Tyler Perry, Reese Witherspoon | featured news

Twentieth Century Fox's Rio 3D may be about a bird, but Friday numbers show "it's holding like a rock," a studio exec just emailed me. Lionsgate's latest in Tyler Perry's franchise, Madea's Big Happy Family, looks soft compared to his others but it's not in very wide release and and its per screen average of $4,620 was the best of all the top-grossing pictures Friday... But overperforming is Fox's Water For Elephants based on Sara Gruen's best-selling book and written by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Francis Lawrence.

This week at the movies we've got a big-top romance (Water for Elephants, starring Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson); a maternal fixer (Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family, starring Loretta Devine and Bow Wow), and familial felines (African Cats, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson). What do the critics have to say? Nowadays, the word "melodrama" is mostly used pejoratively, but it wasn't always so: melodramas were the stock-in-trade of great directors like George Cukor and Douglas Sirk.