According to The Hollywood Reporter, Anthony Hopkins has joined the cast of Thor and will play Odin. In Norse mythology, Odin is the father of Thor and the ruler of Asgard and possesses amazing powers of strength and wisdom. He sacrifices his eye in exchange for knowledge.

Anthony Hopkins seems like the perfect choice all things considered. Hopkins was great in Beowulf in a similar role as a powerful father figure and certainly has the stature and charisma to pull it off. He wasn't a God in Beowulf of course, but his acting abilities (with the help of CGI) should certainly be up to the task.

Early reviews of Michael J. Bassett's Solomon Kane, which had its first public screening at the Toronto International Film Festival last week (and reportedly one of the largest midnight turnouts ever), have generally been positive. Fans, as you might expect, are considerably more enthusiastic than some in the "official" press, but that is only to be expected.

Based on Robert E. Howard's pulp fiction about a sombre and no-nonsense 16^th Century Puritan Soldier, both Howard's stories and I suspect Bassett's movie are an acquired taste: a seriously grim and grimly serious tale about one man's blood soaked and gore-splattered quest for redemption. Better known perhaps as the creator of Conan, Robert E. Howard wrote the Solomon Kane stories for Weird Tales in the late 1920s and early 1930s, setting them in a brutal and violent period in which the ascent of reason was in conflict with superstition (not unlike today when you come to think about it).

It's been a week or so since a settlement was reached over the disputed share of profits earned by New Line's Lord of the Rings movies. The lawsuit was filed in February last year by the Tolkien Trust and HarperCollins Publishers who claimed not to have received "even one penny" from the movies. The case was due to go to trial on 19 October and it had the potential, we're told, to bring production of New Line's adaptation of The Hobbit to a grinding halt before Bilbo Baggins had even had a chance to set off on his journey "there and back again".

I'm a big fan of Ricky Gervais' work, from the masterful BBC series, The Office, to HBO's Extras, his radio shows and stand up performances, it's all worth a look. He's easily one of the funniest comedians around. So I was happy to hear that in his next film project he has merged two of my favourite genres: fantasy and comedy. Gervais stars in the upcoming romantic comedy, The Invention of Lying, set in an alternate reality where even the concept of a lie does not exist. He co-directed and wrote the film with Matthew Robinson. It's always hard to blend science fiction and fantasy with comedy, but if anyone can pull it off with style, it will be Gervais.

Sometimes it's hard to separate fact from fiction when it comes to movie speculation, so it's nice to hear a director directly squashing rumours that have taken on a life all their own. Guillermo del Toro, director of the two upcoming Peter Jackson produced movies based on Tolkien's, The Hobbit, has done just that. First Showing reports that in recent responses to forum questions on TheOneRing.net, Del Toro said that they are not pursuing 3D for The Hobbit, even though the special effects are being created by Weta Digital in New Zealand, the same company presently finishing off James Cameron's 3D magnum opus, Avatar.

It appears that the movie formerly known as Nottingham will not be the only retelling of the Robin Hood legend making its way to our screens in months to come. With filming of Ridley Scott’s (once but no longer) revisionist version underway, comes news of another version in the works, this one a futurist action adventure.

With “ists” dropping like arrows from the sky, a couple of questions spring to mind: is't good news? Or does news of a double dose of Men in Tights leave you cold and with a disagreeable flashback to 1991 when we were subjected to another Band of Merry Movies: the Prince of Thieves from the two Kevins (Reynolds and Costner, may their names live in infamy forever for that awful offering!) and the marginally better Robin Hood directed by John Irvin, with Patrick Bergen in the lead?

Two words sum up the experience of watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Dull and disappointing. More so than any of its predecessors, this sixth instalment in the insanely popular series about the boy wizard has suffered from the compression of a sprawling work of fiction - some 600 plus pages of multiple interwoven plot lines - into two and a half hours of screen time.

I say compression and not adaptation because very little of the novel's substance has found its way to the screen. So little in fact that one gets the impression that screenwriter Steve Kloves was so daunted by the amount of material covered in the novel and the almost impossible task of adapting it to a single movie, that he threw away his quill, picked up his wand and cast a reducto spell on it. All that remains of Rowling's mammoth novel is a little dust.

With very few exceptions, adaptations of video or computer games for film have been trivial at best and for the most part unwatchable, so as a rule I don’t get excited when news breaks of yet another game due to receive the big screen treatment. But if there are two things we know about rules it’s that there are always exceptions and they're made to be broken, and so it is that my prejudice about video game adaptations is under serious threat on two fronts: Prince of Persia and now Warcraft.

While news of the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced adaptation of UbiSoft’s video game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time can’t be described as breaking given that filming has progressed to post-production and we’re looking at a 28 May 2010 release, it’s really only been the recent release of stills and footage that has finally grabbed my attention. Quite simply, it looks superb.

While the fourth Indiana Jones movie,  Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, was a farcical, special effects mess, with more holes in the plot than a sieve and panned by critics and fans alike (it didn't stop them all going of course), it appears they're still planning to make another one. I guess with a box office take of US $786 million worldwide there's no reason not to (at least no financial reason anyway).

Judging by the generally unenthusiastic reaction to last week’s announcement that Marcus Nispel (Pathfinder) has been invited by Nu Image/Millennium Films to direct their Conan reboot, I can’t help but suspect I’m in the minority when I express some excitement with this decision.

To be sure, the rise and fall of directors prior to the commencement of filming is not the most thrilling news and I would have been happy to leave it to my fellow hacks to break news of Nispel’s ascension to the director’s throne, if only they’d been a little bit more enthusiastic about it.