Conan The Barbarian, Fright Night | featured news

“The Help” continues to clean up at the box office, taking over the No. 1 spot with $20.5 million in its second weekend. The drama about Southern black maids had debuted in second-place a week earlier. “The Help” raised its domestic total to $71.8 million and bumped “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” which slipped to No. 2 with $16.3 million after two weekends at the top.

Every one of my sources had a different Top 5 list all day -- and there wasn't even a consensus until tonight that DreamWorks' holdover The Help (which needs none) is Friday's No. 1 movie. The problem was that the new releases -- Dimension/Weinstein Co's Spy Kids 4D, Nu Image/Millenium/Lionsgate's Conan The Barbarian, and DreamWorks/Disney's Fright Night are all bunched together behind another holdover, Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.

This week at the movies, we've got a heroic strongman (Conan the Barbarian, starring Jason Momoa and Rachel Nichols), pint-sized agents (Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D, starring Jessica Alba and Joel McHale), scary neighbors (Fright Night, starring Anton Yelchin and Colin Farrell), and part-time lovers (One Day, starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess). What do the critics have to say? The 1982 Conan the Barbarian became a seminal entry in the sword-and-sorcery subgenre, maiking Arnold Schwarzenegger a star in the process.