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In theaters Friday: The Hills Have Eyes 2, Pride, Reign Over Me, Shooter(in theaters today) and TMNT.

New on DVD: Blood Diamond, Eragon, The Nativity Story and Rocky Balboa.

Celebrity birthday: Timothy Dalton turns 63 today. Many happy returns, old sport. You are one of the most underrated actors of your generation. Being typecast as a so-so James Bond after only two films didn’t help much back in the day, I guess. And though I’ll never fully forgive you for what you did to sweet Jen Connelly in The Rocketeer, I do hope your turn in the upcoming Hot Fuzz kicks off a comeback. Still, you do run like a Welshman, and you ought to have someone look into that.

The trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End debuted online yesterday. Watch it here. Meh, it looks okay—certainly overblown with CGI like the last Pirates film, but for some reason this trailer seems very flat and unemotional to me. Maybe it was the ridiculous "voodoo" narration, or the fact that Will Turner has only one line in the trailer—a poorly timed "Will you marry me?"—and he and Elizabeth Swan are supposed to be what the movies are about. After the original, director Gore Verbinski tried to take the series in a darker direction, but he hasn’t delivered on the character development of Will, Elizabeth or Captain Jack Sparrow to make the darker tone pay off. Instead he has overstuffed the movie with more characters and bombastic set pieces in hopes that it will add up to some grand finale. Maybe it will, but maybe it won’t. At least Johnny Depp is fun to watch.

Cate Blanchett is in final negotiations to play Harrison Ford’s new dame in the long-awaited fourth adventure of Indiana Jones. At least, I think she looks like an Indy dame. No way Spielberg is casting her in a bit part or as a Nazi. At 38, Blanchett is 27 years younger than Ford so there is an outside chance she could play his daughter. So which is it, dame or daughter? I'd rather she be his love interest, because the whole progeny storyline doesn’t do anything for me.

But rumors persist that Dr. Jones has fathered a kid. Former Even Stevens, now Transformers star Shia LeBeouf was hotly tipped last week to be playing Indy’s son. But he has since backed off from the strong innuendo he let slip in an interview. No offence to Shia, but I don’t want to watch Indy running around in some generation gap story with his annoying or ironically "different" 20-year-old kid in tow.

And finally, the directorial work of Francis Ford Coppola is set to return to the big screen. Last fall he shot the bluntly titled pre-WWII drama Youth Without Youth. It's Coppola’s first film as a director (he also adapted the screenplay from a Romanian novella, word up!) since The Rainmaker dropped in 1997. And wouldn’t you know it, Tom Cruise who ate chocolate cake for breakfast in Coppola’s The Outsiders, has picked up the film for distribution through United Artists.