Kim Newman

Pleasant, forgettable.

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

What's missing here though is the novel's trick of being a wonderfully contrived mystery on the surface while underneath lurks an angry and upsetting analysis of class injustice in the USA.

An austere, cerebral reading of a book which is unfettered, blood-bolstered and wildly sensationalist — Lewis is the father of torture porn, not a master of subtle chills. It’s interesting and unsettling, with a charismatic lead performance, but nowhere near as shocking as it should be.

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

The script hasn't aged well and their's an overdose of the ominous, but when Ford forgets about religion and concentrates on squealer-on-the-run thrills, the film still has a real charge.

This isn't afraid to be a horror movie.

The main problem is that the supposed good guys are all such reprehensible toads it’s impossible to care whether they get to bring down Willem Dafoe’s charismatic, polo-necked super-crook.

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.

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.

Some interesting creative choices make this more a curio than a great film.

Hellboy might not have the name-recognition factor of the Spider- or Batmen, but Guillermo del Toro brings the audience swiftly up to speed on artist-writer Mike Mignola's comic book anti-hero.

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

Just the right recipe for a seasonal horror cocktail — gruesome kills, proper suspense, sly wit, likeable leads and a dose of just deserts for very, very bad boys and girls.

Though some of the interludes are surprisingly effective – Cong Cong’s playground romance is genuinely sweet – the downtime between disasters is mostly here to let the audience breathe. The draw of the film is its huge set-pieces, which easily best recent Hollywood essays in disaster such as Deepwater Horizon.

Once you get past the ridiculous story this is a fine example of De Palma's lush overkill style and certainly has a redeeming thread of silly sick humour.

A few too-broad gags aside — and even these are in the funky spirit of ’60s Marvel — this is a satisfying second issue with thrills, heartbreak, gasps, and a perfectly judged slingshot ending.

It sets some sort of record for use of the expressions "nigga" and "muthafucka".

Earlier Clancy films alternated between the dull and the ridiculous. First-rate writers like Steven Zaillian and the great John Milius have managed to make this considerably meatier.

Very 'talky', but the three lead females are excellent, as are the costumes and sets.

A small but perfectly formed crime drama. And, without making a fuss, a proper nail-biter, too.

A curiously compulsive drama that for all its inevitable Dead Sailors’ Society trappings is still highly entertaining.

Effective melodrama with some satisfying emotional confrontations, particularly from Lana Turner.

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

Burke — perhaps best-known as the grown-up version of the scary baby in the last films in the Twilight saga — is outstanding as the fragile, yet determined heroine who is terrorised beyond the bounds of sanity but has to remember that she might be doing all this to herself.

Thoughtful trial movie with a disturbing edge.

Okay, so it’s Cujo with a chimp and a pool instead of a dog and a car – but Primate delivers good, gruesome business and has a sense of fun. Solid horror hokum.

Ingenious and wonderfully detailed, though better in its imaginative horror than its slightly too-broad comic knockabout. It's not quite on the level of Coraline, but it's proper summer fun with some dark delights.