It's the question of the week. Lionsgate took a considerable risk in snapping up Oliver Stone's rushed-to-production W. with the plan of releasing it just a couple weeks before the election, when the country -- and especially the film's target audience -- has already been living and breathing presidential politics for months. On the other hand, Lionsgate's marketing effort has been very solid, giving the jokes and conventional wisdom (Bush as a beer-guzzling frat boy, etc.) plenty of play while successfully pitching it as a serious historical saga. I think they've succeeded in making people curious, which is the best they could have hoped for. And the positive buzz that has started to surround the film in the last week or so will only help.

So let's talk turkey. How much money will W., opening on 2,000 screens with Max Payne as its main competition, make this weekend? There's no real precedent for this, so the prediction is very difficult. Stone's World Trade Center managed to open to $18 million despite the subject matter, though it had 1,000 more screens to work with. I could be way off, but I still think this release is precarious enough that $15 million would be a big victory, and $10 million not a disappointment. I suspect the reality will be somewhere between those two numbers.

What do you think? Do people want to see this? Will they actually be able to bring themselves to go?

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
The big release this week is, undoubtedly, the latest adventures of Indiana Jones. There are so many fan goodies involved with this release, that you can check out our previous two posts for specifics -- one for the disc extras and one for the collectible extras. As for the film itself -- it's gotten a lot of banter about its plusses and minuses, but in the end, it's still 77% fresh. So basically, this is a Buy It if you're an Indy fan, and a Rent It, if you're not sure.

War, Inc.
This is the feature that plagues me. It has John Cusack. It was co-written by the wildly insane, talented, and fun Mark Leyner. Nevertheless, War, Inc. failed to impress. You know you've got to worry when a review starts with: "What do you say when a film is so bad that you actually feel physical pain for everyone involved?" So, I say with a heavy heart: Skip It.

Y.P.F -- aka -- Young People F**king
This is merely a funny and mostly honest look at sex, but with a title that flings out the F-bomb, it's gotten a whole slew of drama ranging from political movements to Ebert responses. But when it comes down to it, the Canadian comedy is funny, but it's not shockingly racy and has barely any nudity. You'll see more jaw-dropping sex and skin on True Blood. Buy It!

Four movies opened in wide release last Friday, but only three, City of Ember, Body of Lies, and The Express, were screened for critics beforehand. The fourth, Quarantine, was kept hidden away, which has become common practice with the studios and their horror films. I like to call those movies Hollywood's Shameful Secrets.

Funny thing, though. According to Rotten Tomatoes, the critics who eventually saw Quarantine liked it better than most of the stuff the studios weren't ashamed to show. At the moment, it has a 61% Fresh ranking. The Express is only slightly higher, at 64%, while Body of Lies is far below it at 52%, and City of Ember is way back at 46%. At Metacritic, which comes up with an average score between 1 and 100 for each film, all four movies are basically tied: 54 for Quarantine and 58 for the other three.

So what gives here? About 95 percent of the time, if a movie isn't screened before it opens, it's mediocre at best, and it's usually downright bad. If Quarantine is actually pretty good -- better than the other new films last week, anyway -- why didn't Screen Gems let critics see it?

There have been a number of moderate- to high-profile box office fizzles in the past few weeks -- 'tis the season, I suppose, though the flop ratio seems higher than average this year -- and this week adds a couple more to the list. First and most surprising is the tepid performance of Body of Lies, which couldn't leverage the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, or Ridley Scott to open to more than $13 million. I don't really get it: the marketing was action-packed and fairly ubiquitous (though a bit confusing -- people apparently had trouble deciphering the trailer), and I thought the star wattage would do more for the film. (On the other hand, Scott's A Good Year, which also starred Crowe, died an even harder death.) Is anything involving Iraq or the Middle East really that much of a turn-off right now? Or maybe anything perceived as serious? It's really a superb film, and one that benefits from the big screen; you should check it out before it vanishes.

Another addition to the list of big fat flops is Fox's City of Ember, which crashed and burned at number ten (10). I haven't seen it yet, but I'm a big, big fan of Gil Kenan's debut Monster House, and so was rooting for Ember. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone knew that it existed. The football drama The Express doesn't count as a flop, I don't think, since no one expected it to do much better than it did: $4.7 million in sixth place. People just couldn't bring themselves to care about this story again, though the movie isn't bad.

The weekend's hits were exercises in escapist frivolity, which might support one of my hypotheses regarding Body of Lies' failure. Beverly Hills Chihuahua held on to the top spot with $17.5 million, ensuring a sequel. And the low-budget Quarantine took second in a huge victory for Screen Gems -- a $14 million opening for a movie like this is gold.

The full list of estimates after the jump.

It's football season, which means it's also the season for at least one heartwarming and inspiring movie about the sport. This year the film comes from Universal -- The Express, a biopic of Ernie "The Elmira Express" Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman trophy, back in 1963. However, the movie divides its time between Davis and his coach at Syracuse University, Ben Schwartzwalder, and shows the ways in which the two characters changed one another (for the better, natch).

The movie opens during the notorious Cotton Bowl game of 1960, when Davis (Rob Brown) was a running back on the Syracuse University team that played The University of Texas, which had not yet allowed black varsity team members. It's a rough game, but Davis is handling himself until all hell breaks loose ... and then we flash back to Davis's childhood in the 1940s and see how he learned to handle nasty racist situations even at an early age. He's stubborn and he's speedy, and eventually decides to use those assets to strive for his goal of playing professional football. His idol, Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown, advises Davis to play for his alma mater Syracuse because Schwartzwalder (Dennis Quaid) is such an excellent head coach. But Davis encounters difficulties in the ways Schwartzwalder handles the black team members. The coach's primary goal is to avoid "trouble," so they're warned away from the white female students, and worse yet, at certain Southern games they're not allowed to score touchdowns. The real action culminates when the film returns to the Cotton Bowl game in Dallas.

Welcome to the Indie Spotlight, our weekly roundup of the limited-release films opening outside the multiplexes all over this great land of ours. There are quite a few indie films debuting today, and while it's especially good news for movie buffs in New York City, the rest of us can make a note of the ones that look good and keep an eye out for when they come to our neck of the woods (wherever that neck may be).

Today we have, in alphabetical order: Ashes of Time Redux, Billy: The Early Years, Breakfast with Scot, Choose Connor, Fraude: Mexico 2006, Good Dick, Happy-Go-Lucky, Nights and Weekends, and Talento de Barrio. Here's the scoop on each of them, from widest opening to smallest.

Billy: The Early Years
What it is: A friendly, faithful biopic about the Rev. Billy Graham.
What they're saying: Nothing so far. If I had to guess, I'd reckon fans of the good reverend will find it pleasant, while those unfamiliar with or uninterested in him will find it boring. That's if I had to guess.
Where it's playing: About 300 locations throughout the southeastern quadrant of the United States, below the Mason-Dixon line and east of Amarillo.
More info: Here's the official site.

Talento de Barrio
What it is: Puerto Rican drama starring Daddy Yankee as a drug dealer who falls in love and becomes a reggaeton singer. I guess it's like a Puerto Rican Hustle & Flow.
What they're saying: The only two reviews available so far are very, very negative.
Where it's playing: About 20 screens in the greater New York City and Los Angeles areas.
More info: The official site lists the theaters it's playing in.

Oliver Stone's W. has screened for the more important among us, and I am pleasantly surprised to report that people are not openly laughing at it. Some seem downright impressed. Here, for example is David Poland on The Hot Blog:

"[Josh] Brolin should be nominated for the Oscar. We'll see whether the crowd around Best Actor is too big for him to crack, but it is a letter perfect performance that looks much, much easier than most critics and audiences, I think, will understand . . . . The only downside is that the movie doesn't offer the massive supporting cast a lot of big awards-style moments. They are just really, really good. And that really should be enough."

Variety's Todd McCarthy is a bit more mixed than Poland, but concedes that W. "offers a clear and plausible take on the current chief executive's psychological makeup and, considering Stone's reputation and Bush's vast unpopularity, a relatively even-handed, restrained treatment of recent politics." And Kirk Honeycutt over at The Hollywood Reporter says that though the film is more bold than it is good, "Stone goes out of his way to give Bush a fair hearing."

Over the summer, I guffawed at the notion that Stone was going to be fair and sympathetic to Bush in W., but it looks like I may be eating those words before too long. Apparently the problem people are having with the film isn't its politics but its lack of formal audacity, which is the opposite what I expected to hear. But it's certainly good to learn that Stone at least attempts a serious treatment of the subject -- those script pages that Slate "leaked" a while back could have fooled me.

You'd think that being married to Madonna, Guy Ritchie would have picked up on the value of occasionally reinventing oneself. But no, he keeps making the same movie, the same ultra-cool exercises in British gangster violence and stylish criminal shenanigans, and RockNRolla is the latest entry. Then again, the one time he did try something different, the result was Swept Away, so maybe he's wise to stay in his comfort zone.

At any rate, RockNRolla inspires strong feelings of "meh" in me. It's not nearly as clever, funny, or stylish as Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, though the accents are a lot less indecipherable this time around, so that's nice. It's also not as good as Gangster No. 1 or Sexy Beast or many of the other gritty British gangster capers that have come around in the last several years. It feels like a rerun -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing, after all. People watch reruns all the time.

Our narrator is Archie (Mark Strong), who works as the calm, suave right-hand man to Lenny (Tom Wilkinson), the most powerful money-lender and underworld boss in London. Half the city's councilors, judges, and cops are in Lenny's pocket, and he has leveraged this influence into a massive fortune in real estate.

Lenny is not a figure to be messed with, but the Russians don't know that. A new mover and shaker named Uri (Karel Roden) has come to town to strike a deal with Lenny -- it involves paying Lenny to bribe city officials to get a construction project underway -- and he's a formidable figure himself. Lenny is old school; Uri is dangerously modern.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. It's an American remake of an Asian horror film about ghosts that seek revenge against, or try to pass messages to, the living. And the studio's releasing it in January. But instead of listing the first 20 films matching that description that come to mind, watch the new trailer for The Uninvited, courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes (we've got it embedded below).

The trailer makes the film look relatively promising: Two sisters deal with their father's much-too-young new girlfriend, who it turns out might have murdered the last family she lived with. Casting the marvelous Elizabeth Banks as the potential murderess gets my attention immediately; she can do funny and sexy, but can she do creepy? I bet she can.

By the way, the film apparently has nothing to do with the 1944 movie of the same title. It is, rather, a remake of a 2003 South Korean movie called Janghwa, Hongryeon (or A Tale of Two Sisters, as it was known internationally), which got a very small U.S. release in December 2004. The remake is due Jan. 30. What do you think?

The trailer is after the jump....

Eric D. Snider tried his best to trick me into watching Beverly Hills Chihuahua this week. It didn't work on me, but it worked on millions of Snider acolytes all over North America, who joined forces to give the talking-animals kidflick a strong $29 million, first-place debut. I didn't see it, as I say, so it would be wrong for me to bemoan the decline of civilization that this surely (if unsurprisingly) represents. Feel free to do so in the comments.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist opened to $12 million and third place, which I'd have to say is okay for the low-profile, borderline-niche film. That number, though not terribly impressive, is actually a fair testament to Michael Cera's star power, since his presence was literally the only mass-marketable aspect of the movie. So the debut is at least a draw for Sony.

It was an interesting weekend in that there were several films opening in, or expanding into, semi-wide release. The biggest winner of that bunch has to be Religulous, Bill Maher's aggressively anti-faith documentary, which did $3.5 million on around 500 screens for $6,972 per screen. Given the preaching-to-the-relatively-small-choir quality of the film, I don't expect it to hold up too well in the weeks ahead, but this level of interest is a mild surprise. Facing off against Religulous ideologically was David Zucker's conservative spoof An American Carol which, according to the estimates, edged out Religulous with $3.8 million on over 1,600 screens.

Ed Harris's lightweight western Appaloosa expanded to roughly 1,000 screens and took in $5 million -- which is okay, but seems like a missed opportunity. Faring worse were Flash of Genius (1100 screens) and Blindness (1700), with $2.3 and $2 million respectively, both landing outside the top 10. The grim Blindness was a no-sale from the beginning, especially since the critics never got on board, but the unabashedly populist Flash of Genius underperformed. Maybe the ads emphasized windshield wipers too much.

A bit more plus the weekend's top 12 after the jump.