Kim Newman

William Eubank continues to work his particular mind-stretching mix of acute character interplay and cosmic conceptual breakthrough.

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.

Still the definitive werewolf movie.

Even by their high standards, the performances of Weaver and Kingsley here are impressive, and Polanski ratchetts up the tension nicely. A chilling and thought-provoking piece.

It's no first-rank CGI cartoon, but shows how Pixar's quality over crass is inspiring the mid-list. Fun, with teary bits, for kids; fresh and smart for adults.

Inventive suspense, spiky characters, outrageous horror and wicked satire. Welcome back, George - you've been away too long.

Downright depressing.

This isn’t an atrocity on the level of, say, Rob Zombie’s Halloween — but it is a horror designed to test your patience rather than your nerves.

Red Dawn is at once a mainstream shoot ‘em up action picture and an ideologically demented exercise in American paranoia.

A crunching, visceral transplant for this cannibal tale from its urban Mexican setting to an American milieu.

Quality acting and writing and appropriately understated direction, but a touch too polite for its own good.

A disturbing and poignant anthology of Roman Polanski's favourite, oppressive themes.

An intense, streamlined exercise in gruesome thrills, with a tiny glimmer of social context (it’s all about the economy) which doesn’t take away from the exciting struggle to get out of this house of horrors.

A good-looking and entertaining British horror film.

If you're a bah-humbug type looking for an alternative to Santa Claus: The Movie or Miracle On 34th Street, this could be a holiday perennial. May be too strange for normal people, but weird kids will love it.

Like all the best exploitation flicks, Piranha is driven by a ruthless desire to entertain and, in this non-pretentious ambition, it succeeds magnificently.

Instantly gripping, with a powerhouse star performance, it'll make you want to speed through the weeks to get to part two.

The hardest power to depict onscreen is the wisdom of Solomon, but Shazam! makes clever decisions, mixing middle school snark with disarming sweetness. And — yes — it delivers the requisite lightning-strike punch-’em-ups with considerable force.

This doesn't have the high style that made Taxi Driver or American Gigolo instant cultural icons - although Schrader shows more than a few traces of Scorsese as his camera creeps- perhaps because it's concerned with a chilly 90s that looks back with a sort of nostalgia on the cocaine-fuelled craziness of earlier years. But it does develop powerfully the themes of Schrader's earlier work and will not disappoint his fans.

Significantly grittier than previous Bat-beginnings, this finds new things to do with, and say about, a character who's been around since 1938.

More startling than an unexpected punch in the noggin, Na Hong-Jin's unusual thriller could have the highest knife count this side of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. A violent thrill-ride to a dark new corner of Asian cinema.

Though it rings ever so slightly hollow as cool shades into callousness, this exercise in sexy suspense and brain-scrambling mystery is a dazzling, absorbing entertainment which shows off Danny Boyle’s mastery of complex storytelling and black, black humour.

Eichhorn, who should have had a much bigger career, is luminous as the sad-eyed heroine, while Heard pulls off the showy role - especially in a climax that finds him rampaging through a posh party at the Cord estate in search of justice.

A wholly captivating date movie for eternal romantics who also enjoy slime-and-tentacle transformations.

Though stuck with stretches of guff and looking all too convincingly like video-era rubbish TV, Mindhorn delivers regular proper laughs and eventually wrings just enough drops of pathos to scrape by.

The guy story is so strong that conventional romantic interludes with the woman torn between two men could easily have been dropped.

Uncomfortable viewing which isn't afraid to engage with race-related violence.

It has some of that episodic ‘compressed miniseries’ feel which a lot of King pictures get stuck with (the book was later redone as a TV serial with Anthony Michael Hall) but still manages a lot of powerful material.