Film: Rushes

SHEKHAR KAPUR and the Indian film-censor board are at loggerheads over the director's award-winning film, Elizabeth. The row - which led to the film being withdrawn on the eve of distribution there this week - centres on a scene in which a woman's naked breasts are visible. The censor board deprecated the requested cuts as "minor matters" but Kapur remains steadfast in his refusal to alter his film. "There are a lot of other people, too, who are saying: `Why must you bother about just three cuts?' " Kapur was quoted as saying in the Times of India. "But all my life I have fought against this attitude. Sometimes I have lost and sometimes I have won. But I have never given up."

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HAVING ALREADY been rescued by Miramax from a quailing Disney, Kevin Smith's pseudo-metaphysical flick Dogma now has the Catholic League on its back. The conservative religious group announced this week that it will disseminate a booklet "that offers proof of the anti-Catholic nature of the film." Miramax has yet to find a distributor for the film.

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REMINISCENT OF The Exorcist's visceral impact 25 years ago, tales of nauseous cinema-goers fleeing theatres are accompanying the release of the already hugely successful budget horror movie The Blair Witch Project. An American academic, however, has suggested that there's a sound physiological reason why the film has reportedly turned stomachs: the dodgy camerawork. Purporting to be the video account of the film's protagonists, the film features a lot of hand-held camera-work which, viewed in a cinema, reproduces the symptoms of motion sickness. "What happens is that the camera and the brain mismatch message," John Risey, a clinical audiologist at Tulane University Hospital in New Orleans, told The Washington Post. "Because you are seated and you are still, your brain gets wrong information that you are in motion."