After the summer drought during which the multiplexes were monopolised by The Phantom Menace and The Spy Who Shagged Me, Irish cinemas are catering for adults again. The release schedules between now and the end of the year promise enticing new movies from, among others, Pedro Almodovar, Atom Egoyan, Jane Campion, Ang Lee, David Fincher, David Mamet, David Lynch, Spike Lee and Albert Brooks. Kick-starting the season this weekend is Doug Liman's dynamic Go, followed next Friday by the opening of Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut.
This is how the schedules line up, week by week - and, as ever, they are subject to change for any number of reasons:
September 17th
John Travolta stars in the crime thriller, The General's Daughter. The high school beauty pageant comedy, Drop Dead Gorgeous, features Kristie Alley, Ellen Barkin and Denise Richards. Oscar winners Cuba Gooding Jr and Anthony Hopkins team up for Instinct. A Cannes prize-winner, Jasmin Dizdar's Beautiful People is a vibrant, multi-charactered drama set in London.
September 24th
Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart joins Rupert Everett, Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer and Stanley Tucci in the cast of Michael Hoffman's transposition of A Midsummer Night's Dream to Tuscany at the turn of the 20th century. The Mafia comedy, Analyse This, features Robert de Niro and Billy Crystal. Matthew Broderick and Reese Whitherspoon are in the American political satire, Election. Jan de Bont's remake of The Haunting stars Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Tim Roth makes an intense directing debut, The War Zone, featuring Ray Winstone and newcomer Lara Belmont. Yet to be finally scheduled in September is Pedro Almodovar's superb new film, All About My Mother.
October 1st
The Adam Sandler comedy, Big Daddy, has been a huge success in the US. Kate Capshaw, Blythe Danner and Ellen DeGeneres are in the romantic movie, The Love Letter. Mifue is the third Dogma 95 film.
October 8th
Atom Egoyan's enthralling William Trevor adaptation, Felicia's Journey, stars Elaine Cassidy and Bob Hoskins. Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall is reunited with stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere for the romantic comedy, Runaway Bride. The musical documentary, The Buena Vista Social Club, is directed by Wim Wenders. A summer sleeper hit in the US, American Pie is a gross but good-natured teen movie which, given its much-discussed scene of a young man's sexual experiment with an apple pie, could have been re-titled There's Something About Pastry.
October 10th
The 43rd Cork Film Festival opens and runs for eight days. The programme will be launched on September 23rd.
October 15th
Holy Smoke, the new Jane Campion film reunites her with Harvey Keitel (from The Piano) who plays an American "cult buster" who finds himself compromised when he falls for a young client (Kate Winslet). Thomas Jane, Michael Rapaport, Saffron Burrowes and Samuel L. Jackson lead the indie actors into action against the sharks in Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea. The Last Days is the Oscar-winning Holocaust drama.
October 22nd
Tom Tykwer's exhilarating German movie Run Lola Run powers along as the flame-haired Lola (Franka Potente) races through Berlin with only 20 minutes to save her boyfriend from mobsters. An exceptionally busy week also promises Disney's animated cartoon feature, Tarzan, with songs by Phil Collins; Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy in the comedy, Bowfinger; John Lynch and Brenda Blethyn as an ex-convict and an introverted woman falling in love in Dublin in John Lynch's Night Train; the Australian gay drama, Head On; and Catherine Breillat's sexually explicit French film, Romance.
October 29th
Made for $60,000, the phenomenon that is The Blair Witch Project has now taken over $130 million at the US box-office. In Mike Newell's Pushing Tin John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton air traffic controllers whose intense rivalry threatens to wreck their careers and marriages - and the planes in their airspace. David Mamet's new version of Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy features Nigel Hawthorne, Gemma Jones, Rebecca Pidgeon and Jeremy Northam. And Anna Friel, Joanna Lumley and Greg Wise feature in Sara Sugarman's film of the Kathy Lette novel, Mad Cows.
November 5th
A major audience favourite on the international festival circuit this year, Damian O'Donnell's East is East is a serious comedy of generational and cultural conflicts in a Pakistani family in early 1970s Manchester. Ang Lee's American Civil War drama, Ride With the Devil, features Skeet Ulrich, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Simon Baker Denny and singer Jewel.
November 12th
The movie which has topped the US box-office for the past four weeks, The Sixth Sense is a psychological thriller starring Bruce Willis as a therapist treating a boy who talks to the dead. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton get caught up in underworld no-holds boxing in David Fincher's highly anticipated Fight Club. Steven Soderbergh's droll The Limey brings together Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda for a cool revenge thriller. Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas play two bereaved people who learn their late spouses had been involved with each other in Sydney Pollack's Random Hearts. In the remake of The Out-of-Towners Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn take on the roles first played by Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis. Robin Williams stars in the Holocaust film, Jakob the Liar. And from France comes Robert Guediguian's A la Place du Coeur, based on James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk.
November 19th
Another very crowded week promises Spike Lee's provocative, Seventies-set Summer of Sam; Melanie Griffith directed by her husband, Antonio Banderas, in the Sixties-set Crazy in Alabama; Ralph Fiennes directed by his sister, Martha in Onegin, inspired by the Pushkin poem; Ron Howard's Truman Showish Edtv with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson; Lynne Ramsey's Scottish drama, Ratcatcher; and Juliette Lewis in The Other Sister.
November 25th
The 11th Dublin French Film Festival opens and runs until December 5th.
November 26th
Bond is back, again played by Pierce Brosnan, with Robert Carlyle as his latest nemesis in The World Is Not Enough, directed by Michael Apted. Meryl Streep is directed by Wes Craven, of all people, in Music of the Heart, for which she learned to play the violin - and performed on stage at Carnegie Hall with Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman.
December 3rd
David Lynch's characteristically quirky - and unexpectedly touching - The Straight Story features Richard Farnsworth as an elderly man who travels by lawnmower to visit his ailing brother. Irish actor Brendan Gleeson joins Bridget Fonda and Bill Pullman in Lake Placid. Steve Zahn and Jeremy Northam play redneck criminals mistaken for a gay couple in the Sundance hit, Happy, Texas.
December 10th
Anjelica Huston directs and stars as a widowed Moore Street trader struggling to raise seven children in Agnes Browne, based on Brendan O'Carroll's The Mammy and also featuring Marion O'Dwyer, Ray Winstone and singer Tom Jones. Albert Brooks directs and stars in the Hollywood satire, The Muse, with Sharon Stone, Jeff Bridges and Andie McDowell. Gabriel Byrne plays Satan, no less, with Arnie Schwarzenegger as the alcoholic ex-cop on his trail in the action blockbuster, End of Days. And there's the self-explanatory Muppets From Space.
December 17th
Matthew Broderick plays the eponymous elastic-limbed law enforcer in Disney's live-action feature, Inspector Gadget, while Warner Bros weighs in with the animated feature, The Iron Giant.
December 26th
Mystery Men is a spoof on the superhero lifestyle that features Ben Stiller, Greg Kinnear, William H. Macy and Janeane Garaofalo. And Kevin Smith's less-controversial-than-we'd-been-led-to-believe Dogma stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as fallen angels, Linda Fiorentino as a woman of failing faith who's chosen to save the world - and Alanis Morissette as God.