X-Men: The Last Stand had one of the biggest openings of all time last week, and The Break-Up, a badly-reviewed “anti-romantic comedy”, is the only new wide release this week. So it’s easy to see why the Hollywood Reporter predicted, on Thursday: After its $123 million opening last weekend, 20th Century Fox’s third “X-Men” movie is a shoo-in for the top spot again, while Universal’s “Break-Up” will vie for the second slot with Sony’s “The Da Vinci Code” and Paramount’s... Read more

My review of The Break-Up is now up at CT Movies. Read more

I don’t subscribe to Variety, so I don’t know all the details, but I can make out enough of this article‘s first sentence to figure out that David Wain, director of Wet Hot American Summer (2001), will soon be shooting The Ten, a spoof of The Ten Commandments (1956) starring Paul Rudd, Amanda Peet and Jessica Alba. Which reminds me, I have still never seen Wholly Moses! (1980), the Dudley Moore vehicle that came out shortly after Monty Python’s Life... Read more

Blimey, I had forgotten just how stupid Superman II (1980) is. In anticipation of Superman Returns, which comes out next month, I have been watching the Christopher Reeve films. A couple weeks ago, I watched the original Superman (1978) and was struck by how much potential it had — though the potential was already being squandered, even then. The stuff on Krypton with Marlon Brando was a little too serious, and the stuff with Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty yukking... Read more

Another movie about the 1994 Rwanda massacre is in the works, according to a press release I received today. This one will star Quebecois star Roy Dupuis (The Barbarian Invasions, La Femme Nikita, etc.) as Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, and it will be based on Dallaire’s memoir Shake Hands with the Devil, which was already turned into a documentary in 2004. The director will be Ottawa-born Roger Spottiswoode, whose credits include the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and... 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. Deep Sea 3-D — CDN $1,138,590 — N.AM $9,353,786 — 12.2%The Da Vinci Code — CDN $16,445,661 — N.AM $136,481,000 — 12.0%Mission: Impossible III — CDN $12,323,982 — N.AM $113,967,000 — 10.8%Just My Luck — CDN $1,443,533 — N.AM $13,457,000 — 10.7%RV — CDN $5,204,496 — N.AM $55,955,000 — 9.3%Poseidon... Read more

Tomorrow is a holiday in the U.S., so today’s box-office estimates are even more approximate than usual, but even so, there is something about these figures that gets me wondering. BoxOfficeMojo.com says The Da Vinci Code dropped 56.5% from last weekend, while the DreamWorks cartoon Over the Hedge — the beneficiary of the so-called “other-cott” — dropped only 29.1%. Thus, whereas The Da Vinci Code made double what Over the Hedge made last week, this week it’s only made a... Read more

The newest issue of BC Christian News is now online, and with it, my film column, which is basically a review of The Da Vinci Code with some brief notes about Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, the upcoming remake of The Omen and Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), which, along with Guy Maddin and Isabella Rossellini’s My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005), comes to the Vancouver International Film Centre June 26-29. Read more

Mark Steyn has re-posted the obituary he wrote for Alec Guinness six years ago. He brings up that rather cute anecdote regarding the letter Guinness wrote to the editor in response to Steyn’s review of the Gwyneth Paltrow version of Emma (1996), and he mentions Guinness’s turns in various David Lean films — including Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and A Passage to India (1984) — as well as... Read more