I just noticed this now, but The Hollywood Reporter‘s review of The Nativity Story also went up yesterday — and, like the Variety review, it manages to make two errors in a single sentence: [Mary’s] aging cousin Elizabeth (Oscar-nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo) is experiencing a similar miracle, newly pregnant by her equally ancient husband Zechariah (Stanley Townsend), a priest. Mary convinces her parents to allow her to visit the pious couple to sort out her life. It is here she experiences... Read more

Say what you will about Al Gore and his climate-change seminar-on-film An Inconvenient Truth, but you gotta love this ad for the DVD, starring Gore and Futurama‘s Bender. Read more

Nikke Finke of Deadline Hollywood on the latest developments regarding the film version of Angels & Demons, the prequel — or will it be a sequel, kind of like how the old James Bond movies told Ian Fleming’s stories all out of order? — to The Da Vinci Code: I’m told that Akiva Goldsman, who adapted Dan Brown’s worldwide bestseller into a $755.6 mil hit pic, is receiving $4 million for the Da Vinci Code sequel in the works by... Read more

I have heard some people say that the makers of The Nativity Story might have cast an actor in his mid-20s as Joseph, rather than the older man depicted in the vast majority of traditional iconography, because audiences wouldn’t accept a teenager marrying a guy in his 40s. I wonder, though. Did anyone object when Alan Rickman (who was 49 at the time) wooed Kate Winslet (who was 19 at the time) in Sense and Sensibility (1995)? Read more

Variety has posted Todd McCarthy’s review of The Nativity Story, and the first sentences give you a sense of where he’s going: Memories of dreary Sunday school classes come flooding back courtesy of “The Nativity Story.” Earnestly Hallmark-worthy to a fault, this stodgy addition to the cinematic religious revival gravy train offers only a bit of Year One location realism to distinguish it from films of its kind made in the ’50s and early ’60s, though at least then it... Read more

My review of Emilio Estevez’s Bobby is now up at CT Movies. Since I mention Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days (2000), here’s a link to my review of that film for the Vancouver Courier. One thing I don’t get into in my review of Bobby is the recurring “reunion” aspect of it. Martin Sheen and Laurence Fishburne — together again for the first time since Apocalypse Now (1979)! (Though I don’t think they share any screen time — and, okay, they... Read more

One of the people I spoke to at the Nativity Story junket nine days ago was Shohreh Aghdashloo, the Iranian actress who plays Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. Near the end of our interview, she mentioned a film that I had never heard of before: SA: As a matter of fact, I found out that the only place that they had made a film about Saint Mary is in Iran, and I got my hands on it, and... Read more

The original The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) DVDs came with TV specials, music videos, and web featurettes. The extended editions came with extensive documentaries on the making of each film, each one lasting six hours, give or take. The limited editions that came out earlier this year included brand-new documentaries by Costa Botes. And now comes word that there may be a fourth set of extras, for the inevitable HD release. From IGN.com’s interview with Michael Pellerin, producer of... Read more

From Time magazine’s recent story on The Nativity Story: Despite the challenges of reconciling Scripture with story, casting actors to play icons, constructing a Christ-era Nazareth in the Italian countryside, wrangling donkeys and camels, and figuring out how to market the first major-studio Bible epic since the genre’s peak in the 1950s and ’60s with films like The Ten Commandments, The Nativity Story will arrive in theaters on Dec. 1, just about a year to the day after Rich started... Read more

Click here to read his reasons why not. (Hat tip to Jeffrey Overstreet at the Looking Closer Journal, who is already recommending another director for The Hobbit.) UPDATE: Jeffrey Wells says New Line Cinema dumping Peter Jackson “is a reflection of the this year’s sea-change attitude among distributors and producers towards coddled, overpaid wunderkind types like Jackson — big-name talents who get rich deals for themselves and their production companies, after which they go off and strain or exceed the... Read more