Scarlett Johansson’s Strong Weekend at the Box Office

Scarlett Johansson has two box office hits this weekend with Captain America and more surprisingly, Under the Skin, which had a per screen average of $35,000. Under the Skin is enjoying mostly great reviews but the positive ones are very positive, with nine scores of 100 at Metacritic. Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir wrote of Under the Skin:

One of the many startling things about “Under the Skin” is how complicated and distressing a story can be told with almost no dialogue and absolutely no explanation or back story. On one level this is a horrifying, surreal and possibly allegorical tale about male-female relationships and the link between sex and the death wish, and on another it’s a work of downscale British social realism where you can feel the damp and the cold, the dismal blocks of “council flats” (i.e., public housing) and the second-rate suburban houses. We experience the sometimes barren, sometimes beautiful Scottish landscape alongside Johansson’s character, whose adopted persona is that of a woman from England running some complicated family errand that’s gone awry. In one of the movie’s most memorable sequences, when Johansson appears to be struggling with the costs and consequences of her assumed human identity, Daniel Landin’s camera adopts her point of view, moving through the ordinary street life of Glasgow, all those shoppers and office workers and pubgoers unaware of the monster in their midst.