Actually, a handful of Web reviewers have already struck at the film "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," despite an intense effort by the director Steven Spielberg, the executive producer George Lucas and Paramount Pictures to keep this highly anticipated sequel out of sight until Sunday.

On that day, this fourth Indiana Jones movie is scheduled to make its debut at the Cannes Film Festival with an afternoon press screening, and another one at night.

About the same time, the picture, which opens in theaters on the following Thursday, May 22, is expected to be screened for the news media and industry insiders at multiple showings in Manhattan and Los Angeles, while other screenings are scheduled around the world.

Spielberg is unusually fastidious when it comes to protecting his films from advance word that can diminish excitement or muddy a message planted by months of carefully orchestrated publicity and expensive promotions (including, in this case, a February cover article in Vanity Fair, complete with Annie Leibovitz photos of the cast, and leather bullwhips delivered weeks ago to newsrooms).

Spielberg customarily avoids leaky test screenings. Even Marvin Levy, his publicist of more than 30 years, said he had not yet seen the new movie.

Still, there it was, at 6:42 a.m. on Thursday: a harshly critical review on aintitcoolnews.com, from a poster who identified himself as "ShogunMaster." Rife with details from the film, the review said, "This is the Indiana Movie that you were dreading."

By that afternoon two other less critical, but less than sparkling, reviews also appeared on the Web site.

The man who posted as ShogunMaster, reached via the Web site, said he is a theater executive who saw the film at an exhibitors' screening. He spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal from the studio.

Paramount had shown the film to a handful of theater company executives at its Los Angeles lot and elsewhere.

How word gets out

Movie studios increasingly tend to protect their biggest bets from advance showings. Two years ago, for instance, Sony Pictures screened "The Da Vinci Code" for critics at the Cannes Film Festival only two days before its opening in the United States. But exhibitors' screenings can open a window for determined reviewers.

Such screenings are required in about two dozen states that have laws against blind-bidding, a practice in which theater owners were once asked to bid on films they had not seen.

As a practical matter, there is little or no actual bidding in the contemporary theater business, which relies instead on negotiations between distributors and theater owners. But distributors continue to hold screenings for theater company executives in the weeks before a film's release, whether as a courtesy or as a way to avoid conflict with a patchwork of state laws.

Theater executives may have an incentive to play down a movie's prospects after such a screening, to get better terms. In any case, many fans will most likely flock to "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," if only to make their own judgments about Spielberg's decision to revisit the franchise fully 19 years after its last installment. Still, bad notices could keep the more ambivalent moviegoers from attending and thwart a truly huge box office haul.

According to Levy, who spoke by telephone on Thursday, Spielberg has kept a watchful eye on virtually every aspect of the film's marketing campaign. "He gets involved with everything," Levy said. "Every TV spot, every line in every ad, every advertising concept."

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