This Week: What We Learned About Ben Affleck, September Disappointments, and More

Not every director experiences a sophomore slump

Better behind the camera?

This week saw the release of a pair of films from second-time directors, and each managed to improve a bit on the reviews earned by his debut. Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go 68 scored slightly higher than the one-time music video director's 2002 debut, One Hour Photo 64 (though that could change as the former rolls out into more cities in the coming weeks). And Ben Affleck appears to be turning into a serious film director, earning strong notices for his bank heist drama The Town 73, just as he did for his 2007 debut Gone Baby Gone 72. (Another actor-turned-director, Philip Seymour Hoffman, also earned generally good reviews this week for his directorial debut Jack Goes Boating 63.)

Romanek and Affleck are not alone in scoring equal or better reviews for their second film than their first; a check of our database indicates that directors experience Metascore increases for their second films slightly more often than they do decreases. Below, we list some of the most extreme jumps in quality between directors' first and second movies over the past dozen years.

* Excludes directors whose first and second films both failed to receive positive reviews (even if there was an improvement).
** Excludes directors whose second film was still in the "good" (green Metascore) range.

You can't judge a movie by its book

Never Let Me Go 68 and The Town 73 have one other thing in common: both films are adaptations of novels. (The former is based on Kazuo Ishiguro's acclaimed book of the same name, while the latter comes from Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan.) There have been many such adaptations so far this year, and there certainly does not appear to be a lot of correlation between book quality and movie quality or book sales and movie box office. But, as you can see from the list below, half of these adaptations have received generally positive reviews from critics (indicated by green Metascores), which is actually a fairly good success rate: through the middle of August, only 45% of all 2010 releases had green Metascores. Too bad it seems like people would rather stay home with their Kindles than go to the theaters to see most of these movies.

Films Adapted from Novels, 2010

	Movie	Metascore		Box Office (U.S. only)
1	The Ghost Writer	77		15.5
2	The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo	76		10.0
3	How to Train Your Dragon	74		217.6
4	The Town	73		tbd
5	Never Let Me Go	68		tbd
6	The Girl Who Played with Fire	66		6.9 *
7	Shutter Island	63		128.0
8	Youth in Revolt	63		15.3
9	The American	61		29.6 *
10	The Twilight Saga: Eclipse	58		299.8 *
11	Diary of a Wimpy Kid	56		64.0
12	Ramona and Beezus	56		25.5 *
13	Alice in Wonderland	53		334.2
14	Percy Jackson... The Lightning Thief	47		88.8
15	Flipped	45		1.4 *
16	Dear John	43		80.0
17	Charlie St. Cloud	37		31.2 *
18	Repo Men	32		13.8

* Movie is still in theaters.

Even good bands release subpar albums

An off year for Blonde Redhead

While September so far is proving to be a relatively strong month for new music after an uneventful late summer, it's not without its disappointments. Below, we look at albums released during the past few weeks by artists who usually score higher. (And, yes, we know we picked on Interpol last week too; we promise to leave them alone next week.)