Reel News

James Bond's next movie will be a little less British. PHOTO: EPA

Arecord countries from four continents are vying for nominations in next year's best foreign-language film Oscar category, including first time entrants Iraq and Fiji, officials said.

Organizers cinema's top awards unveiled the entrants for next year's Academy Awards' foreign movie section some three months ahead of the announcement of the nominations for the 78th annual Oscars.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had invited 91 countries to present a film for consideration for the 2006 Oscar for best foreign film and the winner will be unveiled at a star-studded show in Hollywood on March 5.

Mobsters the 1990 film Goodfellas have beaten a fear of heights in Vertigo and the great white shark of Jaws to help the Martin Scorsese film clench the mantle of greatest movie of all time in a survey of UK film experts. Goodfellas, which featured Ray Liotta, Robert de Niro and an Oscar winning supporting role from Joe Pesci, topped the list of 100 movies in a survey of film critics by Total Film.

Although JK Rowling's books, and the Harry Potter movies, have raked in a fortune, the director of the latest movie griped about its inadequate budget. PHOTO AP

Goodfellas will not appear on the billing in Iran as there won't be any liquor-swilling God-deniers on the Iranian silver screen any time soon -- nor drug takers, secularists, liberals, anarchists or feminists.

Thus a committee of Islamic clerics, led by new hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which earlier this week banned foreign films -- specifically naming those elements of Western culture that were judged as affronts to the government's vision of Iran's Muslim culture.

A new life awaits Dakota Fanning in her next film. PHOTO: AP

With the decision, Iranians felt one of the first cultural reversals of the opening to the outside world that they enjoyed under their former reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

And ban, designed to wipe out what clerics call ``corrupt Western culture,'' is not going down well with many in Iran.

``It's not right to fight other cultures. Imposing censorship is not the logical way to resist Western culture, at any rate,'' said Ali Reza Raisian, head of the Iranian film directors association. ``If Westeners were to treat us the same way, we also would not be able to reach them through film with our messages and way of thinking.''

The ban aims to distance the Persian state from the open cultural policies undertaken by Khatami that encouraged cultural coexistence and dialogue among civilizations. But many experts and officials say the ban will only cause Iranians to turn to the black market for western video tapes or to foreign satellite television broadcasts.

Meanwhile, stirred but not too shaken was the reaction of a British film industry mission to news that most of the next James Bond film will be shot in Prague and not its traditional site, Pinewood Studios, outside London.

It is the first time that the four decades old Bond series will be mostly shot on foreign soil. Landing most of the work on the next 007 blockbuster underlines Prague's credentials as a global movie centre, but it is sobering news for the depressed British screen industry.

Mike Newell had the backing of one of Hollywood's biggest studios and a budget he called "colossal," but the British director was continually fighting over money while filming the latest Harry Potter blockbuster. In a weekend interview to promote Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Newell said his experience was not unlike that on smaller movies where he felt there were never enough funds to get the job finished.

Child Dakota Fanning has signed on to star in the animated movie Coraline in which she will voice the main character, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The movie, to be directed by Henry Selick is based on the book by Neil Gaiman about a girl who discovers a door in her house that leads to an alternate version of her life.

Fanning, 11, is currently starring in Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story. She had her breakout role opposite Sean Penn in 2001's I Am Sam and went on to star with Denzel Washington in Man on Fire, Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds and Robert DeNiro in Hide and Seek.