Becky Hallsmith of Ultimate Picture Palace looks forward to some late summer celebrity action and a bit of a break too...

With our new seats safely installed back in May, this is the first summer that we aren’t embarking on a major upgrade or renovation. So this year we’ll only be closing our doors for a mere week (from August 29) to do a few minor repairs, have a bit of a breather, and generally get our house in order for the year ahead.

It’s been a bit of a sluggish start to the summer. Although the exceptional weather has played its part in keeping our audiences small, more importantly so did the football — even if you weren’t watching it! — with very few films of much substance being released in World Cup month, and the last couple of weeks have been a bit lacklustre.

But a week, as they say, is a very long time in cinema programming and now we’ve got plenty to get excited about. This week’s main feature has been the comedy with an unfeasibly long title: The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, based on the bestselling Swedish novel. It’s good to see our audiences leaving with such huge grins on their faces — and yes, if you missed it, we will be bringing it back in our new programme (which comes back from the printer tomorrow).

Tomorrow we also start our run of Boyhood, another longterm project from one of my favourite directors, Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, the excellent and underrated Bernie and of course the Before trilogy. Before Midnight, made 18 years after the first film Before Sunrise, was one of our biggest hits last summer. With a 99 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and exceptional word of mouth, I fully expect that this summer the film that took him 12 years to make will be just as big.

There’s just enough time to squeeze in one more event this summer: you may have spotted in last week’s paper that on Friday, August 15 we’re welcoming Creation Records founder Alan McGee. Together with Paul Dixon (the film is based on his ambition to be a band manager), he’s doing a Q&A cinema tour of the UK with feel-good British independent rock’n’roll comedy Svengali. The film— as you might expect it would – features a fantastic sound track. And always wanting more, we’re showing another feel-good British independent rock and roll comedy with a fantastic soundtrack that weekend: the 50th anniversary restoration of Richard Lester’s Beatles classic A Hard Day’s Night.

Which, by the way, also gets 99 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Waiting till after the August Bank Holiday to take our week’s breather means that for the first time I’ve had to think about programming for it. Now to my mind the juxtaposition of ‘August’, ‘bank’ and ‘holiday’ can mean only one thing — adding a summer blockbuster to our usual more cerebral mix! And ideally one featuring a talking raccoon and a tree with limited vocabulary.... yes, Guardians of the Galaxy! Our newest volunteer Katie, the lucky girl, went to see it on opening night and is stoked that she’ll get to see it again when she does her shift on bank holiday weekend—‘Oh yeah!’