The Kingdom refers to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the movie is set (it was filmed mostly in Arizona), and it concerns the efforts of U.S. special agents played by Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman to discover the perpetrators of a terrorist attack in Riyadh, the country's capital. It is opening to vastly mixed reviews. On the one hand, there's this description of the movie by Lou Lumenick in the New York Post: "A xenophobic, overblown, revenge-driven action thriller that exports the Rambo mentality to the contemporary Middle East." It reminds Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times of all those "Yellow Peril" films of World War II. He criticizes "the film's determination to blatantly play on our emotions, to shamelessly exaggerate the good and evil in all of its plot elements. The Kingdom is in many ways a film that doesn't want us to think, doesn't trust us to feel on our own and is more than willing to strip everything of nuance as if it were a disease." But that's not necessarily bad, suggests A.O. Scott in the New York Times, who calls The Kingdom "a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: Syriana for dummies." (Ty Burr in the Boston Globe uses an almost identical description in his review.) Or as Glenn Whipp puts it more unmannerly in the Los Angeles Daily News, it's "a rock-'em, sock-'em action movie that is unapologetic in its ethos of butt-kicking revenge."

One thing that most critics appear to agree on: If Disney's game plan was to make The Game Plan a movie that would appeal strongly to kids 15 and younger, it succeeded. Jane Horwitz writes unenthusiastically in the Washington Post: "It is an amiable enough movie and ought to give warm and fuzzy amusement to kids 8 and older, even as it will appear utterly contrived to adult eyes." The film stars wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne The Rock Johnson, who draws polite applause. David Germain of the Associated Press says that "Johnson combines an effective mix of swaggering charm, cluelessness and childish enthusiasm." Gene Seymour in Newsday asks, "Why isn't Dwayne Johnson a big star by now? The camera loves him. He's funny, self-deprecating. ... It could be that he hasn't quite found the right vehicle to drive home his persona." This movie may not be that vehicle, either. As Robert W. Butler notes in the Kansas City Star: "Johnson pretty much drips on-screen charisma, but he can't overcome the banality of The Game Plan, a comedy so formulaic and uninspired that you'd swear you've seen the movie before." And Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News concludes her review of the movie by remarking, "The only mystery, in fact, is why Johnson chose to make this film in the first place. He could be -- should be -- one of the biggest action stars of the era. Instead, he's wasting his talents on one mediocre movie after another."

In director Robert Benton's Feast of Love, Morgan Freeman is once again playing another variation of his previous role as God. "Just once, it would be great to see him play a spiteful neurotic or a selfish bastard," Carina Chocano remarks in the Los Angeles Times. Stephen Holden in the New York Times says that Freeman "has a role he could act in his sleep." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post comments that Freeman "has devoted entirely too much of his screen career to selflessly helping white folks." Most critics have gagged on the movie. Lumenick calls Feast of Love "diabetes-inducing." Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail suggests it's "like a buffet of contrivance." And Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune uses this analogy: "This feast is more like an artfully arranged appetizer plate."

The Kingdom would appear to hold the keys to the top position at the box office this weekend, judging from analysts' projections, but it's unlikely to earn more than $18-22 million, and the overall box office is expected to remain in its annual September slump. Targeting the "tween" audience, Disney's The Game Plan, starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson, is likely to earn $14-18 million and place second. But MGM is unlikely to pull out of its recent tailspin, with Feast of Love, starring Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear, expected to do just $3-5 million.

Television networks may spend the lion's share of their budgets on primetime television shows, but if you're a TV personality, the big bucks are not in primetime, judging from Forbes magazine's latest list of television's top-earning performers. Topping the TV20 list once again is Oprah Winfrey, who earned $260 million between June 2006 and June 2007. Somewhat surprisingly Jerry Seinfeld comes in a distant second with $60 million, most of it earned from syndication. No. 3 on the list, with $45 million, is Simon Cowell, the judge and co-producer of Fox's American Idol. No. 4, with $40 million, is David Letterman. Donald Trump, the only billionaire on the list besides Oprah, earned $32 million from his The Apprentice shows, to land at No. 5. Only one TV network anchor made the list -- Katie Couric, who came in at No. 14 with 15 million. But her former Today co-host, Matt Lauer also made the list with $13 million, while Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer tied for No. 18 with $12 million. Meredith Vieira, who replaced Couric on Today, entered the list for the first time, coming in at No. 20 with $10 million. The only primetime actor to land on the Forbes' list was Keifer Sutherland, star of Fox's 24.

Nine out of ten consumers are confused about what HDTV actually is, with 40 percent unaware that they must have a special HDTV receiver to view high-definition programming. Even among those who own HDTV sets, 44 percent do not know that they must use a special player, such as a Blu-ray or HD DVD player, and special discs in order to view recorded movies in high definition on their sets. The survey results were published Thursday by the retailer Best Buy, which said that it had polled 1,012 adults across the country.

CBS is taking an untraditional approach to promoting some of its fall programming, Advertising Age noted on its website today (Friday). For example, supermarket shoppers will see an image of the lead character in its vampire drama Moonlight when they open the door of the freezers in some frozen-food sections. Survivor: China ads will be appearing on take-out containers at many Chinese-food restaurants. And ads for the new series Cane will be popping up on sugar packets. It's all part of a strategy to "get people when they are least expecting messages about entertainment, but they are very receptive to them," CBS Marketing President George Schweitzer told AdAge.

A single commercial for Chevron will occupy the entire 2 1/2-minute commercial break at the beginning of 60 Minutes on CBS Sunday night, carrying the theme, "The power of human energy." It's part of the oil company's current campaign spotlighting the energy issue, the New York Times observed today. It quoted Helen Clark, a Chevron executive who is overseeing the campaign, as saying that the issue is "a complex subject" that is "hard to get across in a 30-second spot." Gordon Bowen, chief creative officer for the McGarry Bowen ad agency, which created the spot, added: "We were taking a point of view that needed some thought and education, so 30 seconds was just not the right vehicle."

The managing director of Al Jazeera English has called U.S. television coverage of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearances at the U.N. and Columbia University this week "abysmally one-sided" and suggested that the Qatar-based channel could serve as "an alternative voice" to such coverage. (Al Jazeera English is currently not carried by any major cable provider.) In an interview with the online trade publication Multichannel News, Nigel Parsons said, "I'm not defending him as necessarily a good guy, but I'm not rushing to judgment on him either." He was particularly critical of standard assertions by U.S. TV reporters that Ahmadinejad had called the Holocaust a myth. [In fact his words have more often appeared to be deliberately ambiguous or vacillatory, as when he told his Columbia audience last week, "Our friends refer to 1930 as the point of the departure for this development; however, I believe the Holocaust, from what we read, happened during World War II -- after 1930 -- in the 1940s."] Meanwhile, UPI reports that a TV series airing on state-run television in Iran, based on the actions of Iranian diplomats who helped Jews escape from Germany during WWII by providing them with Iranian passports, has become a "massive hit" in the country.

The kids' TV channel Nickelodeon is planning to intentionally go dark on Saturday at noon, with announcers telling their audience, "Go outside and play." The channel plans to remain dark for three hours, after which Nickelodeon says it will air Let's Play Go Healthy Challenge, produced in cooperation with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation.