The audience at a Phil Collins stadium gig aside...

... 95,594 people can’t be wrong. That’s the 95,594 Internet Movie Database voters who currently put The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at #4 in their top 250 films. And who could blame them? I’ve seen it once in the cinema (on a ropy, battered old print) and more times than I can remember on TV (I especially enjoyed when ‘panning and scanning’ removed two members of the astounding 3-way Mexican stand-off finale!), risk of sounding like some sort of sad film geek, I have been looking forward to August the 1st for many, many months (nay, years) now.

Actually, I don’t know about you, but this entire month at Filmhouse makes me feel like the proverbial pre-teen at the pick ‘n’ mix...

EIFF ‘08 hits come thick and fast in August: Sir Ben Kingsley’s university professor falls for younger woman Penélope Cruz in Isabel Coixet’s seriously classy Elegy; Santosh (The Terrorist) Sivan’s Before the Rains is a seductive moral maze set in the last days of the Raj; and Chris Cooper and Pierce Brosnan star in the deliciously dark emotional storm, Married Life. The French are never too far away from the FIlmhouse programme, this month with three radically different films: the March of the Penguins team’s latest, the beautiful The Fox and the Child; Abdellatif Kechiche’s immigrant family drama Couscous – for many, the French film of the year – which manages to be both warm and devastating; and Mes amis, mes amours , starring Vincent Lindon as a lovelorn ex-pat living in London.

David Lean gets a complete retrospective (bar The Passionate Friends, which we are screening in July) including a special 70mm presentation of Lawrence of Arabia, in this, his centenary year; brand spanking new prints of The Seven Samurai and Ikiru seemed an appropriate excuse for a 13-film Akira Kurosawa retrospective; likewise a new print of Terrence Malick’s stunning debut Badlands triggers a full (albeit only 4-film) retrospective; to tie in with the launch of his new book at the Book Festival, we’re screening five of Edinburgh’s favourite son Sir Sean Connery’s best performances, with an introduction to The Hill by the man himself; Paul Merton will be here for 8 days this month with his marvellous Silent Clowns show; and the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival On Tour swings by for its 2008 edition.

And finally, a quick congratulations to Ginnie Atkinson, Hannah McGill and the rest of their EIFF team for a highly successful 62nd edition of the world’s longest continually running film festival. It’s now official, June is the new August...