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The end of the world as we know it is nigh in Steven Spielberg's new movie. PHOTO: AP

Edward Masry, the crusty lawyer played by Albert Finney in the Oscar-winning film Erin Brokovich, died at 73, announced the city hall of Thousand Oaks, California, where Masry had served as mayor.

"City Council and staff offer our sincere condolences to the Masry family during this difficult time," said current mayor Claudia Bill-de la Pena. "Mr. Masrys passing is also a great loss to our community."

According to the council and media reports, Masry died Monday from difficulties connected to diabetes in a hospital in Thousand Oaks, 60km northwest of Los Angeles.

Masry and his feisty assistant Brokovich -- played by Julia Roberts in the 2000 film -- gained fame as a small-town law office which successfully sued a power company for polluting the town's water supply and poisoning its residents.

After a lengthy David-and-Goliath battle that furnished the plot for the film, the couple forced the company to pay US$333 million in damages to the residents.

The film was nominated for five Oscars in 2002, including one for Finney's portrayal of Masry, and Julia Roberts won the best actress Oscar for her role as Brokovich.

Film producer Gregg Hoffman, who with his partners turned a US$1 million horror movie called Saw into a US$102 million hit, has died at the age of 42, associates said on Tuesday.

Lions Gate Entertainment, which distributed Saw and its successor Saw 2, said Hoffman died on Sunday in a Hollywood hospital of natural causes but gave no specifics. An autopsy is planned.

Saw, financed by Hoffman and his partners at Twisted Pictures, cost about US$1 million to make but reaped US$102 million worldwide at the box office when it was released in October 2004. The sequel Saw 2 brought in even more earlier this year, and a third movie in the series was in production.

Saw is the grisly story of a serial killer called Jigsaw who devises intricate situations to get his victims to kill each other.

And Japan's oldest working actress Hisako Hara, who starred in the 1989 drama of the Hiroshima bombing Black Rain, has died aged 96, media reports said Tuesday.

Hara, whose real name was Hisa Ishijima, died Sunday night of heart failure.

Renowned as a supporting actress, Hara played in director Shohei Imamura's Black Rain, the story of a family that witnesses the horror of the world's first nuclear bombing and confront its legacy years later as they live among survivors.

After reviving cosmic fright films with War of the Worlds earlier this year, director Steven Spielberg is to remake the 1951 sci-fi thriller When Worlds Collide, Daily Variety said Tuesday.

In When Worlds Collide, a dead star speeding directly toward Earth forces humans to choose a group of survivors to flee in a space ship for another planet.

The original version of the film was directed by Rudolph Mate and won an Oscar in 1952 for special effects.

Spielberg will produce the remake for Paramount Pictures and has recruited as director Stephen Sommers, who specializes in action and fantasy films such as The Mummy and Van Helsing.

He's back, and New York is besieged with King Kong fever: the newest film incarnation of hairy King Kong goes on general release in Taiwan on Wednesday when local audiences will watch the beast once again climb up the Empire State Building.

Initial reviews of King Kong have already proclaimed the Hollywood blockbuster by director Peter Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson to be a modern masterpiece.

The US$200 million movie about the doomed love of a giant gorilla for a Hollywood actress hits cinemas as the annual box office takings are slumping at least 6 per cent from last year's figures.

But hopes that director Jackson has fashioned a hit on par with his previous Lord of the Rings epics have risen following initial reviews in the UK press.

"That Jackson's King Kong upgrades the now hammy original with wit, heart and humor is a pleasant surprise," wrote critic Kevin Maher in The Times. "That it does so by reinventing the action blockbuster, in form and emotional impact, is nothing less than an act of cinematic alchemy."

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