First, the news:

Writer’s Guild strike continues: LA Times, etc. There are a bunch of mildly uninspiring YouTube videos from the picket lines: Here’s one from some guys (and one woman) who write for The Office.

Movie palace: Pritzker-anointed architect Christian de Portzamparc has been tapped to design the museum planned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

It had to happen: Big-name critic trashes mumblecore.

Trade media sucks up to new media: Check out Anne Thompson slobbering all over Hollywood Elsewhere.

What is Guillermo del Toro smoking?: Pan’s Labyrinth director will adapt an ancient British TV show about secret agents who acquire psychic powers after crashing in the Communist Himalayas.

Opening this week:

Andrew Wright reviews the “genuinely creepy diversion” P2 (it’s about a pretty lady trapped in a parking garage).

And in an oddly political On Screen this week: the stultifying Lions for Lambs (me: “Despite its topical veneer, this is a movie about pure, weightless abstractions: apathy versus action, moral courage versus careerism”), the Americans with Disabilities Act drama Music Within (Charles Mudede: “Why isn’t it just a documentary? Why does it have to be a drama? Why the actors? Why a script that employs the techniques and enhancements of fiction to tell a “true story”? Really, why?”), Darfur Now (me again: “a slick, almost uncomfortably optimistic documentary about the human catastrophe currently taking place in western Sudan”).

Plus (keep scrolling): the best movie to come out this week, Terror’s Advocate (me for a third time: “The unsavory, even antisocial glamour that French defense lawyer Jacques Vergès depends on for his life’s work is exactly the stuff that makes for a chilling international thriller”), and the, um, second best, Fred Claus (Lindy West: “Oh my god I hate this lying sack of shit movie so much!”).

And in Limited Runs this week: the Shohei Imamura series wraps up with Black Rain, The Eel, and more; Barbarella gets two midnight shows at the Egyptian; the Polish Film in America festival continues through this weekend at the Seattle Art Museum.

And… I like the endearing Cannes oddball Quixotic (a loose dual portrait of Cervantes’s knight and squire); the SIFF ‘07 films The Bubble and Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten make reappearances at the Varsity; the 70mm Ghostbusters wraps up at Cinerama; two intriguing experimental shows land at Northwest Film Forum, The Films of Michael Robinson (see his website for a taste) and In the Kingdom of Shadows: Two Stereoscopic Films by Zoe Beloff (see her website); there’s a partly experimental and partly narrative series at SIFF Cinema on the work of Lech Majewski (I couldn’t stand The Roe’s Room, but people seem to be liking the newer Glass Lips); the film Amy Taubin nominated as Korean-American mumblecore, In Between Days, plays at Grand Illusion through this weekend; and there’s a free screening of Paris Is Burning next week (as long as you can stand some car propaganda and are willing to RSVP in advance).

And in DVD: Jonathan Zwickel reviews Bling: A Planet Rock (which he actually first saw at a Scion event). New releases this week include Ratatouille, a collection of Pixar shorts, and the lovely I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone.