Johnny Depp continues making intriguing career moves: he’s just bought the rights to Gregory David Roberts’s novel SHANTARAM, about a young Australian who escapes from prison, flees to India, and ends up joining insurgent forces in Afghanistan…

THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE director Sylvain Chomet is hoping to make an animated film from an unfilmed Jacques Tati script. L’ILLUSIONISTE, which was written and then discarded in the early Sixties, tells the story of a hotel worker who comes to believe a conjuror has genuine magical powers…

France’s cultish Larrieu brothers follow up the quirky semi-musical UN HOMME, UN VRAI with the tentatively titled PEINDE OU FAIRE L’AMOUR (Paint or Make Love), featuring Daniel Auteuil, Sabine Azéma, and Amira Casar, of whom we recently saw so much in Catherine Breillat’s ANATOMY OF HELL …

And Tom Waits fans will be excited to hear that he’s returning to the big screen, first up, he'll appear alongside Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke and Christopher Walken in Tony Scott’s DOMINO, which tells the true story of how the daughter of British actor Laurence Harvey quit her acting career to become… a bounty hunter—what else? After that Waits will also have a major role in Robert Altman’s adaptation of A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANIAN, due out in 2006.

MUST-SEE MOVIES:

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
(Jean-François Richet, U.S., 2004)
A taught and gutsy remake John Carpenter's 1976 cult siege thriller, itself an homage to Howard Hawks's classic western Rio Bravo.

SHE'S ONE OF US
(Siegrid Alnoy, France, 2003)
An office temp with the self esteem of a doormat breaks free from a life of somnambulist conformity.

MUST-SEE ALTERNATE ENDING:
Screenings of the new 35mm print of Luis Bunuel's LOS OLVIDADOS at New York's Film Forum (January 28 to February 10) will be immediately followed by a recently discovered (and thematically inconceivable) "happy ending." Apparently it was shot by the film's nervous producer who wanted to "soften" the film's message.

Winner of the 2004 European Film Award and the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Fatih Akin's HEAD-ON also swept the German Academy Awards. So is Akin the new Fassbinder? Mixing melodrama and social critique, this grimly tempestuous love story is set in Hamburg's Turkish community with Brechtian theatrical flourishes in the form of traditional Turkish tunes, played in front of an Istanbul riverscape. Amy Taubin tells us more.

Winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin the same year as HEAD-ON won the Gold, Daniel Burman's LOST EMBRACE is a charming depiction of immigrant culture set in a Buenos Aires shopping mall home to Koreans, Italians, Peruvians, and to Ariel, trying hard to reclaim his Polish roots.

Click here to read the full article

Now in his seventies, Clint Eastwood continues to find new challenges both in front of and behind the camera, as the heartrending MILLION DOLLAR BABY demonstrates. Read the unexpurgated interview with the undiminished icon, only available online.
To read the interview online

COVER STORY: The Aviator
Martin Scorsese's THE AVIATOR gives us a 20th-century visionary driven forward yet paralyzed by his own obsessions.

Terra Incognita: Movies to Look Out For in 2005
13 unknown pleasures from around the world.
Read more online

FEATURE: ROUTE 181
A controversial epic documentary about the state of relations between Israelis and Palestinians, scoops up plenty of reality on the ground, while history slips through its fingers. By Harlan Jacobson.
Read the article online

ROUTE 181 is playing as part of FILM COMMENT SELECTS at the Walter Reade Theater in NYC, February 9-24
For the Film Comment Selects schedule


JEAN-LUC GODARD
The director as actor by Richard Combs & Raymond Durgnat

Godard: The Interview by Frédéric Bonnaud

and more...

Read the Table of Contents Online

If you live in the NYC area, see these great unreleased films you've been reading about in the pages of Film Comment

On the slate for this year are:

• Olivier Assayas’ CLEAN starring Maggie Cheung

• Isabelle Huppert in the scandalous MA MERE

• A tribute to French actress Bulle Ogier including Jacques Rivette’s LE PONT DU NORD, Barbet Schroeder's MISTRESS, and Luis Buñuel's THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE

• Recent Korean films OLD BOY, SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE and MEMORIES OF MURDER

• Takashi Miike's new symphony of violnce, IZO, starring Takeshi Kitano.

• The controversial Israeli documentary ROUTE 181

• The latest by Iranian directors Samira Makhmalbaf and Bahman Gohbadi

• Two early Sam Fuller films to complement this year's release of the reconstructed THE BIG RED ONE.

and more.

For the Film Comment Selects schedule