Terminal Velocity

Anyone who has ever suffered the misery of a delayed flight has learned how life-draining it is to kill time in an airport. Imagine, then, the poor sap stranded in a terminal for the foreseeable future. Such a fate befalls poor Tom Hanks in the new Steven Spielberg film The Terminal, which launched its official site today at this address. Hanks plays Viktor Navorsky, an Eastern European immigrant fleeing civil war in his own country. At the very moment that he arrives in the US, his country ceases to exist, making all his paperwork invalid. He is left stranded in the airport terminal in which he landed, where he gradually befriends staff and falls for a beautiful flight attendant (Catherine Zeta-Jones). The trailer ably demonstrates Hanks' comedy accent and Zeta-Jones' winsome charms, but also features the tantalising promise of Stanley Tucci and Kumar Pallana, better known as The Royal Tenenbaums' Pagoda. In other Terminal news, Spielberg has announced that the film will get its European premiere at this year's Venice festival in September, just before its UK release on September 10. Hopefully after that Spielberg can go off and focus on Indiana Jones 4, before Harrison Ford decides he prefers a wooly cardigan and slippers to bullwhip and fedora.