Featuring retrospectives of Atom Egoyan and David Lynch, the restored version of Hitchcock's great Vertigo and a range of new international features, the August-September programme at the IFC in Dublin is one of the most attractive fielded by the centre to date. The David Lynch retrospective gets under way tomorrow week with the director's visually arresting and definitively weird Eraserhead, which I first saw many years ago at UCD Film Society. I arrived a few minutes late for the movie, which was showing on two reels in 16mm. That's my excuse for not noticing that the projectionist showed the reels in the wrong order. In fact, nobody spotted the error until the credits began to roll after 45 minutes. The Lynch retro also features The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart and Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, and a four-week run of Lynch's new movie, his first in five years, Lost Highway, starring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette and Balthazar Getty. The Atom Egoyan season begins on September 5th with his 1984 movie, Next Of Kin, and continues with Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, Calendar and the fascinating Exotica. Egoyan's moving new film, the Russell Banks adaptation The Sweet Hereafter, which took the runner-up prize at Cannes this year, begins an extended run on September 26th.
New US indies on the IFC schedule include two opening next Friday - Alan Taylor's picture of inept slacker criminals, Palookaville, with Vincent Gallo, Adam Trese and William Forsythe, and actor-turned-director Larry Bishop's gangster movies pastiche, Trigger Happy, with Richard Dreyfuss, Gabriel Byrne, Ellen Barkin and Kyle MacLachlan. Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey makes his directing debut with Albino Alligator, a hostage drama which opens on August 22nd and features Matt Dillon, Faye Dunaway and Gary Sinise.
International productions on the programme include Mira Nair's 16th-century Indian drama, Kama Sutra (August 15th), featuring Sarita Choudhury and Naveen Andrews and lit by Declan Quinn; an acclaimed new three-hour Canadian treatment of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (September 5th), directed by David Wellington, who made I Love A Man In Uniform; and for a week from September 12th, a rare chance to catch Regardez Les Hommes Tomber (See How They Fall) the first feature from the Self-Made Hero team of director Jacques Audiard and star Mathieu Kassovitz.
Both IFC cinemas will be equipped with digital sound systems from the middle of this month, and among the first to benefit from this enhanced presentation will be the impeccably restored version of Hitchock's 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo, a classic that repays repeated viewing like few others. It runs for a fortnight from September 19th.
As a tribute to the late Tony Kirkhope, a distributor who was one of the IFC's most regular suppliers, the centre will screen his favourite film, Gillo Pontecorvo's riveting 1965 The Battle Of Algiers, in a new print for four days from August 23rd.
In late September, in association with the Norwegian embassy and ministry for foreign affairs, the IFC will present a selection of films adapted from the writings of Knut Hamsun, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920. Seven films will be screened, including Henning Carlsen's haunting Hun- ger which won Per Oscarsson best actor at Cannes in 1966, and Jan Troell's recent biopic, Hamsun, featuring Max von Sydow as the writer.
And the IFC will celebrate its fifth birthday with an Open Day of free screenings on Saturday, September 20th.
THE programme of free open-air Saturday night movies in Meeting House Square in Dublin's Temple Bar continues tomorrow night with Bob Fosse's superb Cabaret, as part of the Fifth Dublin Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. It will be introduced by Nell McCafferty. Coming up are the British comedy classic, Kind Hearts And Coronets, to be introduced by Barry Norman on August 9th; Fellini's La Dolce Vita (16th), presented by Professsor Anthony Clare; and the peace-and-love rock epic, Woodstock (23rd), introduced by Adi Roche.
Meanwhile, as another part of the lesbian and gay festival, a forum on film-making with Irish short film-makers will be held in the IFC on Monday afternoon, following the 2.20 p.m. screening of Family Values. The participants include two Irish film-makers with short films in the festival - Colette Cullen, whose film, Secrets, will be shown before Isle of Lesbos on Sunday night, and David Brown, whose Dun Laoghaire graduation film, Rural Heat, screens before the festival's closing film, Alive and Kicking, on Monday night.
Filing in the US: Tom Cruise is expected to follow Stanley Kubrick's long-in-production Eyes Wide Shut with the starring role in Houdini, to be directed by Paul Verhoeven . . . Having co-directed the mouth-watering Big Night with Campbell Scott, Stanley Tucci is solo at the helm of the comedy, Ship Of Fools, now shooting in New York. Joining Tucci in the cast are his Big Night co-stars, Tony Shalhoub, Isabella Rossellini and Campbell Scott, along with Oliver Platt, Steve Buscemi, Nathasha Richardson, Aidan Quinn and Natasha Richardson.
Natasha Richardson has also teamed up with Dennis Quaid, in the roles first played by Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith, for Nancy Meyers's remake of Disney's 1961 The Parent Trap, which featured the young Hayley Mills as twins . . . Twenty-nine years after the original opened, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are back together as Felix and Oscar for The Odd Couple II: Travellin' Light, scripted by Neil Simon and directed by Howard Deutsch . . . Benicio Del Toro and Christina Ricci have joined Johnny Depp in Terry Gilliam's movie of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, which started shooting in Las Vegas two weeks ago...Christina Ricci also features with Martin Donovan, Lyle Lovett and Lisa Kudrow in the Don Roos comedy, The Opposite Of Sex, which wrapped recently.
