Lou Lumenick of the New York Post says Uwe Boll‘s In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, which opens across North America this Friday, “is not being screened in advance for critics.” That might be true in the United States, but the film — shot in Vancouver and produced by local company Brightlight Pictures — had a daytime press screening here back in December, and will have another preview screening tomorrow night. For what it’s worth, I... Read more

The newest issue of BC Christian News is now online, and with it, my film column, which looks mainly at I Am Legend but also includes brief notes on The Golden Compass and Year One. Read more

Time to round up a few news and commentary bits. 1. Is the high-def format war coming to an end? Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema have announced that they will go exclusively with Blu-Ray, and stop releasing films in the HD-DVD format; this boosts Blu-Ray’s exclusive marketshare to 70% and leaves only Universal and Paramount/DreamWorks releasing films in the HD-DVD format. Variety, IGN.com and Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood Daily, among other sites, have the details. 2. Kyle Smith... Read more

TrekMovie.com reports that Leonard Nimoy gave an interview recently in which he let slip an interesting detail about the new Star Trek movie, in which he will be one of the actors playing Spock. Check that site for the details, and for their possible significance in the context of the rest of the film. Read more

Last month, I asked whether mentioning a certain plot element in National Treasure: Book of Secrets could be considered a “spoiler”, since the plot element in question had been given away — and very explicitly so — in the early trailers for that film. At the time, some of my colleagues said they could not even remember those trailers, so from their point of view it was a “spoiler”. I was thus amused to read what David Pogue of the... Read more

ComingSoon.net reports that the pilot episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a version of which was leaked via the internet several months ago, will be made available online officially, at Yahoo! TV, for a 24-hour period starting late tonight. The pilot episode will be broadcast January 13 on the Fox network, and the second episode will follow just one night later. Variety has already posted a review of the two episodes, and while critic Brian Lowry cautions that the... Read more

Just to be fair, I should note that the headline on this post is only semi-true … I think. At any rate, one of my Canadian sources tells me that The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, the second theatrical film in the long-running VeggieTales franchise, will be screened for critics in the United States but not in Canada, even though the film is opening in both countries next Friday. But one of my American sources tells me he hasn’t heard... Read more

As a lifelong fan of Fantasia (1940), I was intrigued to learn today that the climactic ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ sequence in that film did not mark the first time that Modest Mussorgsky‘s rousing bit of music had been adapted by animators. There is at least one earlier version, produced in 1933 by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker and released under the title Une nuit sur le mont chauve: Click here if the video file above doesn’t play properly. (Hat... Read more

Vanity Fair has a new article on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with photos and interviews and a video of Annie Leibovitz taking her on-the-set pictures of Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, Karen Allen and, of course, Harrison Ford. An extensive section of the article deals with “the MacGuffin” and the central role it plays in the Indiana Jones films — as opposed to, say, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, where the MacGuffin is just a gimmick... Read more

Two years ago, I posted an item on Ultraviolet and several other movies which had not been screened for critics in the first two months of 2006; and then, as the year progressed and the ranks of such movies swelled, I posted updates to that original post. I then kept a similar list for 2007 — and now that 2008 is upon us, it is time to start a list for this year, too. Already, and as I noted here... Read more