Venice Film Festival finale nears

VENICE—The 11-day Venice Film Festival winds up on Saturday after a red carpet award ceremony on the glamorous Lido beach front, with British entry "The Queen" and Hollywood's "Bobby" favorites to take away the main prize.
When last year's Golden Lion award went to Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" it was an expected and popular choice at the world's oldest film festival, but 2006 lacks a clear frontrunner.
Film critics and the public alike have hailed Stephen Frears' "The Queen," in which Helen Mirren plays a monarch hopelessly out of touch with her people when Princess Diana dies in a Paris car crash in 1997.
Leading the chasing pack behind "The Queen" for best picture is Emilio Estevez's "Bobby," about a dozen or so characters who were at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968.
Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Anthony Hopkins and Lindsay Lohan appear in a touching story that works real news footage from the day of the assassination into the movie.
"Bobby is the favorite because it has a politically correct appeal, like 'The Queen'," said Maurizio Porro, film critic for Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Estevez completed the script in 2000, but said in Venice that the film's lessons about Kennedy and his stand against the U.S. war in Vietnam had become more and more relevant today.
Italy's "Nuovomondo," or "Golden Door," the last of the 21 competition films to screen to the press, made a late charge.
The film about a Sicilian family of illiterate peasants who travel to the United States in search of a better life won a 15-minute ovation after the world premiere screening.
"The last film in competition could be the last-minute surprise of this festival," La Repubblica newspaper said.
Other contenders for the best film Golden Lion include French veteran Alain Resnais' "Private Fears in Public Places," an intimate account of ordinary people searching for happiness in a snow-covered Paris.
Alfonso Cuaron won fans for his terrifying vision of London in 2027 in "Children of Men"; "Daratt," Chad's first competition entry about coming to terms with the horrors of civil war, is seen as an outside bet, and two Asian films are in the frame.
"I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" by Tsai Ming-Liang explores the lives of migrant workers in Malaysia after economic collapse, while China's "Still Life" by Jia Zhang-Ke is about how the giant Three Gorges Dam project affects ordinary people.
In the best actor category Belgian brothers Jeremie and Yannick Renier, in Nue Propriete, Briton Clive Owen in Children of Men and Sergio Castellitto of Italy in "La Stella Che Non C'e" won warm praise.
Mirren is hot favorite to win best actress, with only France's Isabelle Huppert seen as a realistic challenger.
Despite Bobby's success in Venice, other U.S. competition entries fared less well, with Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain" booed at a press screening and "Hollywoodland," starring Ben Affleck, Diane Lane and Adrien Brody drawing mixed reviews.
"The Black Dahlia," starring Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank and Josh Hartnett, was also seen as a disappointment. —Agencies