He's hardly unbiased, but Viggo Mortensen reckons his film Eastern Promises is this year's best movie even though it wasn't nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

"I don't think there's a better movie than Eastern Promises which came out any time this year," he said. "I'm very very proud of it."

The movie, which follows a Russian mafia family living in London, features a scene where a completely naked Viggo has a violent fight in a bathhouse with some would-be assassins.

"The thing about that scene is it works because of the emotional content as well as the actual nakedness," he said.

"It's a small movie in itself. A survival story - the survival of the fittest. That's the way it needed to be done.

"We worked together as a team, David [Director David Cronenberg] and I. We told it the way it needed to be told, end of story. That's one of many great scenes in the movie, of which there are many."