Kim Newman

A spirited gothic tale, played with welcome black humour.

Brimming with ideas and laudable ambition, it's well worth a look.

It feels a little like ‘a very special episode of The Walking Dead’ and might be a tad low-key for its field, but Schwarzenegger and Breslin are good and the payoff is affecting.

Guilty, with one or two mitigating circumstances.

One or two serious scares and some excellent creature design work make this a superior British horror sci-fi.

Director Steve Miner, on board because Carpenter passed, made two of the early Friday The 13th sequels and manages the business of the sudden knee-jerk shocks with ease, realising (as the previous sequels didn't) that Halloween movies are supposed to be scary not violent.

The remake/parody sequences - trailers for which are on the official site - are outstanding, but Black’s all-over-the-place mania and Mos Def’s slightly too bland orphan hero don’t quite tie the rest of the picture together. Still, it has heart. And you’d rather see this version of "Rush Hour 2" than the original.

After several successful films where he plays the tough-as-nails cowboy, Wayne wasn't about to break the pattern now. Playing the only character he knows, he gives several inspiring speeches to an unlikely group of kids who turn from boys to men.

Derivative but tongue-in-cheek enough to have a following.

Tolerably exciting spycraft, but stuck with a see-through plot. Washington and Reynolds are watchable, but not exactly stretched by these roles.

All style and no anything else, especially plot coherence.

A little too exactly like the original but with (fewer) memorable performances.

A safe, effectively jumpy transfer of Alien to the depths that restores the fear of Jaws into an environment momentarily softened by The Abyss.

A good performance from Barrymore, the admirable Gilbert (who talks as her character on Roseanne would if she was covered by an 18 certificate) and director Katt Shea Ruben, a Roger Gorman associate hitherto best known for sleaze thrillers set in strip clubs.

Cheerful, kitsch and camp.

Silly but enormous fun, complete with gypsy musical numbers and an insane battle royal finish.

A solidly okay Saturday night effort, but unambitious considering the talent involved. Maybe Rodriguez should direct Predator Resurrection, but get a science fiction writer to script it.

An entertaining, provocative biopic with good performances and many strong scenes — but it still doesn’t feel like the full Lovelace story.

Sloppy crime epic.

Except for the success of Three Men and a Baby, (NOT Little Lady), Tom Selleck had great problems making the transition to the big screen. Here is another case in hand with such stereotypical characters as Hutton dominatrix and Hoskins Londoner.

It’s the tangle of workings-out not the easy answer that are the proof of a theorem, and that magnificent, sparkling, insightful chaos abounds here.

Though it tries to be different, with hair's-breadth escapes that don't depend on implausible stunts or Bondian-scale explosions, Conspiracy Theory is an uneasy mix of laughs and thrills; suspense and soap.

Guest star Dan O'Herlihy steals the film as a Celtic joke tycoon (‘the man who invented sticky toilet paper and the dead dwarf gag’) who hates the way American kids are despoiling the religious spirit of Samhain and decides to teach them a nasty lesson.

Though it could do with being weirder and wilder, this high-concept mash-up — what if crooks robbed a haunted bank? — features fine work from a brace of rising stars.

Sugar Hill wants to be very different to the other Boyz in the Hood style films by using a second rate Spike Lee approach but sadly it doesn't make the film any better, only highlighting its failures. With the market heavily saturated with these 'hood' gangster films, this fails to stand out.

Arguably the most imaginative of the horror franchise, with a fair number of truly resonant scenes.

An offbeat comedy/drama elevated by another terrific Varmiga turn.

Overdone and not particularly tasteful musical stuff and nonsense.

A well-above-average ho-ho-ho-horror film with a shivery sense of winter weirdland and anarchic ultra-violence, it’s also a strong candidate to become a holiday favourite thanks to a perfectly judged punchline.

Punchy and confronting, with another terrific turn from Seimetz.

See-saws between straight superhero movie and parody, with layers of soap-opera fudge in between. A lot of solid scenes - but Hancock lacks the power of super-coherence.

A star rating is not much help, since von Trier’s self-conscious arrogance is calculated to split audiences into extremist factions, but Antichrist delivers enough beauty, terror and wonder to qualify as the strangest and most original horror movie of the year.

Dynamite action. This is a good bet for a night with the lads. And weedy girlies can at least wake up every ten minutes when Denz takes his top off.

Reasonably entertaining but hectic (supposed) finale for the up-and-down series.

It works as a suspense-building scare machine, given heart and depth by Olsen's performance - though it's still an effective exercise in misdirection rather than a strikingly original vision, and now it's a remake of an effective exercise in misdirection.

Impressively nightmarish.

Pleasant, forgettable.

A drama of upper-middle-class menace that can’t quite bring itself to be a full-on slasher movie, this has a few too many clichés but offers some creepiness and decent performances.

Son Of A Gun has the gritty, rough feel of 1970s heist/hit picture

The tension revs along nicely and - if you're not heisted out already - there's some suspense to be had.

Chucky's smartest, sharpest outing yet.

Still creepy, ooky, mysterious and spooky, but trying to follow the storylines is like sorting spaghetti.

Breaking the golden rule of thrillers - don't let the audience guess the ending from 15 minutes in - this just becomes largely pointless.

More entertaining than "The Da Vinci Code," but still tosh.

Despite being not officially a Bond film this is good solid, entertaining action.

Lambert fails to convince as the action star and somehow it is left to a computer to steal the show.

Though it might charitably be described as "a load of old cods", there is a certain entertainment value to Murder At 1600.

This energetically charmless 'family' fantasy lies there dead on screen, occasionally twitching at a funny line.

Once past a first reel which deliberately sticks to torture porn conventions, Pet is redeemed by a series of developments that take the film into surprising story and character areas.

King of the Monsters delivers what its genre requires. Truly awesome monster scenes fill the screen, often imbued with emotional resonance by music cues.

Resembling a kids’-birthday-party remake of 1973's The Legend Of Hell House, this suffers from being not that funny or spooky. Its saving grace is a cast you’re happy to spend time with.

A decent, mid-list spy thriller, suspended somewhere between le Carré and Bond but with a budgetary austerity in keeping with UK government spending cuts that keeps it out of the real high-stakes game.

A noisy but enjoyable destruction derby of a film, sadly with none of the subtlety, invention or skill of Spielberg's Duel.

Smart, fun, mid-list horror with Scream overtones

Very, very low-brow.

If the series wants to become a franchise, a rethink and new blood will be necessary -- maybe Banderas can get mortally wounded in reel one of The Son Of Zorro, passing on the mask and sword to, say, Gael García Bernal.

Super sexy, silly Meyer fun where he takes his own self-styled genre to its heights/depths.

It’s an intense, imaginative piece of work – which treads over familiar ground but modestly ventures a bit further in the climax.

An okay paranormal mystery, with solid work from the regulars – but please Mr Carter, next time, could we have liver-eating mutants or post-modern comedy like the really good episodes of The X Files?

As a thriller it's solid three-star tension. As a Samuel L. Jackson showcase it proves a man can only coast through so many motherfuckin' or milquetoastin' turns before having to display his full and overpowering talent.

Half-an-hour too long, but still a fun ride.

44 Inch Chest gets by on the quality of its performances.

Figgis, reunited with Gere after Internal Affairs, went through the Hollywood mangle on this one, and despite flashes of insight, anything worthwhile gets lost in a script that strains too hard for truth and provokes unfortunate big laughs.

As horror, it's a worn-out succession of gory, meaningless, hard-to-enjoy deaths, and too much of the running time is given over to puppets arguing with each other.

Sentimental, cliched and at times overdone but a true weepy if ever there was one.

There’s a wobble about how committed this is to being a scary movie rather than an inside Hollywood drama, but — like Exorcist III — it springs one great lunge-out-of-an-unexpected-corner-of-the-frame jump scare.

The real nun in the movie is the heroine, played by a spirited Taissa Farmiga, and the dramatic weight falls on her able shoulders.

As good an all-out, non-camp horror movie as we’ve had lately.

Straining for significance at every moment, this is one of a wave of late '60s/early '70s Westerns that represent Hollywood's idea of the counterculture in love beads, feathers and picturesque gore.

Writer-director Jack Hill (Spider Baby) evidently didn't try very hard on this one.

Fonda and Danner — who looked then exactly like her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, does now — are likable leads in ’70s futurist leisurewear (why didn’t those tailored jumpsuits catch on?), and some creepy corporate robot action helps (Danner’s gunfight with her robot duplicate), but it’s a lot less exciting than the original and replaces satire with TV-style plotting.

Unforgivably terrible.

Fanning brings her A-game and there’s enough mystery about the monsters in the woods to string audiences along until the satisfyingly weird finish. As mid-list horror goes, perfectly fine.

One of Tom Hanks' overlooked performances because this bizarre thriller-comedy ends so strangely but there's much to like here.

Lurie's remake doesn't bring a lot of fresh ideas to the table. The thick fug of moral ambiguity, so disconcerting in Peckinpah's film, is missing, replaced by certainties rife in modern horror. The result is a bit of yawn enlivened only by James Woods' delirious bad guy.

Despite magic moments, this is so lop-sided in conception it's really only worth seeking out as a folly.

Too safe to shock and too familiar to really frighten, this is an overly conventional affair.

A moving and often funny self-portrayal of Chapman that will delight Python fans.

Murphy occasionally does uninterrupted seconds of shtick, but the film is stuffed with cheap sentiment (a kid with cancer), extraneous characters and embarrassing simplistic politics.

The first film had its moment of charm, and the cast were good enough to overcome the downright stupidity of the storyline, but this is simply a dreary bore that takes advantage of a terrific cast by moving them about on the screen without giving them anything to do. One long yawn.

It may not be as good as the material it's sourcing, but it's still fun to see so many faces from the genre in one place.

Although adequately put together, this is entirely unnecessary as a movie, with nothing to add to its limited interest sub-genre, no surprises at all in its by-the-numbers script, and no credit at all to the various servicable members of the cast.

If there are post-Harry Potter children who don’t know or care about The Wizard of Oz, they might be at sea with this story about a not-very-nice grownup in a magic land, but long-term Oz watchers will be enchanted and enthralled. There’s even a musical number, albeit an abbreviated one. Mila Kunis gets a gold star for excellence in bewitchery and Sam Raimi can settle securely behind the curtain as a mature master of illusion.

A gripping, affecting, strange movie -- but oddly, it's just like too many other gripping, affecting, strange movies we've seen recently.

Landis occasionally plays wonderful licks on the cliches, as in an original take on the familiar vampire-burning-up-at-dawn shtick, but like his earlier movies (An American Werewolf In London, The Blues Brothers) this keeps self-destructing on a story level. Of all entries in the recent vampire cycle, this is at once the most hung-up on horror history and the most revisionary in its rewriting of the mythology.

This is a feel good movie which is too mechanically put together to make you feel anything.

Hardly groundbreaking but this high-school actioner ghosts by on its charm and sense of fun.

A needless threequel. Note to director: avoid 'rise of the' titles.

Besides being an author, Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most vicious, merciless critics of his age. He would not have let this get past him without skewering its shortcomings with a barbed quill.

This isn't afraid to be a horror movie.

Delivers a decent puzzle and enough jumps to keep you enjoyably jittery.

This is one of those failures that has so many near-great things that it almost gets by on guts.