Hey, yesterday was Friday, wasn’t it? And Friday is new movie day! Specifically:

“Date Night“: Steve Carell and Tina Fey make a terrific — and completely credible — couple in Shawn Levy’s otherwise generic farce. If you like ’em, you’ll enjoy watching them. If you don’t, well … seriously, what’s wrong with you?

“The Eclipse“: Conor McPherson, who wrote the exceptional “I Went Down” back in the late 1990s, brings his utter disregard for the conventions of genre to a tale of a widowed teacher (Ciaran Hinds) struggling with some very unnatural things during an Irish authors’ festival.

“The Misfortunates“: Growing up Flemish in the 1980s couldn’t have been easy at the best of times, but factor in being raised by a quartet of drunken, anarchic idiots, and you’ve got yourself some scars. Felix Van Groeningen’s grotty comedy-drama may not stand up to “My Queen Karo“, with which it shared screen space at last year’s TIFF, but it has its moments.

“A Shine of Rainbows”: Aidan Quinn, who plays a key role in “The Eclipse”, fares less well in Vic Sarin’s mawkish tale of a childless Irish couple who take in an orphaned boy. Rad rightly calls it out for its forced melodramatics.

“The Wild Hunt“: Though it’s hobbled by a tonal shift it can’t quite pull off, there are some really terrific things in Alexandre Franchi’s no-budget tale of a Montrealer who invades a live-action role-playing game to retrieve his unfaithful girlfriend, including a balls-out performance by Mark Antony Krupa and some very incisive observations about the appeal of fantasy in contemporary life.

There, that gets us back on track …

Stop your mourning — I’m back online, and everything is just peachy. Apparently my static IP number was changed sometime early on Tuesday, shifting the site a degree or six out of phase with the rest of the interweb.

I’ve been enjoying my time in the Phantom Zone, actually; waiting for my webhost tech support guys to figure out the problem let me focus on the six thousand or so film festivals taking place in Toronto this month. Hot Docs, Sprockets, the Toronto Jewish Film Festival … as far as I’m concerned, they’re all happening right now and I’m neck-deep in all of ’em.

What, you thought my piece on the ReelWorld festival in this week’s NOW was the last of it? Don’t make me laugh.

Well, there you go: “Clash of the Titans”, marketed as the Next Big Movie, became the Next Big Movie with an opening weekend gross of $61.4 million — or $64.1 million, if you count the Thursday night screenings.

I’m kind of surprised by the way the movie’s fared with critics, honestly. I mean, it’s not great cinema or anything, but it’s a well-crafted entertainment, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much it improves on the now-quaint original. The venom being directed at such an unpretentious production seems disproportionate … though I guess the other option is to go too far in the other direction, and treat it as a camp artifact without waiting for the ironic distance to form. (Though that approach does result in fun pieces like this.)

Maybe it helps that I saw it in good old two-dimensional 35mm; most of the griping I’ve read comes from people who’ve seen it in 3D, which seems to make for a pretty disappointing experience.

Or maybe it’s just that the Kraken in this version looks like the Cloverfield monster’s stroppy older brother. I’ll give ’em that one.

It’s Easter weekend, so The House Next Door has logically dedicated the latest of its Conversations dialogues to Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” and Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” — two radically different takes on the same subject matter.

Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard know their material, and it makes for essential reading, even if you don’t know your Pauls from your Sauls.

(That was a trick. They’re both Harry Dean Stanton.)

This week’s MSN Movies gallery uses the “Clash of the Titans” remake to look at other big-screen interpretations of Greek mythology.

I am very proud of MSN’s art department, by the way; it couldn’t have been easy to find a still from “Hercules in New York”. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spent a great deal of money erasing all traces of that film …

Holiday or no holiday, it’s a Friday and movies are opening. Once more into the breach, then?

“Clash of the Titans“: Louis Leterrier’s remake of the inexplicably beloved 1981 fantasy epic — seriously, have you seen it lately? — throws out the love story and focuses on the monsters, which is pretty much exactly what the property demands.

“Formosa Betrayed”: James Van Der Beek plays a Reagan-era FBI agent who stumbles across U.S. complicity in China’s annexation of Taiwan. No, seriously!

“The Last Song”: The Miley Cyrus machine meets the Nicholas Sparks machine … with entirely predictable results, according to Rad. (Yes, I know it opened Wednesday, but I was distracted.)

“Max Manus“: Aksel Hennie gives a complex performance as Norway’s greatest WWII resistance hero in this straight-up espionage thriller — which could have used a little more complexity itself. But it has its moments.

“Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too?”: Writer-director-producer-star Perry’s commitment to releasing a new movie every six months is admirable, but now he’s basically just remaking “Couples Retreat”.

“Women Without Men”: A quartet of Iranian women attempt to create a feminist utopia in Shirin Neshat’s adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s allegorical novel. Susan admires its imagery, but can’t overlook its structural problems.

Right, that’s everything. And now to go in search of a proper hot-cross bun …

The latest issue of NOW is out, and I’m all up in there, from my “Clash of the Titans” junket piece (and attendant Q&A with Sam “half-man, half-big-blue-alien” Worthington) to my overview of this year’s Images Festival.

You know, I keep hoping some experimental filmmaker will produce an 8mm non-narrative take on the saga of Perseus, but somehow it never happens …