In 1988, three gray whales were caught under Alaska's arctic ice with only a tiny open patch of water to come up for air. How to save their lives? Drill airholes in the ice all the way to the ocean. Big Miracle tracks the unified rescue effort between Alaska's indigenous people, Greenpeace activists, and the American and Soviet armed forces at the tail end of the Cold War—the Berlin Wall wouldn't fall for another two years. Vinessa Shaw plays Kelly Meyers, the White House aide who coordinated the whale rescue with President Ronald Reagan. After a few phone calls with Colonel Scott Boyer (Dermot Mulroney), who heads up the military's team, Meyers falls in love with a man she'd yet to meet.

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Crushing cars with your mind got you tired? Unwind with Boxoffice Weekly's coverage of Chronicle and meet the three young stars of the found footage teen superhero flick. We ask what superpower they'd love to have—and is Michael B. Jordan (The Wire) serious when he wishes he could be more like pre-meltdown Mel Gibson? And when editors Amy Nicholson and Phil Contrino squabble over the same question in You're Wrong, they realize the pitfalls of their favorite movie power could leave them with anger management problems or stuck hanging out with Bruce Willis for all eternity. (Which, come to think of it, wouldn't be so bad.

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This week sees the American premiere of W.E., Madonna's film about the love affair between Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), an ambitious American socialite, and Prince Edward VIII of England (James D'Arcy), who abdicates the throne to be with his beloved. Not surprisingly, the turn-of-the-century British public pillories the already twice-married Simpson for shacking up with the one member of the royal family not obsessed with corgis, but at least seven decades later she'll win the rapt admiration of WALL-E Wally (Abbie Cornish), a contemporary New York woman trapped in a loveless marriage. The awkwardly titled—and impossible to Google—film is Madonna's second historical biopic after Evita (1996).

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BOXOFFICE.COM FEATURED INDEPENDENT FILM:

The Innkeepers
Ti West's last horror, The House of the Devil, was a glorious, high-anxiety throwback to '80s VHS screams. His newest, The Innkeepers, offers a different kind of entry into the past—he's less fixated on his period setting and more intrigued by the dangers of history, especially when you shake the walls of a long-haunted inn on the eve of its final vacancy.
Director: Ti West
Writer: Ti West
Stars: Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis

Indie

Bad Fever

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In 2009, Ben Wheatley made the film Down Terrace, a bleak little comedy about two ex-convicts consumed with finding out who got them nicked. Since then, it's seemed as if Wheatley himself was poised to be snatched up by Hollywood, and his new film Kill List all but guarantees he'll be guilty of moving on to even bigger things. Boxoffice caught up with Wheatley via telephone during the South by Southwest Film festival, where his film was the first among the festival's SX Fantastic sidebar to find distribution. In addition to talking about his conception of Kill List, Wheatley examined the underlying techniques that tied together the film's disparate ideas, and offered a few insights on where he and his career might go from here.

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In Chronicle, three high school kids find themselves blessed—and cursed—with fantastic super powers. Two of them, Matt (Alex Russell) and Steve (Michael B. Jordan) are already cool. But the third, Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is an angry geek who first uses his gifts to get popular, and then everything goes wrong. What makes them destroys them, a fitting metaphor for the perils of fame, if these three young actors think about it. We sat down with guys to find out for ourselves if they can handle it if Chronicle is a hit, and in the process compared their performing art school upbringings with this flick's normal teenage take on senior year, and most importantly, asked them super powers they'd like to have.

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Haunted hotels get a reboot in the indie thriller The Innkeepers. Sara Paxton plays Claire, a listless twenty-something desk clerk who teams up with her co-worker Luke (Pat Healy) to find ghosts in their spooky New England inn, the Yankee Pedlar. Though things get truly scary, Paxton's wide-eyed, girl-next-door, disarming sense of humor has a way of defusing tension between ghostvattacks, kind of like the way she charmed audiences in Shark Night even while her friends were getting chewed up by fish. Boxoffice met up with Paxton at the Beverly Hills' posh SLS hotel—a sweet suite that's probably never seen a haunting, although Paxton's manager lurked nearby to offer casting advice.

That's a fancy chair you're sitting in.

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