Last weekend, the British media were so busy pouring vitriol on John Travolta's wildly misguided vanity project, Battlefield Earth - and gloating over the commercial failure of Dave Stewart's reviled All Saints movie, Honest - to pay much attention to the release of the unspeakably bad Shergar.
Billed as "a true story", this is a speculative yarn in which the unfortunate champion horse is stolen by an IRA splinter group whose weird leader, Gavin O'Rourke, is played by Mickey Rourke with strange new facial features. Shergar is kept on a farm owned by a Republican sympathiser (David Warner with a dire Irish accent), where the horse is befriended by an orphaned stable boy (Tom Walsh) who, as luck would have it, happens to be Shergar's number one fan.
The cast also includes Ian Holm as a hippyish old New Age type who spouts poetry aloud and whose flame-haired granddaughter (Laura Murphy) gets the movie's most risible lines. Example: "Goodnight. Don't let the leprechauns take you away. There's a lot of them around here."
When the movie failed to attract a UK distributor, its writer-director Denis C. Lewiston set up his own company, Sun Chariot Films, to release it. It has opened in Britain on just a single screen - the Odeon in Epsom, where it hopes to capture a special-interest audience in town for today's Epsom Derby.
Masochistic Irish cinema-goers longing to see Shergar and Honest may well have to wait for them to be released on video, given that an Irish cinema release for either movie looks out of the question.
The Irish Film Board, Film Makers Ireland and United International Pictures (UIP) have established three major new awards for the Irish Film Industry. The awards are funded by UIP - the international distribution outlet for the major Hollywood studios, Universal, Paramount and DreamWorks.
They will be presented as follows: Best Emerging Irish Film Director, for which the prize is 20,000 Euros (£15,751); Best Film in the Short Cuts or Oscailt series, with a prize of 4,500 Euros (£3,544); and Best Film in the Frameworks scheme, for which the prize is 4,500 Euros (£3,544).
The Short Cuts scheme has been running for five years and is supported by the Irish Film Board and RTE. This year, five projects were selected from 140 applications. Frameworks, supported by the Irish Film Board, the Arts Council and RTE, encourages imaginative work from new animators.
Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman sing all the way through the new Baz Luhrmann movie, Moulin Rouge, a musical fantasy set on the last day of 1899, in which McGregor plays the conduit for the music which will be produced over the next 100 years - everything from Rogers & Hammerstein to T. Rex.
Karyn Rachtmann, executive producer of the movie's soundtrack album says: "Ewan sounds like a cross between Freddie Mercury and Elton John, and Nicole has the sexiest Marilyn Monroe singing voice, but with more power."
Luhrmann's third feature (after Strictly Ballroom and Romeo and Juliet), Moulin Rouge, which opens at Christmas, also features several guest appearances - among them a cameo by Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne as an absinthe-induced hallucination singing The Sound of Music.
The veteran French film-maker, Eric Rohmer, now 80 years old, is employing digital technology to shoot his latest film, The Lady and the Duke, a love story set during the French Revolution. Now nearing the end of its production schedule, it stars newcomer Lucy Russell as an Englishwoman living in Paris who becomes involved with the Duke of Orleans, played by Jean-Claude Dreyfus.
Rohmer decided that no real-life location could adequately represent Paris at the time of the Revolution and has opted to use artwork based on drawings from the period as a backdrop. He said the film would be a "pioneer in its genre", showing that technology can be used "not only for the spectacular efforts in science-fiction, horror and disaster movies, but also more subtly but no less efficiently, in the service of art and history."
Director Joel Schumacher has signed Jim Carrey for a "low-budget, indiestyle" film, Phone Booth, a thriller in which Carrey will play a man who picks up a ringing phone and is told he'll be shot if he hangs up. Carrey will next be seen in Me, Myself and Irene, which reunites him with his Dumb and Dumber directors, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, for a comedy in which he plays a romantic, under-achieving police officer whose alter ego is a drunken womaniser. Renee Zellweger co-stars in the film, which opens here on September 22nd.