London's Leicester Square was getting a dose of Hollywood glamour on Wednesday with the opening of the 49th annual London Film Festival.
Stars Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz and master spy writer John Le Carre were due to walk the red carpet before the opening-night screening of The Constant Gardener, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles' adaptation of Le Carre's novel of international diplomacy and betrayal.
The festival closes Nov. 3 with George Clooney's McCarthy-era drama Good Night, And Good Luck. In between, it will screen 180 feature films and 130 shorts from some 50 countries.
Spanish screen heartthrob Antonio Banderas won a coveted place on Hollywood's prestigious Walk of Fame this week, 16 years after he arrived in the US as a struggling young actor.
The 45-year-old star of blockbuster Hollywood films as Zorro made his mark on Tinseltown when his bronze-edged star was unveiled on the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard before a cheering crowd including his wife Melanie Griffiths and pal Sharon Stone.
"It is an honor and privilege, thinking that I arrived to this country and this city 16 years ago with practically no money in my pocket," said Banderas.
France is offering financial incentives to lure Bollywood producers to its shores, a French official said.
Franck Priot, deputy director of Film France, an agency set up by the French government to attract international film shoots, said value added tax was refundable on shoots by foreign film crews.
Priot, in Mumbai, India, this week with a French delegation to meet Bollywood heavyweights, said the agency had put together hotel packages at special rates for Indian crews to film in mountain resorts.
"Six years ago no one in France thought that Indian commercial films will become so big, but now Bollywood is very big in France and lots of people are fascinated by Indian cinema," Priot told a gathering of Bollywood producers.
And on the other side of the world in Hollywood, heavyweight star Sylvester Stallone will reprise his role as a working-class boxing champ in a sixth Rocky movie, the iconic role that propelled him to fame 30 years ago, he said.
Stallone, now 59, will also direct, write and co-produce Rocky Balboa, the latest in the winning series launched with the Oscar-winning Rocky in 1976, Stallone's spokeswoman and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios said.
"Rocky Balboa is about everybody who feels they want to participate in the race of life, rather than be a bystander," Stallone said in a statement.
Actor Ashton Kutcher, whose May-to-December romance with screen star Demi Moore has riveted the tabloids for months, is producing a Fox TV sitcom pilot inspired by the couple's recent real-life marriage. The show, about a man closer in age to his eldest stepdaughter than his bride, is "loosely based" on Kutcher's new blended-family life, with some key variations, 20th Century Fox Television spokesman Chris Alexander said this week.
Nearly a thousand people and dozens of horses launched an epic city invasion in China's Inner Mongolia for a scene in a new movie starring Andy Lau, a newspaper reported this week.
Four hundred crew members captured the scene from Mozi Gong Lue (Mo Zi's Attack Strategy) with four cameras, the Apple Daily newspaper reported.
The shoot took more than 40 consecutive hours, the Shanghai Youth Daily reported.
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