Hollywood high flyers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg have launched what is being hailed as Venice's most ambitious film festival in years, but their romantic comedy The Terminal failed to take it to new heights.

More than 70 feature films, many of them world premieres, will screen at the 61st edition of the world's oldest cinema competition, which runs until September 11 - an infamous date that is central to many of its more controversial films.

A string of hot stars and internationally acclaimed directors will hit the red carpet and a record number of paparazzi have flown in for the occasion.

But The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks as a traveller from an imaginary eastern European country who gets stranded in New York's JFK airport for nine months, opened the festival on a slightly flat note.

A preview screening for the press received only a scattering of applause with critics praising Hanks's performance but saying they would have preferred something fresher.

"Nobody would deny Hanks and Spielberg are two coveted names at any festival, but frankly the film has been out for a couple of months and hasn't done very well," a British critic said.

The film opened two months ago in the United States, where critics and audiences gave it mixed reviews.

Organisers, trying to reinvent the Venice festival as a star-studded event, said the Oscar-winning duo were a perfect choice.

"We needed an opening film which would feel like an opening film," Marco Muller, the new director of the festival, told Reuters in an interview.

"It's a film which tackles a lot of serious issues but it's also a very successful comedy."

He said the deluge of Hollywood blockbusters would not drown out the festival's independent and arthouse roots.

"I wanted a festival of quality films for mass audiences. But if the Venice Film Festival is really going to be useful it has to create the conditions so that more fragile films will finally find a distributor and an audience."

Spielberg told journalists the comedy was a response to "the need for escape when the world is in crisis."

The festival will assume a more international air on Thursday when some of the 21 films competing for the Golden Lion top prize start screening.

The attacks against the United States will take centre stage later in the week with Wim Wenders's Land of Plenty, about post-September 11 United States.

-- <strong>Reuters/VNU</strong>