Cloverfield, the latest giant monster movie, is getting some surprisingly decent reviews from critics who usually love to lay in to disaster movies of any sort. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, for example, concedes that it "is actually pretty scary at times." Ebert complains mostly about the hand-held footage, which he says was shot in "Queasy-Cam." (It's supposed to represent home movie footage taken by the monster's victims.) Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times observes, "Cloverfield is adept at wringing maximum suspense and might have reached the heights of the Korean monster film The Host but for the limitations of the camcorder ploy. While it injects the film with a run-and-gun urgency, the device grows tiresome and ultimately leaves the film shortchanged." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, however, suggests that even at 84 minutes, the movie may run too long: "The film is too dumb to offend anything except your intelligence," she writes, "and the monster does cut a satisfying swath through the cast, so your only complaint may be, What took it so long?"

27 Dresses, starring Katherine Heigl of Knocked Up and Grey's Anatomy fame, is receiving a good dressing down from most critics. "This by-the-numbers romantic comedy is the kind of rote exercise that can give a genre a bad name," says Los Angeles Times critic Carina Chocano. Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal gives it just that, dismissing it as a "half-hatched chick flick" -- although he does credit Heigl for managing "to make her character endearing, as well as borderline -- believable." Indeed, Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News comments, "Anyone watching this appealing actress march toward the inevitable will wonder why she's settling for so much less than she deserves." And Claudia Puig in USA Today says that the movie is like one of the 27 bridesmaid dresses featured in the film: "frothy, predictable and over the top."

Critics are suggesting that Woody Allen has plunged off the track again with Cassandra's Dream. While acknowledging that the movie is "perfectly watchable," Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times observes that it's nothing to get excited about. "Perched uncomfortably between thriller and melodrama, it's a film that hints at possibilities that are left unfulfilled," he writes. Likewise Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News suggests that while there's nothing particularly bad about the movie, there's little that's particularly commendable, either. "Overall, Dream is a fairly engaging ethical thriller with some excellent bits, but the plot could have been more clever," he remarks. Several critics point out that like his most recent films, there's nothing particularly funny about Cassandra's Dream, leading Claudia Puig in USA Today to remark: "We're not asking that he return to the silly-funny turf of his early movies. (He tried that with some success in Scoop.) But he seems so obsessed with making movies about ordinary people getting away with murder that he appears to be stuck in a rut."

A film titled Mad Money that stars Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes sounds like the kind that should draw just about every female moviegoer to the box office. But critics suggest that's not likely to happen. Even the female critics have few kind words for it. Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News asks, "Why would so many accomplished women waste their time and talents on a movie as counterfeit as Mad Money?" Claudia Puig in USA Today comments, "This lifeless comedy and uninventive caper feels as if it were cobbled together at a studio's obligatory consciousness-raising diversity seminar." As for the male critics, most of them post implied warnings to their gender to avoid it. Kyle Smith in the New York Post writes that director Callie Khouri "achieves a level of overall drabness suggesting Saturday afternoon at your local Wal-Mart, in whose $2.99 bins you will soon be finding the DVD of this movie."

Revelations that most of the screenplay of American Gangster is based on rumors and speculation and contains untrue accounts of what actually occurred could crush the film's Oscar chances, the Associated Press observed Thursday in a feature story that contradicted many of the allegations in the movie. The wire service noted, for example, that Frank Lucas, the '70s' drug lord depicted in the movie by Denzel Washington, never employed caskets of Vietnam casualties to smuggle heroin and never provided information that led to the arrests of narcotics officers. A.P. quoted Judge Sterling Johnson Jr., a special narcotics prosecutor in Lucas's case, as saying, "The picture is 1 percent reality and 99 percent Hollywood." Former DEA agent Jack Toal told A.P.: "[Lucas] was my informant for years. ... He never mentioned any crooked DEA agent or cop." Lucas himself was quoted as saying, "I never testified on nobody." He also dismissed the suggestion that New Jersey police detective Richard Roberts, played by Russell Crowe, was the person who brought him down. "They wanted a white boy," Lucas said of the character.

In Thursday's edition of Studio Briefing we suggested that Warner Bros.' decision to release I Am Legend on HD DVD on April 8 appeared to be inconsistent with its announcement that it was abandoning the HD DVD format. In its original statement, however, Warner Bros. indicated that it would continue releasing films in both the Blu-ray and HD DVD formats through April.

All eyes turned to the Writers Guild of America Thursday after the Directors Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers concluded a three-year agreement that significantly raised the directors' residuals payments for shows sold on the Internet. In a statement, DGA President Michael Apted said, "This was a very difficult negotiation that required real give-and-take on both sides." In a separate statement, alliance President Nick Counter said, "Both parties were determined to focus on the core issues that are most important to all of us." Counter's remarks appeared to be a jab at the writers, who had insisted on putting demands for jurisdiction over reality shows and animation on the negotiating table, matters the AMPTP had refused to consider. Under the agreement with the directors, the studios and production companies will pay a residual of about $600 whenever ads are sold on a one-hour program that is streamed over the Internet for more than 17 days. Additional payments are spelled out for programs that are streamed for more than 26 weeks. The deal also essentially doubles the residual rate for paid downloads of TV shows and movies, based on distributors' grosses, after the first 100,000 downloads (50,000 in the case of feature films). The New York Times reported today (Friday) that a $2-million study commissioned by the DGA determined that producers will continue to earn a negligible amount of revenue from digital media until at least 2010. Thursday's agreement also calls for doubling the residual rate on DVDs. Nevertheless, the WGA has made it clear that it will act independently in negotiating a deal with the studios and will not be bound by the terms of a DGA deal. Asked about the deal, Writers Guild of America West President Patric Verrone said cryptically, "I don't want to prejudge it." Doug Allen, executive director of the Screen Actors Guild, which is also due to begin talks with the producers, said that he had only seen a press release and wanted to see "more specifics." Nevertheless, many analysts commented that it was unlikely that the writers would be able to negotiate a separate deal that would be more lucrative than the one with the directors.

As if labor difficulties between the unions and the producers were not unsettling enough, a dispute between the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists became more rancorous Thursday after SAG leaders sent messages to the membership urging that they vote to allow the union's board to terminate a joint bargaining agreement with AFTRA negotiated 27 years ago. The message accused AFTRA of launching an "assault" on contracts for basic cable "by offering producers cheaper contracts with less money for actors, usually with 10-15 free exhibition days, effectively eliminating residuals for one year after an episode airs." AFTRA has said that SAG demands are unrealistic and that numerous showings are required before an original cable drama can attract an audience the size of a broadcast network's.

Columbia University, which hands out the annual Alfred I. duPont Awards for Journalism Excellence each year, presented one award Wednesday night to NBC's Dateline and another award to a Texas TV station for a feature that condemned the NBC magazine show. Dateline received the award for an August 2006 feature titled "The Education of Ms Groves," about a neophyte Atlanta teacher's struggles with her first-grade class. Shortly thereafter, an award was presented to Dallas TV station WFAA, an ABC affiliate, for a feature titled "Television Justice," which condemned Dateline's "To Catch a Predator" series. TV Newser reported Thursday that several NBC executives, including NBC News President Steve Capus, walked out of the ceremony before the WFAA award was presented, then returned afterwards.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams acknowledged Wednesday night that he and other reporters on the program have sometimes mispronounced Nevada as "Nuh-VAH-duh," rather than -- as the locals do -- "Nuh-VAA-duh" -- something that angers Nevadans who flooded the network with complaints. In a lead-in to a story by George Lewis, Williams said, "We haven't always said it the same way and there is a correct way." Lewis then warned presidential candidates campaigning in the state that they had better pronounce the state's name correctly or lose votes. Valerie Fridland, a sociolinguist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told the Reno Gazette-Journal, "News anchors make a big effort to correctly pronounce the names of places around the world, so when they don't do it in their own country, people get upset." The Associated Press quoted Josh Guenter, pronunciation editor for the Merriam-Webster dictionary company as saying, "People in other states have become upset, but I've never heard of a national flap over it like this." [Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has yet to master the pronunciation of "California."]