Why it's time to keep your eyes wide shut

So you're an adult and you want to see a movie that doesn't talk down to you, isn't driven by special effects or grounded in nudge-nudge, wink-wink double entendres. What to do? Well, you could pore through the darker recesses of your local video store and seek out that movie you swore you'd go and see in the cinema six months ago. Or you could go to North America.

It happens here every summer. For reasons best known to themselves - obviously terrified at the thought of going up against the Star Wars prequel, and assuming (or fearing) that there just might be an extended spell of warm weather - film distributors skew their summer schedules towards the under-15 audience, pushing all their quality movies into the autumn and winter months.

Only this summer it's worse than ever. There are now more cinema screens here than there have been in decades - 88 screens in Dublin city and county since the recent opening of Star Century in Liffey Valley. And nothing on. Except the Star Wars prequel and the Austin Powers sequel playing on multiple screens at every multiplex, along with such in-one-eye-and-out-the-other fare as The Mummy, Entrapment and, from today, Wild Wild West, in addition to kiddie pictures such as My Favourite Martian and Doug's 1st Movie. In all cases, check in your brain at the box office.

Even the arthouse scene is arid. The Screen cinema in Dublin is still playing Life is Beautiful, which has been running since the middle of February, and it's into its third month on Woody Allen's Celebrity. "The summer is always the same," comments Ronan Glennane, who programmes the Screen. "We get dictated to from London. Most of the high-profile arthouse pictures are held back till the autumn because people are on holiday and the colleges are closed."

Even though Life is Beautiful has been playing at the Screen for six months, it has been that cinema's saviour this summer, he says. "Generally, we're on the floor in the summer, but Life is Beautiful continues to draw people in. It's still taking over £4,000 a week. The word-of-mouth is great on it and I think people must be coming back to see it a second time." The film has now made over £200,000 at the Screen - an astonishing figure for a foreign-language film in Dublin in the 1990s, and it ranks as far and away the biggest hit in the Screen's arthouse history.

Whatever the weather, the IFC in Dublin dutifully offers an alternative to its members and their guests with a range of summer releases that has notably included Le Diner des Cons, Orphans, Eternity and a Day, Get Carter, The Hi-Lo Country and a number of reissued classics. However, Peter Walsh, cinemas director of the IFC, says that he had to concentrate on films from the smaller arthouse suppliers in London.

"They were the only companies releasing anything," he says. "The bigger arthouse distributors are holding everything back for the autumn - when they will all be fighting with each other over the same screens. Maybe the very successful opening of Place Vendome in London last weekend will persuade Artificial Eye (who distribute it) to put more films out in the summer."

The IFC generally fares much better in summer than British arthouses, he says, adding the surprising information that August was the IFC's best month for business last year and July has achieved the best figures so far this year. In neither case was that success triggered by one or two very big hits. "It just happened that everything did well in those months," he says. Clearly, the fact that the IFC was offering a choice of alternative viewing has a key factor in making it such an attractive option in summer.

Then again, things could be very much worse here. In Italy, for example, where sustained good summer weather is virtually guaranteed and where few of the cinemas are air-conditioned, most of the cinemas simply close down for the summer months. Only in America and Canada, where the mass audience escapes the soaring temperatures for the air-conditioned cinemas, is there a really broad choice of movies in summertime. Sure, they're playing Star Wars and Austin Powers everywhere you look, along with a whole batch of puerile juvenalia to be inflicted upon us later this year. But at the same time their cinemas are also offering such genuine and stimulating alternatives as Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, David Mamet's The Winslow Boy, John Sayles's Limbo, Doug Liman's Go, along with the performance documentary, The Buena Vista Social Club, the exhilarating German movie, Run Lola Run, and the no-budget sleeper smash of the decade, The Blair Witch Project.

It would appear that each and every one of those movies is regarded as too risky to release during the summer in a country such as Ireland where the perception remains that the population would shun the cinema at the hint of a fine day. Roll on the end of the month, though, when the schools re-open and the exploits of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Austin Powers are well and truly played out, and our cinemas will be flooded again with movies for grown-ups.

There is a downside to that, too. After the barren summer of 1998, when our cinema schedules were dominated by Godzilla, Armageddon and Lost in Space, Irish cinemas could not cope with all the movies available in September and October. Opening within three weeks of each other, Saving Private Ryan, There's Something About Mary, Dancing at Lughnasa and Lethal Weapon 4 were all competing for the same screens, nosing out smaller pictures such as The Spanish Prisoner, with another slew of movies rolling out in October - The Truman Show, Mulan, Elizabeth, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, The Last Days of Disco and Primary Colours, among others, all fighting for the very same screens.

A similar scenario could unfold within weeks. After this summer's drought comes the deluge, beginning next Friday with six openings, including Rushmore, Cookie's Fortune, The Thomas Crown Affair and Mickey Blue Eyes. Five movies open the following Friday, among them Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother and the TV spin-off, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. And already on the schedule for September are Go, Eyes Wide Shut, Place Vendome, The 13th Warrior, Varsity Blues, Limbo, Ravenous, Beautiful People, The General's Daughter, Instinct, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Election, A Mid- summer Night's Dream, The War Zone, The Buena Vista Social Club and Analyse This.

Analyse this, indeed.