Anything but the World Cup

Love is the air on the cinema screen for the weeks ahead while football's coming home on the television screen. Traditionally, the start of summer signals a spate of big-budget blockbusters at a cinema near you. However, these action epics appeal primarily to boys of all ages - who are perceived to be too preoccupied with watching the World Cup - so the busting of blocks has been deferred until after the presentation of the trophy on July 12th.

From Wednesday's opening game until then, cinemas are banking on romance to entice the women whom exhibitors and distributors believe will want to flee their homes while football dominates the TV schedules. The air of desperation is greater in British cinema circles, with England and Scotland both among the qualifying teams, and 20th Century Fox is re-issuing The Full Monty, a huge hit with women in cinema and on video, in the hope of getting them to watch it all over again. Irish cinema owners passed a collective sigh of relief when the Irish team failed to qualify, so The Full Monty will not be getting a re-release here, but there's a certain anxiety nonetheless. Rounding out the schedules will be a number of belatedly arrived movies, such as Robert Duvall's The Apostle and Barry Levinson's Wag The Dog, both of which open next Friday while the IFC offers two low-budget indies, Nowhere and The Girl With Brains In Her Feet.

Women take top billing, for a change, in two romances scheduled for June 19th. Meg Ryan teams up with Nicolas Cage for City Of Angels (a remake of the Wim Wenders film, Wings Of Desire) and Jennifer Aniston plays a pregnant woman unwisely falling for her gay lodger (Paul Rudd) in The Object Of My Affection. On the same date, an altogether more controversial romance features in Adrian Lyne's new version of Lolita, featuring Jeremy Irons and young newcomer Dominique Swaim (and her body double). And the IFC offers the thriller, Liar, with Tim Roth, Renee Zellweger and Rosanna Arquette.

A week later Mira Sorvino stars in the science-fiction horror movie, Mimic, while Georgina Cates joins Samuel West in the costume movie spoof, Stiff Upper Lips, and for very young viewers, there's Barney's Great Adventure.

Anne Heche, who also features in Wag The Dog, co-stars with Harrison Ford as an ostensibly ill-matched couple thrown together on a tropical island in 6 Days, 7 Nights, which opens on July 3rd. On the same day John Hurt plays a reclusive English novelist lusting after teen heart-throb Jason Priestley in Love And Death On Long Island, while John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are falling in love again in the cinema reissue of Grease, which will be competing head-on with the stage show of the same name at the Point. Another re-release on that date is Jean Eustache's intimate French epic, The Mother And The Whore, and there's Star Kid for younger audiences.

On July 10th, as World Cup frenzy goes into overload, the kitschy 1980s-set romantic comedy, The Wedding Singer, a surprise smash hit in the US, arrives, as does Billy Bob Thornton's long-delayed Sling Blade, which won Thornton a screenplay Oscar last year. On the same day there will be Paul Schrader's Touch, Bill Bennett's Kiss Or Kill and, possibly, the Costa-Gavras film, Mad City, with John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman.

Meanwhile, anyone waiting for Godzilla - and somebody must be - must wait until July 17th, five days after the final in St Denis. After that, the deluge: Bruce Willis saves the world in Armageddon, opening on August 7th, followed a week late by Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman as John Steed and Emma Peel in The Avengers, and on August 21st by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in The X-Files, while Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, partly filmed in Wexford, and the less than eagerly anticipated Lethal Weapon 4 have been held back until September.