In last year's ensemble comedic caper Tower Heist, disgruntled employees in a luxury building decide to embark on a criminal enterprise evening the score after their ultra-wealthy boss cons them all in a massive Ponzi scheme.  In the spirit of the film, which arrives on Blu-ray and DVD this week, a sampling of the abundant bonus features from Tower Heist are available online now, after being successfully heisted from the Blu-ray (heisted with the explicit permission of Universal Pictures, of course).

Traditionally, the weekend following Thanksgiving's extended vacation is one of unremarkable box office performances, as the nation is content to unbutton its collective top button and sit back to the let the turkey settle in its system, while also lamenting the loss of delicious leftovers.  This year is no different, with no major wide releases in multiplexes to truly shake up the dynamics of last weekend.  With no new competition and generally tame showings from existing competitors, then, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 continued its dominance of the domestic box office, accomplishing a couple of franchise feats in the process.  The Muppets, meanwhile, slowed down considerably, and Hugo hopped up to the third place after rolling out in more theaters.

When we're not mercilessly trampling helpless employees or pepper-spraying our fellow citizens in order to ensure that we get the cheapest possible consumer goods, the citizens of this great land are wont to see movies during their Thanksgiving holiday away from work. This is doubtlessly owed, in large part, to the fact that Thanksgiving is a holiday that necessitates much familial contact, and going to the movies is an efficient means of spending two hours in the dark without actually having to talk to your family.  A preponderance of new family-oriented releases over the holiday couldn't derail The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, with the sequel dominating the American box office in its second weekend, outgrossing The Muppets, Hugo, and Arthur Christmas.

This week, in entirely predictable box office news, a giant dump truck filled with money beep-beep-beepingly backed up to Summit Entertainment headquarters and dropped almost $140 million on the lawn, thanks to the distributor's most lucrative and heavily-hyped franchise.  On Friday the fourth installment of the Twilight franchise debuted almost three years to day after the first film landed in theaters, and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 demonstrated that, with one sequel left, the series is still kicking commercially.  The weekend's other new wide release, Happy Feet Two, didn't do quite so excellently right out of the gate, while the return of Alexander Payne had a ridiculously strong per-screen average in limited release.

Variety, as has been said innumerable times since some guy or girl first saw fit to utter the phrase, is the spice of life.  From sea to shining sea, Americans had no shortage of variety amongst the three major new releases in theaters on Friday.  There was a little something for everyone, from the visual buffet of a Greek mythological action epic to the sight of a comedy superstar in a wig to one of the biggest movie stars in the world portraying an oh-so controversial 20th Century law enforcement official.  Of those three new releases, two were anchored by familiar actors working very much within their respective wheelhouses, yet it was Immortals, a film that did not have the comforting presence of Adam Sandler in drag or Leonardo DiCaprio in old age makeup, that indisputably dominated the US box office over the last several days.

Over the last decade in particular, a wide release tends to be deemed a success or failure just a couple of days, sometimes even a couple of hours.  Studio marketing is focused so wholly on the first three days of a theatrical exhibition, and it's just so entertaining and easy to judge a film based on an immediate and competitive metric such as weekend box office estimates.  This discounts that it's basically a miracle that any movie actually gets made, and that success or failure is far, far more intricate and interesting than an opening weekend haul.  Even in purely financial terms, this weekend provides a welcome reminder, as Puss in Boots held on to first place for the second consecutive weekend, retaining a shocking amount of its opening audience. 

Like a watch that's expensive enough to steal, a proper heist movie is intricate and precise, with interconnected components working in harmony together to create a compelling story that always stays ahead of an audience's expectations.  The structure of many films in this subgenre provide a template for an ensemble in which every character contributes something specific to the larger narrative goal while also populating the cast with unique personalities, all sharing the same basic motivation but clashing nonetheless.

As the title so succinctly conveys, Tower Heist is most definitely a heist movie.  In the film, which hits theaters tomorrow, a group of hardworking hotel employees who discover that they've been the victims of a craven Ponzi scheme executed by a ridiculously wealthy, slick bastard, played by Alan Alda.  With the schemer under house arrest in his lavish penthouse residence, a cast of characters played by Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick, Casey Affleck, Gabourey Sidibe, and Michael Pena conspire to exact revenge by robbing him blind.  In honor of Tower Heist and its tremendous ensemble cast, our latest Rogue 10 is a collection of characters who basically steal their respective heist movies, those irreplaceable and awesome characters who could support their own solo adventures with ease.

Almost any proper heist movie is populated by an ensemble of unique characters, each playing a crucial and distinct role in the unfolding of a cleverly-constructed scheme to defraud a deserving bad guy of as much cash as possible.  The title Tower Heist should tip audiences off to the fact that the action comedy is a proper heist movie, but a new lineup of six character posters from the film leave absolutely no room for confusion.  Each poster shows a member of the cast along with the job in stealing a whole mess of cash from a Ponzi-scheming jerk confined to house arrest in his penthouse.  Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy lead things off as "The Mastermind" and "The Convict," respectively, while Gabourey Sidibe, Tea Leoni, Casey Affleck, and Matthew Broderick all get posters of their own.

Synopsis: Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy lead an all-star cast in Tower Heist, a comedy caper about working stiffs who seek revenge on the Wall Street swindler who stiffed them. After the workers at a luxury Central Park condominium discover the penthouse billionaire has stolen their retirement, they plot the ultimate revenge: a heist to reclaim what he took from them. Queens native Josh Kovacs (Stiller) has managed one of the most luxurious and well-secured residences in New York City for more than a decade. Under his watchful eye, nothing goes undetected. In the swankiest unit atop Josh's building, Wall Street titan Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) is under house arrest after being caught stealing two billion from his investors. The hardest hit among those he defrauded? The tower staffers whose pensions he was entrusted to manage. With only days before Arthur gets away with the perfect crime, Josh's crew turns to petty crook Slide (Murphy) to plan the nearly impossible...to steal what they are sure is hidden in Arthur's guarded condo. Though amateurs, these rookie thieves know the building better than anyone. Turns out they've been casing the place for years, they just didn't know it.

Fox Searchlight Pictures along with Camelot Pictures are set to release Margaret on Friday, September 30^th to limited platform release.  With a stellar cast that includes Anna Paquin (True Blood), Allison Janney (The Help), Matthew Broderick (Tower Heist), Matt Damon (Contagion), Kieran Culkin (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and Mark Ruffalo (The Avengers), the film centers on a seventeen year-old New York City high school student, Lisa Cohen (played by Paquin), who is convinced that she has inadvertently played a role in a bus accident in Manhattan’s Upper West Side that caused a woman’s horrific death.

Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count On Me, which was nominated for two Academy Awards), and produced by the late director Sydney Pollack (Three Days of the Condor), Gary Gilbert and Scott Rudin with the late director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) as executive producer, the film takes the audience along on the tumultuous journey as she tries to make things right.  Met with opposition at every turn as she takes legal action against the bus driver (Ruffalo), she is torn apart with guilt as revelations about telling the truth in the real world prove frustrating and disappointing.