Admission figures at Irish cinemas for the first quarter of this year reached 4.2 million, representing a a dramatic 38 per cent increase over attendances in the corresponding period of 1999. Dublin cinemas attracted two million admissions, a 41 per cent increase over the first three months of last year.
The five films which led the box-office upsurge between January and March were Toy Story 2, American Beauty, Angela's Ashes, The Beach and The Green Mile, and subsequent hits have included Erin Brockovich and Gladiator.
Cinema owners are banking on a slew of potential blockbusters to lure audiences away from television sport and possible good weather over the summer. They include When the Sky Falls (opening June 16th), with Joan Allen as a journalist based on the late Veronica Guerin (See Weekend 4); Nick Park's first animated feature, Chicken Run (June 30th): Tom Cruise in John Woo's Mission Impossible 2, which took $92.8 million on its first six days on US release last weekend; Mel Gibson in the American Revolution epic, The Patriot (July 14th); George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in Perfect Storm (July 28th); Don Bluth and Gary Goldman's futuristic animation epic, Titan A.E. (July 28th); the prequel, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (July 28th); Nicolas Cage in the big-budget car chase movie, Gone in 60 Seconds (August 4th), Bryan Singer's comic-strip adaptation, X-Men (August 18th); and Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson and Guy Pearce in the military drama, Rules of Engagement (August 28th).
In the US, Woody Allen has been enjoying his biggest commercial success for many years with his new comedy, Small Time Crooks, in which he plays an ageing bank robber, with Tracey Ullman as his socially ambitious wife. The cast also includes Hugh Grant, Jon Lovitz, Michael Rapaport, Elaine May and Elaine Stritch. It took $3.8 million at the US box-office on its first three days on release, whereas the entire US release of Allen's previous film, Sweet and Lowdown, earned $4.2 million.
No Irish release date has been set yet for Small Time Crooks. Meanwhile, Sweet and Lowdown, which received Oscar nominations this year for Sean Penn and Samantha Morton, belatedly opens in Britain next Friday. While its Irish opening has not been finalised, it should reach Irish cinemas by the end of this month.
Russian film-makers are continuing efforts to halt the closure of Goskino, the state film committee, after President Vladimir Putin signed a decree last week to scrap it and transfer its functions to the culture ministry.
A crisis meeting has been held between the prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, culture ministry officials and representatives from the Russian film-makers' union. The union's president, director Nikita Mikhalkov (who made the Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun), has asked for a meeting with Putin to argue against the decision.
For only the second time in his career as a writer, Umberto Eco has granted the film rights to one of his books. The US company, Fine Line Features, the arthouse division of New Line Cinema, has acquired the rights to film Eco's metaphysical thriller, Foucault's Pendulum, which has been translated into 39 languages and has sold more than 14 million copies. Fine Line has yet to sign a screenwriter and director to the project.
Eco's The Name of the Rose was filmed by Jean-Jacques Annaud in 1986 and featured Sean Connery and a young Christian Slater.
Shooting got underway in the US last week on Human Nature, the eagerly awaited second film from Charlie Kaufman, the inventive screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, and the new film promises to be equally quirky and original. It features Patricia Arquette as Lila, a young woman who, ever since puberty, has had a rare disorder that makes her look different from other girls.
Painfully shy and self-conscious, she flees the terrors of dating by going off to live among the animals in the forest and begins writing books about life in the wild. Soon, she is a best-selling author and life is almost perfect.
The film co-stars Tim Robbins as Nathan, a behavioural psychologist who has devoted himself to teaching table manners to laboratory mice in the hope that if he succeeds he may be able to apply his methods to humans and make the world a better place. As the earthy Lila and the prim Nathan begin a relationship, they come upon a feral man (played by Rhys Ifans) in whom Nathan sees the opportunity to scale the heights of human re-packaging.
Miranda Otto, Rosie Perez and Robert Forster are also featured in Human Nature, which is directed by Michel Gondry, who is a veteran of award-winning music videos.