Not surprising: Roland Emmerich’s “10,000 B.C.” topped the box-office this weekend, taking in an estimated $35.7 million despite being liked by, well, no one.

Of course, first-weekend grosses are never indicative of a movie’s quality; they just reflect the level of interest in a given title. When toxic word-of-mouth sends next weekend’s numbers through the floor, that’s how you gauge the audience’s feelings. And it’ll totally happen.

Somewhat more surprising is the revelation that “The Golden Compass” has turned into quite the juggernaut overseas: As Variety reports, it’s on track to become the first feature to crack $300 million in international revenue without breaking $100 million domestically. Which means we might end up getting those sequels after all.

Great.

Because it’s the weekend, and because “10,000 B.C.” is the gift that keeps on giving, here’s my latest Sympatico/MSN movie column, offering a list of essential caveman movies, as well as a few considerably less essential entries in the genre.

It’s snowing here again. Heavily. Does anyone know when March is supposed to stop acting like a lion, and start making like a lamb?

Movies! Lots of movies! Opening today! And I … um … am no longer required to have an opinion on all of them!

It’s weird, only being asked to cover a portion of the week’s openings. And a really small portion, at that; I am reviewing precisely one of the four films opening in Toronto today. I’ve seen one

“The Bank Job“: Roger Donaldson’s strangely joyless heist picture stars Jason Statham and a gaggle of eccentric character actors in the mostly true story of the Lloyd’s Bank robbery of 1971. How very odd that the “Italian Job” remake should still be Statham’s best heist picture. Check that one out again; it’s terribly underrated.

“College Road Trip”: A harried, overprotective father drives his independent-minded teenage daughter to visit a bunch of colleges, and guess what? They learn stuff from each other! I guess the story about Martin Lawrence fighting Robin Williams for Steve Martin’s rejected scripts is true after all.

“Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day”: I like Frances McDormand. I like Amy Adams. But I’m also fairly confident that I can wait for the DVD on this one.

“10,000 B.C.”: I take back every bad thing I said about “Apocalypto”. Mel Gibson may be a batshit-crazy torture fetishist — okay, so there’s no “maybe” about it — but he’s a born filmmaker, and his movie looks like a D.W. Griffith epic compared to Roland Emmerich’s bone-headed epochal epic, which is only interesting for the ten minutes in the fourth reel when it looks like Roland Emmerich has tricked Fox into making a “Stargate” prequel. He has not. But we now know that mammoths built the Pyramids. Adam has more.

And that’s it for the week. I feel strangely underutilized. But then, it’s early March, and you know what that means … the Images and Hot Docs screeners will start piling up before we know it!

If anyone was wondering, the chance to write a piece like this, and have it be featured as the section front rather than jammed into an anonymous box of text in the back of the book, is why I’m so happy to be over at NOW.

I mean, no disrespect to Metro, but they don’t do much in the way of the esoteric; they haven’t covered a Cinematheque film series or off-brand film festival in forever, making Adam’s recent piece on the Human Rights Watch festival something of a miracle.

I hope there are more of those. People need to know about the stuff beyond the mainstream — the good stuff, anyway, the stuff that needs to be championed by people who love it — and I’m truly delighted to feel like I’m doing my part again.

And on that subject, does anyone know whether “Streets of Fire” is screening at the reps any time soon?

Over at the Premiere website, which is sadly all that’s left of that estimable magazine, Glenn Kenny blogs about a strange phenomenon sweeping through the critical community.

A number of reviews of Martin McDonough’s “In Bruges” are making special mention of Peter Dinklage’s appearance as a cranky actor whose acquaintance is made by Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell over the course of the film.

There’s just one problem: That’s not Peter Dinklage. It’s Jordan Prentice, an entirely different actor who also, um, happens to be a dwarf.

Some people will rush to pin the confusion on an unconscious bias in the critics’ minds — you know, “all little people look alike” to them, and so on — but I think the confusion is the movie’s fault.

“In Bruges” is a pretty derivative film. Most of it is cribbed from the works of Quentin Tarantino and Neil Jordan — the jabbering hitmen are from “Pulp Fiction”, and the incident that gets them exiled from London has echoes of “The Crying Game” to me, and there’s also the issue of Gleeson more or less playing the same character he played in Paddy Breathnach’s little-seen Irish gangster picture “I Went Down” — but McDonough has also lifted a key chunk of material from Tom DiCillo’s “Living in Oblivion”.

That would be the bit with the dream sequence featuring a dwarf, who eventually explodes at his director with a brilliant rant about all the cliches of dwarves and dream sequences. (“Have you ever hard a dream with a dwarf in it? Do you know anyone who’s had a dream with a dwarf in it? I don’t even have dreams with dwarves in them!”)

And the dwarf in that film is played by Peter Dinklage.

Maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe the critics who’ve confused Prentice — who’s very good in “In Bruges”, albeit in a thankless role — with Dinklage are just allowing themselves to be led astray by the movie’s second-hand aesthetic. Who else could that be, in the Dinklage role from “Living in Oblivion”, but Dinklage himself?

Of course, this also presumes those critics have seen “Living in Oblivion”, which isn’t a safe bet … and it also means they didn’t check the credits or bother with the press notes, which ain’t exactly the best way to get one’s facts straight.

I gotta say, though, I can see how this sort of mistake could be made while dashing off a quick review: To my everlasting shame, I once identified Tom Sizemore as Michael Madsen in a review of “Heat”, despite having previously met and interviewed both actors … and despite liking one a lot more than the other.

In my defense, though, those guys really do look alike.

Opened up the courier box to find MGM’s new special edition of “Twelve Angry Men” waiting for me, along with one of the oddest gimmes I’ve received in a while.

Like the card says, it’s a chocolate gavel.

Now, when I think of Reginald Rose’s stage play, or Sidney Lumet’s simmering screen adaptation thereof, my mind doesn’t exactly go rushing to candy; in fact, these days I flash right back to the uncomfortable experience of watching the play in Toronto earlier this year with an audience that interpreted every calibrated humiliation and power shift as the stuff of situation comedy.

(There’s a longer post to be made somewhere about the way sitcoms from “All in the Family” to “Friends” have taught us to perceive vicious, cutting insults as punchlines — I find “Everybody Loves Raymond” unwatchable, for example, because I’m always waiting for Ray Romano to deck Patricia Heaton. At least on “Seinfeld” the contempt is front and center.)

But back to the chocolate gavel for a second. Doesn’t it sound like the name of the greatest blaxploitation movie never made?

“In a city where justice lies bleeding, THEY enforced the law!”

Starring Richard Roundtree and Fred Williamson, of course …

… at least for a while.

Nope, today is all about frippery — specifically, my latest Sympatico/MSN movie column about the five sexiest portrayals of British royalty in the movies. What can I say? “The Other Boleyn Girl” doesn’t exactly accommodate a serious discussion about the gestation of the Church of England, you know?

Oh, and Torontoist noted my move from Metro to NOW in a very flattering item on Friday … which I’m only getting around to mentioning today because I’m caught between beaming with pride that anyone out there likes my work and flushing with embarrassment at being the story rather than writing the story. This is also why I reflexively flip past NOW’s house ad promoting me every time I see the thing.

But you know what? It’s not always so bad to be the story. I mean, I could be Marion Cotillard right now.

Let’s have a moment of silence for her American career, and never speak of this again.