Fox Searchlight announced in a press release tonight: "The opening of JUNO is moving up to Wednesday, December 5. It will open limited in New York and Los Angeles and will expand on a platform release in the subsequent weeks."

"Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney are to star in a film loosely based on the rise and fall of presidential hopeful Howard Dean," according to The Guardian. "The Warner Bros production will be based on a stage-play written by Beau Willimon, a former assistant on the Dean campaign. Entitled "Farragut North"...It tells the tale of a youthful communications guru working for a principled but unorthodox politician who finds himself undone by a slick and corrupt Washington establishment. Currently in rehearsal, Willimon's stage-play is set to open on Broadway in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Mike Nichols is directing."

"Oscar-nominated screenwriter Peter Morgan has started work on a sequel to "The Queen," which will dig into former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair's relationships with U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush," reports Variety. "The movie will focus on Blair's reaction to the handover of power between Clinton, a natural liberal ally, and Bush, who came from the other end of the political spectrum."

In the latest example of experimentation with collapsing distribution windows, Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" will be screened in 30 cities as part of a deal set to be announced by Emerging Pictures. Emerging will join forces with Thirteen/WNET New York for free screenings of the two-part, nearly four hour doc that screened at the Teluride Film Festival this past weekend and is also set for a screening in Toronto. It will be shown in 30 cities before its PBS airdates on September 26th & 27th and a full length DVD from Paramount is anticipated a week before the TV airdate as well.

As a Palestinian director, Hany Abu-Assad fully recognized he was stepping into a political minefield. By making a feature film about two young Palestinians who volunteer to become suicide bombers, he risked being accused either of glorifying terrorism or of betraying resistance to the Israeli occupation. The solution he found was to tell the story of "Paradise Now" as realistically as possible, but from a human point of view. Alan Riding profiles the director and "Paradise Now" in the New York Times (free subscription required to view entire article).

A groundbreaking movie about forbidden love between two cowboys in the American West, "Brokeback Mountain" by Taiwan-born director Ang Lee, has conquered critics at the 62nd Venice international film festival even before its world premiere. Featuring strong performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in the leading roles, the film is a sensitive study of the homosexual relationship between two cowboys who meet while working on a ranch in 1963. Agence France Presse reports.

"March of the Penguins," "Grizzly Man" and the 16 other summer movies may not solve the riddles of existence, but they offer glimpses into the real world. Stephen Holden reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view full article).

It is the most Korean of folk tales. A young girl, Shim Chung, gives her life to a sea dragon so that her blind father may see again - and is rewarded for her filial piety by becoming an empress. Now Shim Chung has earned another reward for her selfless sacrifice: an animated version of her ancient tale has become the first film to be released at the same time in North and South Korean movie theaters. "Empress Chung" opened on 51 screens in South Korea on Aug. 12, followed by 6 screens in North Korea on Aug. 15. Mark Russell reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view full article).

To observe a young audience collapsing with laughter while watching a Three Stooges romp on a remote Fijian island in "Reel Paradise" is to be reminded of the movies' primal appeal. Rough-and-tumble farce with an edge of cruelty is a visual language that requires no translation, no education. Stephen Holden reviews "Reel Paradise" in the New York Times (free subscription required to view the full article).

Let outsiders judge our culture based solely on the films playing on airplanes and they might assume America is made up entirely of 14-year-old girls. But even though the choices for in-flight movies can seem phenomenally boring (now playing on a 17-inch screen shared by 20 people at an airline near you: "Hitch," "Fever Pitch" and "Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous"), there's something comfortably numbing about the medium. Peter Hartlaub reports in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Coming this fall to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan is a 10th anniversary tribute to Killer Films. The special program will offer a 19-film retrospective, running from September 22 - October 8, 2005.

The Killer tribute will open with Mary Harron's latest, "The Notorious Bettie Page", an HBO Films production that will be released by Picturehouse in March of next year. The film, produced by Killer partners Pam Koffler, Katie Roumel, and Christine Vachon stars Gretchen Mol as the legendary 1950's pin-up icon.

Warren Smith, the publisher of an evangelical Christian newspaper in Charlotte, N.C., compares the movie "Jesus" to the jawbone of an ass. That is, it does not matter if the movie, a 1979 box office flop, has a gooey soundtrack and a British voiceover, or if the actor who plays Jesus breathes noticeably as he lies in the tomb. If a weapon as unlikely as a jawbone can slay an army, as the biblical story goes, then "Jesus," direct-mailed on DVD to every household in Mecklenburg County, N.C., can offer salvation. However dated its production values, "Jesus" has come to be viewed by many evangelical Christians as a singularly modern tool for spreading the Gospel. It speaks, though without special effects or quick editing, to a populace fluent in Hollywood. Shaila Dewan reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view the full article).

"The Great Raid" is an old-style World War Two movie about U.S. Army Rangers rescuing prisoners of war, but its makers caution it should not be seen as "flag-waving" for America's military today. Pitching a war film at a time when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers are at war in Iraq and Afghanistan invites comparisons to the patriotic black-and-white war movies of the 1940s that tried to boost morale at home and on the front. Claudia Parsons reports for Reuters.

A top Ukrainian official blasted a porn film that is due to be shot in Russia soon and is based on Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. In the planned movie the main characters are to be shown holding a secret meeting in Moscow, talking politics and making love in a helicopter flying over the Russian-Georgian border. The film has steamed Ukrainian officials. Agence France Presse reports.

HDNet Films is currently in production on Katherine Dieckmann's "Diggers" a new feature film written by Ken Marino. The film is starring Paul Rudd, Marino, Josh Hamilton, Ron Eldard, Maura Tierney, Lauren Ambrose and Sarah Paulson. Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente are producing the film with Anne Chaison and Ken Marino. Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban are executive producers.

The film was described in an announcement as, "A funny, heartfelt 70s era period piece set in the still-unspoiled Hamptons area of Long Island." Continuing the statement added, "'Diggers' is the story of two generations of hard-living clam diggers trying to maintain their way of life in the midst of the enormous changes swirling around them."

"A State of Mind" offers a rare and often chilling glimpse into the culture of North Korea, the world's least visited country, which Nicholas D. Kristof recently described on the op-ed page of The New York Times as "the most bizarre . . . most regimented, militarized and oppressive country in the world." Directed by Daniel Gordon, a British sports journalist whose first film, "The Game of Their Lives," documented the performance of the North Korean soccer team in the 1966 World Cup competition. Dana Stevens reviews the film in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

Like a live hand grenade brought home from a distant battlefield, the 34-year-old antiwar documentary "Winter Soldier" has been handled for decades as if it could explode at any moment. Now, the 95-minute film - which has circulated like 16-millimeter samizdat on college campuses for decades but has never been accessible to a wide audience - is about to get its first significant theatrical release in the United States, beginning on Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. David M. Halbfinger >reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

Just a week after the Irish Republican Army agreed to disarm, a new movie focusing on the I.R.A.'s activities is set to begin shooting in the Emerald Isle.
"I.R.A: King of Nothing" tells the story of Bobby O'Brien (played by Damian Chapa, who also directs), an I.R.A. member who is not happy with the modern day version of the movement and believes that the only way to achieve Irish independence is through violence. Steve Brennan >reports in the Hollywood Reporter.

Warner Independent Pictures on Friday more than doubled the number of theaters playing its nature movie "March of the Penguins," boosting the film's chance at becoming the No. 2 documentary of all time at U.S. box offices. Reuters reports.

In "2046," a story of longing and loss, the passage of time is marked not by the hands of a clock, but by the women who pass through one man's life. The man in question, a newspaper hack, lives in a glorious ruin called the Oriental Hotel, where the thin walls shake violently from the sexual exertions of the clientele. A ladies' man given to vigorous wall-shaking, the writer turns a blind eye to the hotel's decrepitude even as he keeps its female guests fixed in his sights. In this ecstatically beautiful film, walls never tumble, only women do. Manohla Dargis reviews Wong Kar-wai's "2046" in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

"Darwin's Nightmare," Hubert Sauper's harrowing, indispensable documentary is framed by the arrival and departure of an enormous Soviet-made cargo plane at an airstrip outside Mwanza, Tanzania. Though Mr. Sauper's investigation of the economy and ecology around the lake ranges far and wide - he talks to preachers and prostitutes, to street children and former soldiers - he keeps coming back to a simple question. What do the planes bring to Africa? A.O. Scott reviews the film in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

In the New York Times, David Halbfinger looks at a spate of films from the American South, but while Cameron Crowe's latest "Elizabethtown" and the upcoming "Dukes of Hazzard" offer a take on the region, a group of Sundance '05 entries, in particular Phil Morrison's "Junebug", may offer a deeper perspective:

By contrast, he pointed to three other Sundance films set in the region - "Hustle & Flow" and "Forty Shades of Blue," both stories about music in Memphis, and Tim Kirkman's "Loggerheads," a film with gay themes set in North Carolina - as the kind of company he hoped to keep.

"It may be nothing, but it may be something," he said of the spate of specialty films from Southern filmmakers. "Maybe it's people wanting to speak for a multifaceted South, and we all wanted to take that on, and say, This is what it means, to me."

Based on an autobiographical novel by Rumer Godden, "The River" (1951), directed by Jean Renoir, is one of the most beautiful movies ever made. This is not so much a critical judgment as the recognition of a mathematical truth. A.O. Scott profiles the film in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

If only Europeans would stop thinking they can make better movies about America than Americans, >says John Patterson in The Guardian.

A new film based on a novel by John le Carre highlights what the master spy writer calls the "appalling" practices of drug companies in Africa. Mike Collett-White reports in Reuters.

A filmmaker who portrays his fellow Germans as a mass of collectively depressed moaners burdened with their dark history and fearful of a bleak bankrupt future. Konstantin Faigle, whose light-hearted film "The Great Depression -- Made in Germany" won widespread cheers at the Munich Film Festival in June, told Reuters that he believes a pronounced pessimism is ingrained in the German mentality.

This ain't no Walt Disney production! Not with the language. Or the imagery. Or the bestiality. Particularly the bestiality. Yet Penn Jillette, executive producer of "The Aristocrats," believes his acclaimed documentary about the filthiest joke known to mankind is an achievement far beyond cartoon classics like "Bambi." The Associated Press profiles the film.

It may be hard out there for a pimp. But things have gone pretty well for Hustle & Flow writer-director Craig Brewer. He certainly hustled, along with producers John Singleton and Stephanie Allain, who financed the movie on their own. Laura Sinagra >profiles the film in the Village Voice.

When "Harold and Maude" premiered in 1971, I was too young to go to the movies by myself, and I didn't even hear of the film until years later, after it had already become a cult movie. Somehow, even in high school, I never felt alienated enough to seek out a movie about a suicidal young man and his life-changing friendship with an 80-year-old woman. Mick LaSalle profiles the film in the San Francisco Chronicle.

When Karen Kramer last talked to The New York Times about her film "The Ballad of Greenwich Village," she said she felt pressed for money and time. Especially time. She had been working on her opus about Village history and lore for six years and was worried that much of what she wanted to record was going to disappear before she could memorialize it on film. Julie Salamon reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

It is no big surprise that little is left of the great artist neighborhoods of the last three decades in Manhattan. With prices set firmly for investment banker type salaries and trust fund kids, only those long termers that have rent stabilized leases (or very, very generous landlords) have been able to hold onto affordable housing and not be a part of the mass exodus to Brooklyn and Queens. Karen Kramer, who's film "The Ballad of Greenwich Village" finds herself facing the challenge of documenting "the story of the artists, rebels, and bohemians who came to New York’s Greenwich Village over many decades" as her subject matter disappears before her very eyes. Julie Salamon reports for the New York Times on the "The Ballad of Greenwich Village," which opens this Friday in NYC.

As "March of the Penguins" approaches the two million mark at the US box office, Roshan McArthur reports for The Guardian on the sold out shows in Britain and the doc's phenomenal success.

"Fantastic Four" and "Hustle & Flow" share a fierce determination by their African-American principals to reach the mainstream audience, albeit by different strategies. Ta-Nehisi reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

Precocious sexual knowledge - far beyond what children and teenage characters can absorb, and often with devastating consequences - has become a staple of current independent films. Caryn James reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

"The Beat That My Heart Skipped," Jacques Audiard's excellent remake of James Toback's "Fingers," about a criminal's attempt to sooth his inner beast with classical music, hits theaters this weekend. The film got great buzz at this year's Tribeca Film Festival and is a favorite around the indieWIRE office. Liza Bear interviews Jacques Audiard in today's indieWIRE, where he dismisses the notion of his film as simply a "remake" and how it is a "much deeper exchange," a communication between directors that accounts for the way cinema has developed. Manohla Dargis also praises the film in the New York Times, noting its "beautiful images, strong emotions and the joy found watching a movie aimed straight at the heart and head."

Toledo, OH, where "Twist of Faith" subject Tony Comes was abused by a Catholic priest, is proving to be a tough town to book the film in theatrically. Distributor Artistic License had hoped to open the film locally in the city-owned Maumee Indoor Theater, site of an HBO invite-only showing on Monday, but the theater has thus far rejecteed a run of the movie, according to an article in Toledo Blade

In an email exchange with indieWIRE today, "Twist of Faith" director Kirby Dick said that he blames the Church for the rejection. "There is no question in my mind that either the Catholic Church in Toledo directly intervened to prevent the film from being shown, or that the theater was afraid of how the Church and the Catholic community would respond, so they chose not to exhibit it," Kirby Dick said this afternoon in the email to indieWIRE. He added that Sande Zeig of Artistic License is exploring other local exhibiton options but still hopes to secure a showing at the Maumee, which is within walking distance of the St. Joseph's church where Comes was first molested.

Paramount Classics has shifted the release date for Craig Brewer's "Hustle & Flow" to July 22nd, from its July 13th spot. In an email exchange with indieWIRE today, Paramount Classics co-president David Dinerstein said that the move is to take advantage of positive critical and audience response, allowing the company to schedule public sneak previews of the film on Saturday, July 16th. It will open on 1,000 screens nationwide on July 22nd, Dinerstein told indieWIRE.

New York likes to think it's the home of all that's radical - but when it comes to movies, LA is way out there. John Patterson reports in The Guardian.

Michael Moore might have dominated the headlines at Cannes, winning the top prize, the Palme d'Or, for "Fahrenheit 9/11," but in more rarefied quarters, the award for "Tropical Malady" was equally notable, if not more so. Manohla Dargis reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

Paul Provenza's documentary, "The Aristocrats," shows well known comedians "telling their versions of a joke that involves every imaginable form of sexual perversion in graphic detail, including but not limited to incest, scatology, bestiality and sadism." Apparently the absolute filthiest take on the vaudeville era joke comes out of the mouth of "Full House's" Bob Saget. (That is worth $10.75 right there.) Sharon Waxman reports on the film for the New York Times. The film opens in late July.

With more than 7,000 hours of unused underwater film footage lying around the house, it was no surprise that BBC directors Alastair Fothergill and Andy Byatt decided to make a big-screen feature film about the ocean. But what caught many off-guard about the documentary "Deep Blue," an offshoot of the popular British television series "Blue Planet," were the film's unconventional and almost avant-garde pacing, minimalist narration and ambiguous point of view. Delphin Vigil takes a look at the film in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Who captured the wild west? Not Hollywood, with its stodgy epics, but Italy with its spicy spaghetti westerns. Christopher Frayling gives his two cents in The Guardian.

While still mostly unknown beyond the LA neighborhoods of Compton, Inglewood, Watts and Long Beach, dancers hope that krumping will become more familiar with Friday's release of "Rize." The documentary by photographer and music video director David LaChapelle explores the phenomenon started by Thomas Johnson, a former drug dealer who turned to religion and clown dancing after the 1992 Rodney King riots. A.P. reports.

Roger Weisberg, the Academy Nominated filmmaker who has made several documentaries about the struggle of lower income households, focuses on the working poor in "Waging a Living", which opens today in New York City. "The documentary reveals a country rife with income inequality, short-term political thinking and ineffective tracking of deadbeat dads, a country in which filling a simple prescription for a child's asthma medication can put a family in the street." Jeannette Catsoulis reports for the New York Times.

Film Forum's four-week series of Pre-code Paramount films begins this Friday. The series is described by Film Forum as "early 1930s featured cocktail shakers and white ties, sophisticated dialogue and/or international decadence served up amid lavish décor with a distinctive European flavor." Elliott Stein reports on several of the films for The Village Voice, including Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross (1932), which features "a depraved emperor Nero (played by Charles Laughto) throwing Christians to the lions and hosting splendiferous orgies while Mrs. Nero (Claudette Colbert) cavorts nude in huge pools of asses' milk." Pre-code, indeed.