My review of Munich is now up at CT Movies, as is my review of Casanova. Read more

I found the following note from the Canadian branch of Warner Brothers in my e-mail inbox this morning: Please remember that RUMOUR HAS IT… will be opening across Canada on December 25th!Please note that we are using the Canadian spelling of “Rumour” in Canada & we’d appreciate it if you would suppourt the Canadian message. Cute. So this is a “message” movie now, eh? FWIW, I did notice the different spelling in the ads when I went down to Los... Read more

Mel Gibson may not be starring in Apocalypto, his new action epic with dialogue in ancient Mayan. But he does appear in the film’s new teaser, apparently — though you have to be incredibly good at picking out subliminal images, or so says this website. FWIW, my laptop has been having trouble with QuickTime files lately, so I haven’t seen the online version of this teaser yet — but I did see the teaser in a theatre tonight, and I... Read more

Cheaper by the Dozen 2 opens today, and while I did write a brief review of the first film two years ago, I haven’t got much to say about the new one. I do, however, want to comment on one tiny detail. I appreciate the fact that this film has characters saying “Oh my goodness” and “Oh my gosh” instead of “Oh my God.” But the film’s carefulness in this area does make it all the more disappointing when, later... Read more

Canadian actor Barry Pepper first came to public prominence as the Bible-quoting sniper in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998). And now, according to a Los Angeles Times piece on Tommy Lee Jones’s upcoming film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, it looks like Pepper — who plays a “cruel, foul-mouthed border agent” in the new film — has had Bibles on the brain again: With Pepper, Jones gave the actor a rifle and sent him up to the mountains... Read more

My review of Fun with Dick and Jane is now up at CT Movies. CT also sent out a newsletter yesterday announcing their top ten stories of 2005, one of which is, of course, the film adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, at #10. The newsletter does not link to a specific story, though; instead, it links to a special section which has links to a variety of stories, including one by me... 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. Les Boys IV — CDN $963,688 — N.AM $963,688 — 100%Memoirs of a Geisha — CDN $282,138 — N.AM $2,274,320 — 12.4%Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — CDN $29,392,707 — N.AM $252,598,259 — 11.6%Just Friends — CDN $2,923,392 — N.AM $29,572,142 — 9.9%Syriana — CDN $1,953,137 — N.AM... Read more

Time for another round-up. The first three items are from Reuters. 1. Eyal Arad, one of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s top strategists, is helping to promote Steven Spielberg’s historical counter-terrorism film Munich in Israel. Interestingly, George Jonas’s Vengeance, the book on which the film is based, claims that Sharon, then a major-general, was present at the initial meeting between Prime Minister Golda Meir and “Avner”, and describes Sharon as one of Avner’s “early heroes” — but unless my ears... Read more