LOS ANGELES — In the opening scenes of “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” a wise man cautions the title character, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, not to take on too much. The warning: “You’re just not ready for this.”

The words proved an omen for Mr. Gyllenhaal in real life over the weekend, as an effort to recast him as an action hero — a star capable of anchoring a big summer movie — ended in disappointment. “Prince of Persia” sold an estimated $37.8 million in tickets in North American theaters over the holiday weekend, a weak performance for a film that cost about $200 million to make and carried global marketing costs of more than $100 million.

“Prince of Persia,” from the producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Walt Disney Studios, entered the market in second place. DreamWorks Animation’s “Shrek Forever After” was No. 1 in its second week, with a strong $55.7 million, an indication that positive word of mouth has followed the film’s so-so box office start. Premium-priced 3-D tickets also helped. Total domestic sales for “Shrek Forever After” now stand at $145.5 million.

The other new release of note, “Sex and the City 2,” was third, with about $37.1 million, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box office statistics. Warner Brothers released this R-rated sequel, which cost about $100 million to make, on Thursday to grab any fans who planned to travel over the holiday. Adding in Thursday sales, “Sex and the City 2” sold a total of $51.4 million.

SOONER or later every fairy tale reaches its happily ever after. For “Shrek,” the long-running animated fantasy franchise about a curmudgeonly ogre (voiced by Mike Myers), his human-turned-ogre wife, Fiona (Cameron Diaz), and his pals Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas), that time is now. On Friday, DreamWorks Animation and Paramount will release “Shrek Forever After,” the fourth — and, the studios say, final — installment in the series, in which the titular green guy is thrown into an alternate version of his Far, Far Away kingdom where he never existed and life turned out much differently for his pals. Before the storybook shuts for good, Dave Itzkoff asked some of the “Shrek” stars about the series and what its ending means to them

RIDLEY SCOTT had seen better days. True, he was at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills a few weeks ago while studio types fluttered about making sure that the fruit platters were just so. But he was about to be press-ganged, fed to roomfuls of reporters who would ask him how his latest film, “Robin Hood,” compares to “Gladiator” (it does and it doesn’t) and whether he and Russell Crowe bickered on the set. (Not really, theirs is just a full-contact collaboration.)

But before that ritual began, the English-born Mr. Scott got to warm up with ...another interview. We had been scheduled to meet at his Los Angeles office the day before, but he had been up all night, in extremis from one of his extremities, specifically his recently installed knee replacement. “They tell you you will be up and about in no time, and that is just pure,” um, nonsense, he said, as he eased his way into a sofa and, very carefully, placed his new joint up onto a table.

For the moment he looked very much the 72-year-old veteran of more than 20 feature films, including “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” “Black Hawk Down” and “American Gangster.” But a single question about the provenance of “Robin Hood” and he was up in a flash, moving about the room and using a cane as a field commander might to plan his next campaign.

“Robin Hood,” like “Gladiator,” allows Mr. Scott to use his modern visual and sound technique to make ancient combat brim with menace. And he plays with the Hollywood archetype embodied over the years by Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Sean Connery and Kevin Costner by making his “Robin Hood,” in effect, a prequel.

Mr. Scott’s film is an origins story of how Robin Longstride, a journeyman archer in service of the king, became Robin Hood. Spirited away to a French monastery at a young age, Robin’s path is changed when King Richard is mortally wounded, and Robin decides to head out for the French coast with a newly formed posse of merry men to make their way to England.

They happen upon an ambush, and Robin is tasked by a dying man to return a sword to Nottingham, a once-proud village now forced into a hand-to-mouth existence under oppressive taxation. There he meets and clashes with Marion Loxley (Ms. Blanchett), the widow of the man who owned the sword. With steady nudges from the father (Max von Sydow), Marion and Robin fall in love and fight both for and against a country they cherish, now led by the feckless and narcissistic King John. In this version of “Robin Hood,” Robin is a loyal if conflicted subject, and it is gradually revealed to the archer that fate has put him exactly where he belongs.

Mr. Scott explained as much as he settled back in on the couch, but then Hollywood’s taste in films is mentioned and he is up again, gesturing and declaiming. “One studio head said to me, ‘I make movies I don’t even want to see,’ ” he said. “I find that entirely depressing and told him as much. I only want to make movies that I want to see.”

Lately, however, his choices have not always been embraced by moviegoers. Of his past five films, only one (“American Gangster”) took in more than $100 million at the domestic box office; others, like “Body of Lies” and “A Good Year,” tanked. 

While commercial success is not always a given, critical reaction is much more of a constant: some critics line up to point out that they think the big vessel is a little on the empty side.

“In a Ridley Scott film, the setups are so much more exciting than what he eventually delivers,” said David Edelstein, film critic for New York magazine, who had yet to see “Robin Hood” and added that he very much admired Mr. Scott’s work in “Black Hawk Down” (2001). “He is wonderful at creating an atmosphere of anticipation. I just don’t think it always pays off.”

Throughout his career, Mr. Scott has brushed aside criticism like so many rubber-tipped arrows, in part because he has supreme confidence in every aspect of his craft. He has been a set designer, a camera operator and an art director. He directed hundreds of commercials before the release of his first British feature in 1977, “The Duelists,” and his first Hollywood effort two years later, “Alien,” which created not only a franchise but also a reconsideration of the sci-fi genre. Mr. Scott has great relationships with the actors he has had great relationships with and little time for others. Sigourney Weaver said he showed more concern for the props and sets on “Alien” than the actors working amid them. But Mr. Crowe has made it his business to keep signing up to work with Mr. Scott. “Robin Hood” is their fifth collaboration: in addition to “Gladiator,” they have made “American Gangster,” “Body of Lies” and “A Good Year.”

“He comes prepared to work,” Mr. Crowe said in a telephone interview. “He can tell you exactly how many horses he has, how many severed heads he has on hand in the props department, how many cameras he needs for a shot. He is the boss, and by having that command of infrastructure, he is able to create entire other worlds.”
Mr. Crowe said that Mr. Scott was actually a shy person who enjoys spending quality time with oil paints, which is a bit of a surprise, and a warrior on the set, which is not.

“We were at Fresh Water beach in England, filming a massive scene where the French army was landing and the tide was coming in furiously,” he said. “We are setting and resetting, and there are, I don’t know, 14 barges and 500 extras as French infantry, and one of the backs of the boats kept swinging into the frame where it wasn’t supposed to be. And Ridley jumped into the waves and grabbed this 15-ton barge with both hands, bum knee and all, and starts trying to push it out of the shot. When it was clear he was not going to win his lone battle against the barge, he looked back at the beach and the hundreds of extras and said, ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ That’s leadership.”

Even now, the peripatetic Mr. Scott does a lot more than direct, serving as producer on a variety of film and television projects. Scott Free, with headquarters in both London and Los Angeles, has a lot of Scotts: Brother Tony (“Top Gun,” “Days of Thunder,” “Crimson Tide”) is in post-production with “Unstoppable,” starring Chris Pine and Denzel Washington, a thriller about a runaway train. Sons Jake (“Welcome to the Rileys” with James Gandolfini and Kristen Stewart) and Jordan (“Cracks” with Eva Green) are in the mix as working directors.

For fans and scholars of the silent-film era, the search for a copy of the original version of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” has become a sort of holy grail. One of the most celebrated movies in cinema history, “Metropolis” had not been viewed at its full length — roughly two and a half hours — since shortly after its premiere in Berlin in 1927, when it was withdrawn from circulation and about an hour of its footage was amputated and presumed destroyed.

But on Friday Film Forum in Manhattan will begin showing what is being billed as “The Complete Metropolis,” with a DVD scheduled to follow later this year, after screenings in theaters around the country. So an 80-year quest that ranged over three continents seems finally to be over, thanks in large part to the curiosity and perseverance of one man, an Argentine film archivist named Fernando Peña.

The newly found footage, about 25 minutes in length and first exhibited in February at the Berlin Film Festival, is grainy and thus easily distinguished from an earlier, partly restored version, released in 2001, into which it has been inserted. But for the first time, Lang’s vision of a technologically advanced, socially stratified urban dystopia, which has influenced contemporary films like “Blade Runner” and “Star Wars,” seems complete and comprehensible.

Mehreen Jabbar’s lyrical film “Ramchand Pakistani” tells the story of an 8-year-old Pakistani Hindu boy who accidentally strays across the border with India and is immediately seized by Indian soldiers. Based on a true story, it begins in 2002 during a period of extreme tension between Pakistan and India and explores what can happen to innocents caught up in geopolitical crossfire.

When the soldiers discover that the boy, Ramchand (Syed Fazal Hussain), is carrying a slingshot, he is accused of bringing weapons to liberate Kashmir. He and his parents — his mother, Champa (Nandita Das), and father, Shankar (Rashid Farooqui) — belong to the “untouchable” Dalit caste. When Shankar searches for Ramchand, he too crosses the border, marked only by an arc of widely separated white stones, and is immediately snatched by the same soldiers. The father and son are carted off to a prison, where they are kept for five years.

The film, which has six screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, beginning on Wednesday, as part of its ContemporAsian series, is not the prison horror story that it at first appears to be. There is no torture or starvation in the camp, where the father and son sleep on the floor of a crowded dormitory and do menial chores. The daily diet consists of lentils and potatoes.

The movie crosscuts between scenes of the father and son in prison and of Champa struggling to survive alone without word of her family. During much of their stay in India, Ramchand and Shankar are unregistered prisoners, so they might as well be dead. Champa eventually gives up hope of a reunion, and late in the movie she carries on a discreet flirtation with a man of a higher caste that brings its own kind of trouble.
At the military encampment, Ramchand becomes the servant of a female military official of a higher caste who, to the boy’s chagrin, treats him disdainfully. But over the years a bond develops between them, and she eventually bestows a peck on his cheek. Suddenly, the story leaps ahead four years, and the pubescent Ramchand is played by a different actor (Navaid Jabbar).

“Ramchand Pakistani” has elements of a Bollywood film, but the short, festive musical interludes are not full-scale production numbers. The flute-based music is quietly seductive and lulling, and the cinematography lends the desert landscape a hallucinatory beauty.

The loose-jointed screenplay by Javed Jabbar and Mohammad Ahmed doesn’t build up conventional dramatic tension and makes eccentric narrative leaps that undercut its continuity. Ms. Jabbar’s female perspective is palpable throughout the film, especially in the scenes in which Champa stands up to her exploitative bosses on the farm where she harvests wheat and sugar cane and demands money that is due her. The prison environment, in spite of its hardships, is remarkably harmonious. Fights break out but are settled, and the punishments meted out are mild.

The co-existence of Muslims and Hindus in the same prison is for the most part peaceful, and the Hindu caste system is relaxed. As the production notes state, Ramchand and his parents live at “the bottom of a discriminatory religious ladder and an insensitive social system, which is nevertheless tolerant, inclusive and pluralistic.” For all the trials its characters endure, you might almost describe “Ramchand Pakistani” as a happy movie: too happy to be entirely believed.

IDRIS ELBA is a businessman. In fact, he might remind viewers of Stringer Bell, the no-nonsense Baltimore drug lord Mr. Elba memorably played on the HBO series “The Wire.” “You got to think about what we got in this game for,” Stringer once admonished a colleague, his soft, deep voice studded with emphatic profanity (here deleted): “Was it the rep? Was it so our names could ring out on some ghetto street corner? Naw, man. There’s games beyond the game.”

Though in real life Mr. Elba’s jaunty accent comes from East London, not Baltimore, in a phone interview from his Florida home he sounded much like the driven Stringer, who ran heroin-distribution meetings according to Robert’s Rules of Order. Stringer had no interest in cred-building gangster posturing, and Mr. Elba has little patience for the actor’s equivalent: endless prattling about art and the corresponding reluctance to speak frankly about one’s own ambitions.

Idris Elba is in the Idris Elba business. And he seems as interested in talking about the game beyond the game — the step-by-step process of becoming a star — as he is in talking about the action comedy “The Losers,” out on Friday.

“In this day and age, actors can’t afford to be pompous,” the 37-year-old Mr. Elba said, discussing a career that first caught fire with “The Wire” and peaked with last year’s popular but critically reviled potboiler “Obsessed.” “You can’t afford to turn your nose up at things. Audiences want to see you a bit more dynamic. We know you can act, Daniel Day-Lewis. That’s fantastic. Show us a bit more. We want to be entertained.”
Though Mr. Elba’s early career — he was a stage and television journeyman in London and New York — received a huge boost from “The Wire,” he has expressed discomfort with it, saying he didn’t watch many episodes and hopes not to play a drug dealer again. “It was a gift and a curse,” he says now.

He was surprised when Stringer was — spoiler alert from 2004! — killed off but says the timing aided his move to films. “I died on that show at a time where people were interested in my character,” he said, comparing himself to another actor and his signature HBO role. “If Tony Soprano had died in the fourth season, James Gandolfini would be a bigger actor than he is now.”

The past continually forces its way into the present in “The Secret in Their Eyes,” an attractive, messy drama riddled with violence and edged with comedy that comes with a hint of Grand Guignol, a suggestion of politics and three resonant, deeply appealing performances. Set primarily in contemporary Argentina with intermittent flashbacks to the 1970s when the country was descending into a military dictatorship, the film is by turns a whodunit (and why), a romance and something of a ghost story. A young dead woman lies at the center of the mystery, but she’s scarcely the only thing here haunting the living.
If it takes a while to get a handle on the identity of the dead woman, it’s because she’s initially conjured up in the imagination of Benjamin (Ricardo Darín), a former court investigator. Now retired, Benjamin first encountered the woman years earlier at her home, where her naked body, as is too often true of movie corpses, was decoratively arranged on her death bed. The culprit, at least when it comes to aestheticizing this particular horror, is the writer and director Juan José Campanella, who has a tendency to gild every lily, even a dead one. That inclination explains some of the film’s sudden shifts in mood and outlandish plot twists, both of which can be preposterous but also create tension, surprise and a sense of disquiet that borders on dread.

Benjamin, having decided to write about the dead woman, revisits her murder, a pursuit that leads from the typed page into the offices of a judge and former colleague, Irene (Soledad Villamil). A quarter-century ago, Irene was his much younger supervisor, toiling with him in a warren of book-lined, paper-strewn rooms alongside a boozing, desperate clown, Sandoval (Guillermo Francella). Together the three tried to navigate around a bigger boss, a jaundiced judge, and through a system where the poor were railroaded for crimes they didn’t commit so they could serve the needs of the powerful. One such crime involves the dead woman.
At first, the murdered woman — or rather how Benjamin’s inquiry into her death affects him — brings to mind Otto Preminger’s “Laura.” In that 1944 noir, Dana Andrews plays a detective who, while investigating what he believes is the murder of the title character (Gene Tierney, a natural stiff), falls in love with the victim, or rather her portrait. Benjamin doesn’t fall in love with his dead woman, though the way he looks at her corpse and then her photographs suggests more than he can admit. But this long-gone woman seems to exert a hold on him, possessing him while he pecks out another page, as the camera crawls through the shadows and Mr. Campanella pokes into the past.

Aging CNN talk-show legend Larry King is in the doghouse after explosive allegations surfaced that he bedded the beautiful younger sister of his wife of 13 years.

King, 76, filed for divorce from his seventh wife, Shawn Southwick, 50, in a Los Angeles court yesterday in the wake of the eye-popping allegations. It's the suspenders-wearing chatmeister's eighth trip to splitsville, as he divorced one of his wives twice.

Southwick filed for a split the same day. Both cited "irreconcilable differences."
Sources said the pair fought bitterly for years over her belief that King was sleeping with Shawn's younger sister, Shannon Engemann, 46.

King spent $1 million on Engemann and lavished her with gifts, including a $160,000 car, sparking Southwick's ire, according to Radar Online.

But Engemann, a model and voiceover actress, denied any romance. "It's just ludicrous, really," she told The Post. "Larry's been a good friend and he's been like a father to me."

She said "there's a lot of other things wrong" in her sister's marriage, "and all of a sudden, it's my fault . . . Now this is just crazy."

Radar and the National Enquirer both reported that Southwick has carried on a torrid yearlong affair with her kids' baseball coach. She's denied it.

The constant warring between Larry and Southwick got so intense, it erupted into a slap-fest outside a Beverly Hills restaurant on Feb. 7, Radar reported.

But as accusations over philandering grew more heated, King signed over real estate -- including a Beverly Hills mansion -- to Southwick to show his commitment to the marriage, TMZ.com reported.

"We're not commenting on that," Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for King, said of the cheating allegations.
King has not only married a slew of beauties, he's dated a few, too, including actresses Angie Dickinson and Deanna Lund and ex-beauty queen Rama Fox.

King and Southwick got hitched in a hospital room in 1997 before he went under the knife to clear a clogged blood vessel.

The talk titan and Brooklyn native wants joint custody of their sons, 11 and 9.
"His major concern is the welfare of his children," said Rubenstein.