Sofia Coppola and Darren Aronofsky's new films to premier at Venice, and other top stories...

New films by directors Sofia Coppola and Darren Aronofsky will compete for honours at this year's Venice Film Festival. Somewhere will be Copolla's first since Marie Antoinette, four years ago, while Aronofsky will follow his 2008 film The Wrestler - which won the festival's prestigious Golden Lion prize - with Black Swan, a thriller about rival dancers. Quentin Tarantino will lead the jury at the 67th instalment of the festival, which will feature 79 film premiers along with 22 films from 11 different countries competing for the main prize...

Sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft's tales may have proven highly influential, but they've never been subject to a decent silver screen adaptation. Unless of course you count the 1980s trash classic Re-Animator. That might all be about to change, though, as Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro prepares to go into pre-production with a 3D adaptation of Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness. Having James Cameron onboard as producer bolsters the ambitious project's prospects. This should please fans' disappointment at del Toro's withdrawal of involvement from Peter Jackson's The Hobbit adaptation...

Fans of Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan might want to look away now. Gabriel Josipovici, former Weidenfeld professor of comparative literature at Oxford University, has spoken out to take such contemporary British authors down a peg or two, for what he perceives as a lack of true merit. Along with Martin Amis, books by Rushdie and McEwan were notable exclusions from the Man Booker long list revealed earlier this week. Josipovici commented that the irony they once used as an instrument to "puncture pretention" is now a constriction, cornering them into a petty-bourgeois mindset...