Classics) doubled its theater count to 26 and earned a healthy $5,538 per screen. Also, in its third week, assassins-in-hiding flick In Bruges (Focus Features) expanded into 163 theaters and held well, taking in $4,546 per location.
For what it's worth, here's a look at the cumulative totals for the Best Picture nominees, four of which were released by studio specialty labels: Juno (Fox Searchlight; $130.3 million), No Country for Old Men (Miramax; $64.1 million), Atonement (Focus Features; $49.3 million), Michael Clayton (Warner Brothers; $48.5 million), There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage; $34.9 million).
