Deepa Mehta's controversial drama Water has been named as Canada's foreign language Oscar submission in this year's awards season. The picture opened the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival and went on to become the most successful Hindi-language release in the history of the North American box office. The 1930s-set tale charts the romance between a Varanasi widow and a man from a lower caste. The 79th Academy Awards will take place in Hollywood on March 7 next year

Diane Keaton and Liv Tyler have signed up to the $15m (£8m) comedy Smother, in which La Keaton will portray an overly protective mum. US comedian Dax Shepard rounds out the leading players as a young man who loses his job and faces pressure from his wife to have a baby, at the same time as his overbearing mother moves in.

Angelina Jolie is the latest pin-up for "guerrilla artist" Banksy after spending £200,000 on works at his well-sited show in Los Angeles, an easy art-buying stroll from Beverley Hills. She's invested in various drawing-room talking points, including a white bust with a bleeding bullet hole in the forehead. Jolie is going to need inspiration after landing the part of power-woman Dagny Taggart in the film version of feminist icon Ayn Rand's vast novel Atlas Shrugged. Published in 1957 its 1,100 pages have taken all that time to reach the screen in spite of previous nibbles from Clint Eastwood, Faye Dunaway and Robert Redford.