Despite the UK's fuel crisis and the start of the Olympic Games, cinema-going was not as disrupted as first thought - a relief for several of the weekend's new releases. Although the Top 15 box office tally of $8.4m (£6m) was $1.8m (£1.3m) down on last weekend's Top 15 aggregate, both Scary Movie and Snatch scooped over $1.4m (£1m) at number one and number two in the chart respectively.

The latest Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou' opened with an impressive $793,108 (£563,900) from 132 screens. Released by Momentum Pictures, the highly-praised film won a screen average of $6,008 (£4,272) and registered the best opening ever for the revered filmmakers in the UK. This placed the film, starring George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson as chain-gang runaways, at number four in the chart.

Third place was snagged by the Paramount Pictures' remake of 1971's Shaft which grossed $1.2m (£872,545) from 349 locations, a site average of $3,516. Entertainment's release of The Cell, New Line Cinema's film from award-winning commercial and music video director Tarsem Singh, pulled in $779,626 (£554,314) from 257 screens for a mediocre screen average of $3,034 (£2,157). The least successful opener was Ed Norton's debut as a director-producer, Keeping The Faith, which grossed $368,336 (£261,887) from 235 screens taking seventh place in the chart.

This year's Cannes Film Festival Palme D'Or winner, Dancer In The Dark, scooped $70,318 (£50,000) (including previews of $9,547) from a limited 14 screens, despite being slammed by several newspaper reviewers. Another festival favourite, French-language film Human Resources (Ressources Humaines), released through the National Film Theatre, grossed $3,163 (£2,249) from just four screenings over the weekend.

Fiza, the Indian film released through Blue Star International, has now taken over $360,000 in 10 days and is likely to be one of the highest grossing film Asian films this year.