• Billy Elliot has received three nominations for this year's European Film of the Year Awards: Best Film, Best Actor (Jamie Bell) and Best Actress (Julie Walters). Other films nominated in the Best Film category include the Cannes winner Dancer in the Dark, the French comedy Harry, He's Here to Help, the British animated feature Chicken Run, and the Liv Ullmann-directed drama Faithless. The awards will be presented at a ceremony at the Theatre National de Chaillot in Paris on December 2.

• Julia Roberts has confirmed she will appear in the mysterious Project 3, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Little is know about the project, which has been described as a psychological thriller in the vein of George Cukor's 1944 classic Gaslight. Roberts will begin shooting once she has completed Steven Soderbergh's Rat Pack remake Ocean's 11, and Joe Roth's comedy America's Sweethearts. The project will see her reunited with The Mexican film-makers Gore Verbinski and J.H. Wyman, with whom she has recently finished The Mexican, starring alongside Brad Pitt.

• Julia Ormond is to play the female lead in a Danish disaster epic. Martin Sheen will also star in Baltic Storm, which is based on the real-life tragedy in the 1990s when Scandinavian passenger ferry Estonia sank en route to Finland with the loss of over 1,000 lives. Ormond will play an investigative journalist who attempts to get to the bottom of the tragedy.

• Mario Van Peebles will play the militant black leader Malcolm X opposite Will Smith's Muhammad Ali in Michael Mann's biopic of the boxing star, reports Jam!.Van Peebles, last seen in the 1999 thriller Blowback, has a good pedigree to play Malcolm X. His father, director Melvin Van Peebles, directed the 60s blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback's Baadassass Song and Mario himself played black leader Stokely Carmichael in the 1995 film Panther.