Gleeson accepts his mission

The busy Irish actor Brendan Gleeson has been signed for a key role opposite Tom Cruise in the Hollywood blockbuster, Mission: Impossible 2. Gleeson has been receiving a lot of attention in Hollywood after the excellent US reviews he received for his performance in John Boorman's The General. In the Mission Impossible sequel, Gleeson will play an upperclass British industrialist - said to be loosely modelled on Rupert Murdoch - who is charming on the surface but the opposite underneath. John Woo is directing the sequel which is now shooting in Australia.

Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's C/W Prods. are producing the movie for Paramount Pictures. Ian McKellen, Ving Rhames, Steve Zahn, Thandie Newton and Dougray Scott also star in the project, whose plot developments are being kept tightly under wraps.

Gleeson, who stars in the current Irish release, Sweety Barrett, will also be seen later this year in the US production Lake Placid, which features Bridget Fonda, Bill Pullman and Oliver Platt, and was scripted by Ally McBeal writer David E. Kelley. Most recently, Gleeson worked with Brian Cox and Peter McDonald in Saltwater, Conor McPherson's film based on his stage play, This Lime Tree Bower.

Ewan McGregor is due here shortly to play James Joyce in Pat Murphy's long-ingestation film project, Nora, which features Susan Lynch as Nora Barnacle and is set to start shooting on May 23rd. Now there are unconfirmed reports that McGregor will team up again with his Phantom Menace co-star, Liam Neeson in a remake of Carol Reed's 1949 classic, The Third Man, with McGregor in Joseph Cotten's role as Holly Martins and Neeson taking over from Orson Welles as Harry Lime.

The new version, to be directed by action movie specialist John McTiernan, relocates the story from Vienna to Northern Ireland and the film is likely to be shot in Dublin. Meanwhile, the director's cut of Carol Reed's The Third Man, running 11 minutes longer than the original, opens in US cities today.

Before that, however, McGregor is confirmed to co-star with Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, the new musical from the Australian director, Baz Luhrmann. Based on the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld, it will feature McGregor as a young poet who defies his father by moving to the bohemian area of Montmartre in Paris, where he becomes involved in a passionate but doomed affair with a nightclub star and courtesan played by Kidman.

Luhrmann says that the movie will be "a reinvention of the musical form - the story will be told using contemporary music in a period setting." Meanwhile, Luhrmann himself is enjoying unexpected success on the US singles and albums charts with Everyody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) and Something For Everybody, respectively. The single is based on a spoof graduation speech written in her Chicago Tribune column by Mary Schmich, and the album features the single along with selections from the scores of Luhrmann's movies and stage works.

Despite all the speculation fuelled by the trailer of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in a naked caress, Stanley Kubrick's eagerly anticipated final film, Eyes Wide Shut has been passed with an R (Restricted) rating in the US. The trailer had raised fears that the movie would get the altogether more restrictive X rating which Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange received. Eyes Wide Shut opens in the US on July 16th, but Irish audiences will have to wait until September 17th to see it.

Launched recently by the arts minister, Sile de Valera, the Kerry Screen Commission has been established as a one-stop shop to provide film and television makers with information and assistance to facilitate production needs in a county which, the commission notes, offers "a wealth of undiscovered locations" from epic land and sea scapes to magnificent castles and country houses to old market towns.

The board of the commission, which is chaired by Kevin Moriarty, the managing director of Ardmore Studios, is made up of a cross-section of film and television professionals from Kerry alongside representatives from the county agencies involved with economic development. The chief executive is Ventry-based producer and director Michaela Connolly, a former commissioning editor for film and video at EMI in London.

While Kerry is best known from a film point of view as the location for David Lean's truly epic shoot on Ryan's Daughter, the county has been used in movies since the 1910s when the US-based Kalem Company produced a succession of silent movies there. It was the setting for Tom Cooper's 1936 indigenous production, The Dawn, which drew entirely on an inexperienced, local cast, and more recently featured handsomely in the early stages of Ron Howard's Far and Away.

The first project assisted by the screen commission has been P.J. Dillon's short film, Most Important, featuring Colm Meaney, which won the best first-time director prize at the 1999 Celtic Film Festival.

Three Irish productions have received nominations for the prestigious awards to be presented at next month's 20th Banff Television Festival in Canada. Two of the five nominees for short drama are Irish - PJ Dillon's Most Important and Peter Sheridan's The Breakfast - while the Crescendo Concepts production, Tales From the Poorhouse, has been nominated in the performance programmes category.

Meanwhile John Hurt has won the best actor award at the Verona Film Festival for his performance as a middle-aged minor criminal on the run in the Irish film, Night Train, directed by John Lynch.

The world of supermodels and celebrities will be explored by Denys Arcand, the Canadian director of the marvellous Jesus of Montreal, in his new movie, 15 Moments, which will star Thomas Gibson from Arcand's Love and Human Remains and the TV series, Dharma and Greg. The cast also includes Camilla Rutherford, Charles Berling, Frank Langella, Dan Aykroyd and the Canadian stage and film director, Robert Lepage.