Rouge top for second week

Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge has held onto the top spot at the UK and Eire box office chart for a second week.

The film took more than £1.85m, narrowly beating The Fast and the Furious which took £1.76m and debuted at numner two.

Elsewhere in the chart the British movie The Martins, starring Lee Evans, entered the chart at number seven, taking £310,000.

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Kylie new face of Eurostar

Australian pop star Kylie Minogue has been unveiled as the new face of Channel Tunnel train operator Eurostar.

The singer is due to appear in a TV ad which shows her travelling through the tunnel to Paris for a day's shopping.

Kylie follows in the footsteps of actor John Malkovich who was the face of Eurostar's last advertising campaign.

The advert will be shown on Friday evening during Coronation Street.

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Actress Dorothy McGuire dies

Dorothy McGuire, a star of films of the 40s and 50s, has died in Los Angeles. She was 85.

Her films included A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Spiral Staircase and Friendly Persuasion.

But it is for Gentleman's Agreement, opposite Gregory Peck, in 1947 for which she will be best remembered.

The film earned her an Oscar nomination while the movie itself - one of the first to attack anti-Semitism in America - won best picture.

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Amityville Horror maker dies

Samuel Z Arkoff, Hollywood producer of more than 500 cult movies, has died aged 83.

Arkoff, who said movies were no good unless they titillated audiences, tapped into the youth culture long before the current teen movie trend.

Among his best-known releases were the Michael Caine thriller Dressed To Kill, The Amityville Horror and I Was A Teenage Werewolf.

"I think my dad was one of the first mavericks," said his son Louis Arkoff.

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Spain prepares for Hollywood invasion

Spain is to drop laws that force its cinemas to show one European film for every three non-European movies, which are usually made in the US.

Spain is the last European country with such a screen quota system. It is now expected to be scrapped within five years.

The average budget for a Spanish film is around 500m pesetas ($2.57m). But US blockbusters invest billions of pesetas into the economy through marketing alone.

A spokesman for Spain's culture ministry said: "Now it's time for Spanish cinema to show what it's really made of."

But he admitted the industry would have its work cut out to compete internationally.

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Swiss movies to get 'Smell-o-Vision'

The cinema-going experience in Switzerland could soon be enhanced by the addition of smells to fit the screen image being wafted around the auditorium.

Plans are being worked on by Swiss fragrance group Giuvaden which would see tiny dispensers built into the armrests of seats.

Georg Frater, head of fragrance research, said a new scent to suit the scene would be released every five or 10 minutes.

"It can be the green smell of the jungle. It can be a typical swamp odour. The possibilities are amazing," Frater said.