Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie wasn’t exactly a smashing success in the U.S., but now he and Katie Holmes are in Europe promoting the hell out of it. On Tuesday, they attended the film’s premiere in London.

I kind of hate Katie’s outfit, and it makes her look like she has a baby bump, even though I don’t think she’s pregnant (although she did just end her run on Broadway, so it would be appropriate timing). But is it just me or do black tights and black open-toed shoes not belong on anyone over the age of 8?

Tom Cruise was in South Korea over the weekend promoting his film, Valkyrie.  ”I’ve always wanted to kill Hitler. As a child, I used to wonder why someone didn’t stand up and kill him,”  Cruise told reporters.  If his mother loved him, she could have saved him a lot of angst by letting him know that the reason no one stood up and killed Hitler was because he already did himself the favor seventeen years before Cruise was born.

Since my childhood aspirations didn’t extend much past conquering Pong or feathering Kissing Barbie’s hair with safety scissors, I can’t relate to such lofty goals.  Dictator assassination seems so ambitious for a grade-schooler to contemplate.  He really is a superhero, wanting to kill the dead.  It’s why he can get away with the turtleneck/sportcoat/mom jean combo.

I wrote awhile back about how ridiculous and desperate I felt it was that Valkyrie was opening on Christmas Day. A friend emailed me later that night to point out that Schindler’s List also opened on Christmas Day. “Somehow,” I told her, “I don’t think this is going to be comparable.”

Here are some excerpts from an early review of this feel-good Hitler-assassinating holiday flick (emphasis mine).

Turns out Cruise is both the central figure in “Valkyrie” and its weakest link. He’s distractingly bad in this, the iconography of his celebrity so strongly overshadowing his performance. He’s just too powerfully contemporary. With his hard, flat American accent, he stands out in every single scene. And he’s not a good enough actor to immerse himself in this kind of period piece, or allow us to do the same. (Then again, if he had affected a German accent – or a British one to blend in among his co-stars – he would have invited derision for that, too. Maybe the guy just can’t win.) … Cruise undermines the potential of “Valkyrie” at every turn. He’s outclassed and outmatched by every member of the strong supporting cast, any of whom would have been more believable as Stauffenberg …

But we never get a sense of inner conflict, of the doubt he may have felt in betraying his duties, of the fear he may have faced in putting himself and his family in danger by going through with the plan. When Stauffenberg states with clenched-jawed, hushed certitude, “We have to kill Hitler,” we’ll just have to take his word for it that he feels strongly about the task he’s about to lead … The whole effort feels rather smoothly detached. The actual bomb-orchestration sequence is well-staged and has a few breathless moments, but a scene that’s supposed to be pivotal and poignant – when Stauffenberg reluctantly thrusts his partially amputated arm in the air and declares “Heil Hitler!” – instead comes off as laughable.

Ouch, ouch, ouch. BIG ouchies there.

I expect my headline here is going to be one of many, many, many jokes made in the next week or two where you basically pair the concept of a failed Hitler assassination with the concept of a failed movie. Collect ‘em all!

I raced to Google when I saw these pictures, in the vain hope that at least one of Tom Cruise’s kids was old enough to legally purchase cigarettes.  The mother in me just cannot allow myself to be critical of 16 and 12 year-old children.  Which these two are.  Can you believe it?  Don’t they look so much older than that?  What 16 year-old wears jacquard? 

You rarely hear much about Tom Cruise’s kids.  I was impressed that they are never in the papers for their DUI’s and Vegas quickies.  Yeah.  That’s because they are in the Oxy10 zone right now.  We have years to wait before a tell-all can even be a possibility. 

Isabella and Connor Cruise accompanying their dad to the Valkyrie premiere in LA.

Valkyrie, Tom Cruise’s painfully ill-fated Third Reich flick, has made a last-minute decision to open on Christmas Day rather than later that week.

Um … who goes to the movies on Christmas?

If you guessed “Jews and families with small children and other demographics who would rather stare at a bathroom wall than your Hitler movie, dude,” you’d be correct. You should also consider shooting an email over to the folks at United Artists, since apparently they didn’t get that memo.

This is going to be a remarkably embarrassing opening day for Cruise.

What do we think?

Looks like it’ll be a great photo shoot, if nothing else.

“There’s a misperception about me that I just became this wallflower, this woman who doesn’t have any control of her life,” says Katie in the issue hitting newsstands Sunday, which includes a feature on TomKat’s life. “And that’s pretty wrong. From the very beginning, I’ve made choices in my life that have been very strong.”

It is certainly very cool to look at the evolution of Katie Holmes — from this girl-next-door TV starlet to this glamorous, untouchable woman of mystery.

More pics of Katie here.