Lou Lumenick of the New York Post says Saw IV, which opens this weekend, “is not being screened in advance, natch”. No surprise there, since Saw III wasn’t screened for critics either. I can’t recall if Saw II was. I do know that the original Saw is the only film in this series that I have seen, and that is because there was a press screening for that one, way, way back in 2004. Read more

Remember Angels & Demons, the sequel or prequel (depending on how the movie adapts the novel) to The Da Vinci Code? Variety reports that Ron Howard is rushing it into production: As Hollywood scrambles to make deals before the Oct. 31 expiration of the WGA pact, one fast-tracked project has almost flown under the radar — though it could become one of the biggest films assembled during this frenzied period. Columbia has formalized a February start in Europe for “Angels... Read more

When 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days — Cristian Mungiu’s masterful film about a woman and her friend trying to procure an illegal abortion in 1980s Romania — won the Palme D’Or at Cannes earlier this year, a number of people wrote as though the film took some sort of implicitly pro-choice stance (“if only abortion had been legal in Romania at that time, these women would not have had to go to such lengths, or allow themselves to... Read more

The Hollywood Reporter says Randall Wallace — the screenwriter of Braveheart (1995; my comments), Pearl Harbor (2001; my review) and the upcoming Atlas Shrugged, and the director of The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) and We Were Soldiers (2002; my article) — has been tapped to direct The Arcanum: Adapted from Wheeler’s debut novel, the 1919-set story follows Arthur Conan Doyle as he leads a secret society known as the Arcanum — whose members include magician Harry Houdini, voodoo... Read more

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest. Across the Universe — CDN $2,390,000 — N.AM $16,767,000 — 14.3%Elizabeth: The Golden Age — CDN $1,390,000 — N.AM $11,213,000 — 12.4%Rendition — CDN $470,993 — N.AM $4,175,000 — 11.3%We Own the Night — CDN $2,190,000 — N.AM $19,784,000 — 11.1%The Heartbreak Kid — CDN $3,160,000 — N.AM $32,111,000 —... Read more

I’ve been meaning to mention this ever since Chris at Movie Marketing Madness posted the trailers below back in July, but it kept slipping my mind. Anyway, following the mixed blessing that was Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie (2002; my review) — it bankrupted the producers, but it remains by far the top-grossing independent evangelical movie ever made — the owners of the VeggieTales franchise have decided to forge ahead with a follow-up called The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything. The... Read more

Variety reports: Superman needs some ideas for what his next adventure might be. “Superman Returns” scribes Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris have opted not to come back and pen a sequel to the 2006 summer pic that would have reunited them with helmer Bryan Singer. The three also worked together on “X2: X-Men United.” As a result, WB is now taking pitches for Supe’s next outing from other scribes — just as the studio is trying to figure out which... Read more

Time for a few more quick updates. 1. Will Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), the documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now (1979) that was sorely missing from the recent so-called “complete dossier” edition of that film, finally come out on DVD next month? It seems that way, but co-director George Hickenlooper is annoyed that he was left out of the loop — and he fears that Francis Ford Coppola may have made changes to the film “so... Read more

I saw Luis Buñuel’s The Milky Way (1969) for the first time ever last night, and I liked it a lot, though I will definitely have to see it again and do some reading — on both the film and the various theological debates that it refers to — before I can comment on it in any detail. In the meantime, I was amused to see that I remembered just enough of my high-school French to catch a play-on-words that... Read more

There are lots of great links at the Close-Up Blog-a-thon, hosted by the group blog The House Next Door. One that jumps out at me is this post by Tim Lucas at the Video WatchBlog, on a couple of shots in Ingmar Bergman‘s Persona (1966) that are eerily similar to a couple of shots in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Both films feature subliminal glimpses of a demonic figure: And both films feature close-ups of a face, half of which... Read more