With an average of six movies opening in Dublin every week, this is the busiest summer in years for cinema releases, with a wide range of alternatives to the blockbusters that generally dominate the season.

However, there isn't room for everything, and some releases have been deferred, chief among them the superb Italian epic, The Best of Youth, which opens in the UK today but will not be released here until September. Claude Chabrol's 50th feature film, The Flower of Evil, which also opens in the UK today, is due here on August 13th.

The crowded schedules have resulted in some films being dropped for Irish release, and now destined to go directly to video. They include the sequel The Whole Ten Yards, starring Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry; the Mike Hodges thriller I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, featuring Clive Owen and Malcolm McDowell; Paul McGuigan's medieval saga The Reckoning, with Paul Bettany and Willem Dafoe; the Japanese sequel Battle Royale II; and the hip-hop dance movie You Got Served, of which one London critic wrote, "this tripe makes its 1980s predecessors Breakdance: The Movie and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo seem like Citizen Kane".