My review of The Da Vinci Code is now up at CT Movies. It was originally going to run tomorrow, when the film comes out, but when all the mainstream critics started piling on the movie today, my editors decided to accelerate the publication of this piece. Read more

Eight days ago, I said that I had probably written the last of my pre-release articles on The Da Vinci Code. Turns out I was wrong — I got a call from the Georgia Staight on Monday afternoon asking if I could whip something up overnight. The result is here. Can you guess which paragraph got expanded in the editing? FWIW, I’ve got some more Da Vinci Code newsbites stored up, but I’m too busy working on my review right... Read more

Flipping through the press notes for The Da Vinci Code tonight, I spotted this, on pages 21 and 22 — but if you haven’t got a copy, don’t worry, it’s also available at RottenTomatoes.com: The Priory of Sion In his novel, The Da Vinci Code, author Dan Brown contends that the Priory of Sion is a real organization founded in 1099, and that parchments housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris reveal that its membership included many leading figures of... Read more

My sources tell me that Catherine Hardwicke’s Nativity, formerly The Nativity, is now going by the name The Nativity Story. This is beginning to remind me of how The Passion became The Passion of Christ before it became The Passion of the Christ … One of my colleagues says the new title makes the story sound “fictional”, but I can think of a few fact-based movies that have the word “story” in their titles, such as The Colditz Story (1955)... Read more

Well, not quite. The critics at the Cannes festival saw the film today — and they didn’t care for it, according to a Reuters report (“the reaction at the first press screening in Cannes was largely negative, and loud laughter broke out at one of the pivotal scenes”). But, as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times items linked at GetReligion.org note, it is still highly, highly unusual to hide such a big, big movie from the media until... 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. Mission: Impossible III — CDN $8,613,951 — N.AM $85,100,142 — 10.1%Scary Movie 4 — CDN $7,964,254 — N.AM $86,454,340 — 9.2%Ice Age: The Meltdown — CDN $16,700,313 — N.AM $187,570,805 — 8.9%Just My Luck — CDN $500,909 — N.AM $5,692,285 — 8.8%Silent Hill — CDN $3,896,010 — N.AM $44,490,566 —... Read more

Reuters reports: A powerful organization of Indian Islamic clerics promised on Monday to help Christian groups launch protests if the authorities did not ban the screening of the controversial film, “The Da Vinci Code.” Protest in India against the film have so far been low key, but several Catholic groups have threatened to stage street demonstrations and even to shut down cinema halls screening it. . . . In India, leaders of the two communities met politicians and police in... Read more

To all those people who wondered why the scene of Biggs on Yavin 4 was restored to the “special edition” of Star Wars, but not the scene of Biggs on Tatooine … here it is; theorize at will! UPDATE: I haven’t had a chance to check this site out in any depth yet, but apparently more scenes like this are available here. Read more

The Da Vinci Code star Tom Hanks tells the Evening Standard: If you are going to take any sort of movie at face value, particularly a huge-budget motion picture like this, you’d be making a very big mistake. I guess we should all keep this in mind the next time we see Apollo 13 (1995), Saving Private Ryan (1998) and so on…? In the meantime, here are some other recent related news items: Da Vinci Code music – not the... Read more