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From time to time, we announce plans for a new movie to be directed by veteran Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni - which is in itself quite remarkable, since the great man is 87 and was robbed of the power of speech by a stroke in the mid-eighties.

The latest project to be mooted (in the quasi-official Italian publication Cinema d’Oggi) is Destinazione Verna, which was due to start shooting at about the time we went to press. It stars Sophia Loren as a woman struggling against a profound fit of depression, and has had its original shooting schedule - which planned a week in Turkey and another in London - scaled back so that the company does not have to leave Italy. Other cast members include Kim Rossi Stuart, Naomi Campbell and Alida Valli, and Antonioni will be working from a screenplay he co-wrote with regular Angelopoulos collaborator Tonino Guerra.

Finally, hardly had the ink dried on our last issue - in which you may remember we announced that Francis Ford Coppola had taken over from Phil Alden Robinson as director of the upcoming Cuban Missile Crisis epic, 13 Days (to which Kevin Costner has been attached as star throughout) - than he was off it again. Latest word is: Roger Donaldson, who was one of the interim contenders ousted by the ebullient arrival of Mr Coppola. Well, Mr C has gone again, Donaldson is back and there will be no further mention of this film on these pages until such time as it actually goes in front of the cameras and gets listed in our ‘Production Calendar’. Industry-watchers of a superstitious nature may wonder whether all this is something to do with the ‘13’ in the title.

And, while we’re still on the subject of ‘no longer’, John Travolta who, with wife Kelly Preston, has been attached to the movie version of Annie L Proulx’s The Shipping News for yonks, isn’t any more: he pulled out in early June. No final confirmation on who will take over yet, but the strongest rumour seems to be Billy Bob Thornton.