Today

VENICE BEACH
Duncan Zuur, from Amsterdam, surprised residents and tourists by wakeboarding across St Mark's Square in Venice last autumn. The city was left under more than a meter of water, after its worst flooding since 1986.

TERMINATOR SOLDIERS
Bloomington, Indiana The US military has recruited a British robotics expert to help build robot soldiers that will not violate the Geneva Convention. "The question they want answered is whether we can build automated weapons that would conform to the laws of war," Colin Allen, a scientific philosopher at Indiana University told The Telegraph. Many scientists, however, say that it will be impossible to build robots that don't make mistakes.

AUSTRALIA
After making stylised films such as Moulin Rouge, Australian director Baz Luhrmann attempts a big love story with a dramatic historical setting - Australia in the Second World War. But the restult is not the Antipodean Titanic that he would like to be.
The tone mixes comedy, romance and drama. Nicole Kidman is not good at comedy, however, and the first thirty minutes of Australia is a painful experience in Which she tries too hard to be funny. She improves as the film becomes more serious, but the principal characters remain two-dimensional.
The best thing is Australia itself, but Luhrmann includes landscapes that are clearly computer generated.
Why call a film Australia and then show a fictional creation? That error offers a metaphor for everything that is wrong with this film- it is kitch pretending to be realism.