WITH six new movies opening in Dublin this weekend, including the excellent Seven and Korea - and La Haine and The Run of the Country due next Friday (see Week Ahead overleaf) - the New Year is off to a remarkably busy start in the country's cinemas. With all wide releases now opening at five Dublin multiplexes since the launch of the new Virgin complex and with a new UCI multiplex opening in Blanchardstown in the autumn - movies will be playing inevitably shorter runs, and with such a turnover, more and more movies will be released. Will the quality match the quantity? We'll see in the months ahead.
January
MICHELLE Pfeiffer plays a former marine teaching a class of "rejects from hell" in Dangerous Minds, which some have tagged To Her With Love, but it could have been worse - the movie was originally titled My Posse Don't Do Homework. The soundtrack features Coolio's hit single, Gangsta's Paradise.
On a darker note, Nicolas Cage plays an alcoholic screenwriter who heads for Las Vegas to commit suicide in Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas, and Cage may well be heading for an Oscar for his performance, as might his co star, Elizabeth Shue.
In Sydney Pollack's remake of Billy Wilder's 1954 romance, Sabrina, Julia Ormond takes over from Audrey Hepburn as the woman wooed by two brothers - Harrison Ford and chatshow host Greg Kinnear in the roles played by Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. After her inexplicably successful debut film, The Bookguard, Whitney Houston returns to cinema with the current US hit, Waiting to Exhale, which the publicity notes describe as "the story of four incredible women who journey through a modern labyrinth of husbands and lovers, jobs and makeovers, searching for that someone good enough to make them gasp". Can you wait for it?
Or is the thriller Fair Game a more enticing project, with William Baldwin protecting a Miami attorney played by Cindy Crawford? On the art house circuit look out for the Cannes prize winning Iranian film, The White Balloon, directed by Jafar Panahl, which deals with the misadventures of a seven year old girl when she sets out to buy a goldfish for Teheran's New Year's Day celebrations.
February
THE month gets off to a blistering start with Michael Mann's riveting thriller, Heat, which memorably brings Robert De Niro and Al Pacino on screen together for the first time, as driven characters on opposite sides of the law.
Later in the month De Niro reunites with Joe Pesci and director Martin Scorsese for another three hour crime drama, Casino, which is as technically adept as one could expect, but all too similar to the same team's superior GoodFella. Expect an Oscar nomination for Sharon Stone who brings a vivid vulnerability and intensity to the part of the insecure, heavy drinking hustler who marries the De Niro character.
Scorsese also produced Spike Lee's imminent Clockers, a vibrant and passionate anti drugs drama featuring Harvey Keitel as a cynical homicide detective investigating the murder of a Brooklyn drug dealer. The film takes its title from the slang term for the lowest level of drug dealer, the type who is on the streets around the clock.
The futuristic Johnny Mnemonic has Keanu Reeves cast as a chip implanted information courier, while the action is even more flamboyant in Robert Rodrigeuz's Desperado, starring a smouldering, gun swivelling Antonio Banderas. On a lighter note, there's the romantic comedy, Loch Ness, with Ted Danson as a jaded American scientist falling for a feisty Scot (Joely Richardson); Don Bluth's animated cartoon feature, The Pebble and the Penguin; Ray Liotta and Danny Glover as Green Berets transporting an 8,000 pound elephant through Vietnamese jungles in 1968 in Operation Dumbo Drop Steve Martin and Diane Keaton reunited for the sequel, Father of the Bride Part II; and Robin Williams in the story of an ancient magical board game known as Jumanji, which is top heavy with state of the art special effects.
Pick of the art house movies is Pedro Almoddvar's sparkling return to form with The Flower of My Secret, a captivating and emotional melodrama with the excellent Marisa Paredes as a woman who, in her 40s, faces parallel crises in her life. Look out, too, for Lars Von Trier's ambitious four hour epic, The Kingdom, set in a Danish hospital; Jean Paul Rappeneau's handsome but overextended The Horseman on the Roof starring Olivier Martinez and Juliette Binoche; James Mangold's slice of life American tale, Heavy, with Liv Tyler; and welcome re issues of Sam Peckinpah's great western, The Wild Bunch (the director's cut) and Bruce Robinson's cultish Withnail & I.
March
MORE than 100 movies will be screened during the ACCBank 11th Dublin Film Festival, which runs from March 5th to 14th; priority booking opens on February 21st. March 25th is Oscars night in Los Angeles, and at least three of the month's releases are likely to be among the nominees. The current Oscar favourite is Taiwanese director Ang Lee's Jane Austen movie, Sense and Sensibility, adapted by and starring Emma Thompson, and also featuring Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Greg Wise and Kate Winslet.
Thompson's former co star, Anthony Hopkins, is tipped for another Oscar nomination for his portrayal of an American president in Oliver Stone's characteristically provocative Nixon, and after his comeback in Pulp Fiction last year John Travolta should be back on the short list for Barry Sonnenfeld's eagerly awaited Elmore Leonard adaptation, Get Shorty, which also features Gene Hackman, Renee Russo and Danny DeVito.
Despite a mostly negative reaction in the US, considerable anticipation surrounds the March 1st release of Kathryn Bigelow's hi tech thriller, Strange Days, set on New Year's Eve, 1999, when society has collapsed to the point of siege, and starring Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett. Technological expertise of a quite different type is on display in Disney's first fully computer animated feature, Toy Story, which has already taken over $100 million at the US box office.
Already turned into a successful play in London, Irvine Welsh's novel. Trainspotting - dealing with losers, liars, psychos, thieves and junkies in present day Edinburgh - comes to the screen via the Shallow Grave team of director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge and actor Ewan McGregor. And Ian Hart, James Frain, John Lynch, Michael Gambon and Maria Doyle Kennedy feature in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Nothing Personal, set during a precarious ceasefire in Belfast in the 1970s.
Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter team up to hunt down a serial killer in Jon Amiel's thriller, Copycat, which also features Dermot Mulroney and Harry Connick Jr., Laurence Fishburne plays the title role in Oliver Parker's new movie of Othello, with Kenneth Branagh as Iago and Irene Jacob as Desdemona.
Al Pacino turns up again, this time with John Cusack and Bridget Fonda, in Harold Becker's political drama, City Hall. The White Men Can't Jump pair of Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson returns in the action yarn, Money Train, which has been accused of inspiring copycat killings in the US. For younger viewers there's Balto, the animated cartoon feature of a half breed sled dog (voiced by Kevin Bacon), and just in time for Easter, Alfonso Cuaron's very warmly regarded film of Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, featuring Liesel Matthews as the eponymous precocious child and the Irish actor, Liam Cunningham, as her widowed father.