The box office returns for Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side may have been less than stellar, but the ever-prolific New Yorker roared back with Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson, the exhilarating profile of the renegade journalist whose self-destructive tendencies eventually got the better of him. But in this US Presidential Election year, let's not forget Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Thompson's classic hyperkinetic chronicle of the 1972 campaign.

Gonzo joins four other films-Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed ($7,690,545), Shine A Light ($5,371,629), Young @ Heart ($3,913,229) and Up the Yangtse ($1,228,486)-as having passed that sacred $1 million mark, a holy grail so elusive for documentaries in recent years. Now, I did not see Expelled, but I suspect that its success is attributed to a carefully marketed, Passion-esque campaign to its target audience: conservative proponents of intelligent design. Indeed, the marketing team behind Passion of the Christ, Motive Entertainment, also handled the campaign for Expelled. I have commented on Shine A Light and Young@Heart in an earlier post, but I will add that while Boxofficemojo does not include concert films, citing Woodstock as an example, it does include Shine A Light, which is much more of a concert film than Woodstock is. With Up the Yangtse, I take my cues from Docsider's Mark Rabinowitz, who includes the box office tallies from Canada-the film was produced by the National Film Board of Canada--in the mix. But at $624K, Up the Yangtse is a happy 25th birthday present to US distributor Zeitgeist Films, which opens with the kudos-laden Trouble the Water next week.

Knocking at the seven-digit door at $724K is Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, from THINKFilm, praying for a miracle with its presumably penultimate release of 08, since the highly praised Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired is barely registering at $43,000. I had been monitoring the release of this film all year, believing that HBO's homeopathic strategy, post-Sundance, of screening it only at Cannes and for an Oscar-qualifying run in Manhattan's Washington Heights prior to its June airing might create an even greater demand for the film than had the film run the festival circuit. One can only wonder how Polanski might have fared in better capitalized hands.

Look for Man on Wire and American Teen to continue to surge this summer, despite the lure of the Beijing Olympics on the small screen.

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures