Against the odds of a feeble script and uninspired direction the duo do, in fact, grow on you, and there are a smattering of silly laughs, most notably a sequence involving a large road kill stashed in the back seat.

Sadly, despite its various attributes and overall funky MTV sensibilities, this never gets quite brutal or blockbusterish enough and the result is a movie both likely to offend the family and infuriate the aficionados in roughly equal amounts.

Despite superb performances by Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh, a limp, almost TV movie trite, climax never comes near delivering the shocks it should. A shame, as what could have been superb, is merely average.

Exotica reaches for the mysterious, subtle and provocative with sparing but tangible success, and is flashy in the same way earlier Egoyan films were buttoned down.

Nowhere near as creepy as the original, nor as effective a scarer.

Despite its glaring obviousness, this is charming enough to captivate the viewer, producing unexpectedly strong female characters and faultless attention to detail.

Petersen pulls off the thrills at a stomach lurching pace, and with its requisite Hollywood ham - husband and wife reuniting over piles of haemorrhaging bodies - loud performances, crashing stunts and a fearsome, hypochondria-inducing conceit, there's barely room to catch your breath, let alone cry foul.

Lame and clunky in many places which doesn't manage to save this bizarre premise from dull absurdity.

This is enormous fun, one of the best TV adaptations to date, and guaranteed to provoke a nostalgic misty eye and mischevious grin in anybody who's ever owned a crimplene tank top.

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

Okay, a couple of sniggers sneak out, but on the whole the effect is stone cold.

This ankle-deep story has a cheekful of tongue, providing opportunities galore for hammy, quick-draw melodrama and the perfect vehicle for Ms. Stone.

This, the debut feature from acclaimed TV director Danny Boyle, is the best British thriller for years, a chilling and claustrophobic heart-stopper centring on a moral dilemma destined to fuel many a dinner party conversation.

There are no real surprises, and it's arguable whether three such disparate souls as these would, in reality, bond so well. But the acting is flawless, the principals fleshing out their characters far beyond their hastily sketched stereotypes.

Fans can console themselves with some disorientating creepiness as half-glimpsed monsters swarm and the fine melodramatic performances. But as the film descends into a babbling wreck you start to wonder whatever became of the directing talent that gave us Dark Star, Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween and The Thing.

The overall effect is too intelligent to be soppy and too damn good to be ignored.

Lame, but in a good way.

In all, Legends Of The Fall is a grand bore, more laughable than stirring. So big everything becomes blurry and distant, so beautiful it could be ad for male hair products.

Mesmerising, magical portrait of smalltown America, dominated by a performance from Paul Newman so outstanding it must surely make him front-runner to hoist the Best Actor statuette come Oscar night.

Despite its aspirations to big-screen scares, this delivers more kitsch than a truckload of glow-in-the-dark skeletons.

Impressive because Loach keeps things simple in an accurate social study.

Good intentions, but dull and predictable.

An excellent debut from director Hytner. The real treat, though, is Hawthorne who, whether lecturing his family on regal responsibility or taking a dump in front of the PM, gives what is undoubtedly the performance of his career.

Relatively speaking it's nonsense, but very cute.

So so adaptation of the Kipling story. The human performances are riotous but their animal counterparts are blank canvases yet to be coloured.

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 comes across as a man's eye view of what a women's film should be like, and although it's not altogether clunky, you can't help but feel that in the hands of a more sympathetic director it could have been something really quite special.

You should feel sorry for the memory of Julia - whose swansong this is - but actually it's Van Damme who commands sympathy.

This is full to brimming with doleful pathos and a potent cast.

The beginning of Steve Martin's non-funny comedies. Ephron should know better as well.

It's beautifully mounted to capture the age and the passing seasons, though director Gillian Armstrong never lets the production values overwhelm the gentle sketches of girlish hopes and pastimes tempered by the trials of life.

Another dose of Culkin charm.

Genuinely gripping, Demi makes an awesome femme fatale.

The film never sentimentalises the old swine as it explores the nature of his genius. Terrific ballplayer, miserable human being. Unworthy subject, great movie.

Much like Parker’s career, the film begins with scintillating flashes of what might have been, but slowly deteriorates into waspish repetition.

Exquisitely shot, superbly acted and deftly written, this is easily one of the best arthouse films of the nineties.

A daft movie, but one not without its moments of healthy radiance, spurred on by some bristling gags and a welcome comic return by Emma Thompson as a gauche fellow doctor caught in a romantic sub-plot.

Devoted Trekkers will have to see it to keep abreast of the ships’ logs, but Saturday night at the flicks fun-seekers are apt to concur this one only fires on stun.

Taut, clever, and fronted with two excellent performances, this is a clever choice for Jackson's first step into mainstream filmmaking.

Bold, gruesome and melancholic, this Gothic horrorfest offers us much to sink our teeth into: Cruise - who effectively disappears from the screen for half the film's duration - is terrific, Dunst eerily compelling, Banderas hypnotic.

The film drops from obvious comedy into a ready melt slush which no amount of make-up and special effects can rescue.

Sumptuous to look at, with some decent performances but Branagh's attempt at this gothic horror just doesn't hold together convincingly and fails to engage.

Smith's script simply crackles with an endless succession of humorous gags and on-the-ball observations while Anderson's brilliant performance as the shop assistant from hell is worthy of a film 100 times as expensive.

A scintillating piece of filmmaking, the kind of movie you look forward to seeing again even as you're watching it, and an extraordinary response to both the Dogs-Is-Overrated brigade and the He'll-Never-Top-His-Debut sceptics.

A truly great documentary.

Genre thrills with a big dose of originality.

Exciting in parts, Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon doing their best, but arc of suspense doesn't quite bring you to the edge of your seats.

Van Damme once again bends and twists his muscular frame to superhuman excess, but his Belgian tonsils have all the flexibility of the Himalayas when it comes to splurting out his one-liners.

Almost a guilty pleasure. But not quite.

Unforgivably terrible.

Bold and beautiful ideas perfectly realised.

The strength of the piece is that it realises which aspects of its genre have been seen too many times, always coming back to Nelson's blank but expressive stare as he watches terrible things the director doesn't need to shove in our faces.

A thumpingly good ode to friendship, hope, wit, wiles and wisdom, brimming with crackling characters and topped with the most twisteroo of twists since "The Crying Game."

Energetically humourless, with travelogue and circus footage inserted between the dog-piss and big boob jokes.

A film that isn't so much bad as bizarre with Willis disastrously miscast as a gun-hating trauma victim and the kind of ending that even the writers of Scooby Doo wouldn't dare contemplate.

Those who find men in feathers inherently divine will have a high old time here, and there are enough hilarious cinematic moments for the gob-smacked rest.

What sounded like a bad idea before it started shooting, proves such an atrocity that it makes her last effort, The Beverly Hillbillies, look almost Oscar-worthy.

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.

This is a startlingly superior piece of craftsmanship, with the flavour of life and richness of the script conveyed via uniformly wonderful performances. Above all, though, it's Lee's foodie masterstrokes, as Chu prepares his elaborate menus, that make the film so mouth-wateringly unforgettable.

The result never comes close to being hilarious, merely cute in the corniest way. That it is more of a pleasure than it deserves, is down to the light, bright leads. Cage and Fonda are both charming, though he’s particularly endearing in his uncharacteristic but welcome turn as a soft-hearted, irresistable darling. The slightness is a disappointment, but the concoction is still very sweet indeed.

The net result is unbeatably good fun, helped along by that inherent fantasy that one man can create global mayhem without stopping to worry who's going to clean up afterwards.

Russell's success, however, is in creating a film that avoids being freaky or an exercise in titillation by employing a mixture of sympathetic writing and black, black comedy.

The film has a wonderful super-production look and Baldwin's Shadow breezes through via nifty invisible effects, but the plot never really gels, and for an action fantasy is rather cold.

It soon becomes apparent, though, that the best songs were used by the first two films, leaving the third with a set of slightly underwhelming tunes.

A few more laughs wouldn't have gone amiss, but then baseball's a serious business - especially when you've got your maths homework to finish before the team talk.

Tedious Western, that's a disappointment given the talent involved.

Designed to showcase Culkin at the expense of everyone else, this will have trouble appealing to the adult contingent of the family audience it's aimed at.

This is more a favourite of the children than adult Disney fans. It has a few memorable songs and has spawned a very popular stage production.

There are very few action movies that cut to the chase quite as quickly as Speed and then have the stamina to keep it up for nearly two hours.

Kieslowski plays all this for laughs, and the anti-capitalist satire which fuels Karol's rake's progress remains the most satisfying part of the film.

Nowhere near as good as the first one but all the same ingredients.

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

Funny and occasionally original, this suffers only from too close a resemblance to its rock forefather.

Sadly the plot leaves a lot to be desired with major flaws never far away. The in-jokes are amusing but their novelty soon begins to wear thin.

It's now become Hollywood gospel that if a high concept film is reasonably successful, then make a sequel and if that raises any interest at all, then, hey why not try one more. It's a shame that here the studios just don't know when to stop with this episode ruining the name of what was once an enjoyable franchise.

With such a sprawling and over the top plot, it's hard to remain focused on what's important. Bertolucci is so concerned with the epic quality of the film that he forgets to give it any real substance. Reeves doesn't do himself any favours in his turn as the unconvincing Buddha either.

Van Sant's film is cold and the gallery of eccentrics merely come across as vulgar caricatures.

The plot is one the original writers would have been proud of and with Garner, himself, appearing it gives the film a seal of approval. A rare performance from Foster who is surprisingly funny and Molina giving a good supporting performance, it's an enjoyable family film.

Style over content, sure, but what style.

There are atmospheric shots of billowing thunder clouds, priests on cliff tops, bloody stigmata and moody eclipses, but it all amounts to nothing.

With Almodovar's early work, it was all about extravagance with his later work such as Talk to Her and Bad Education aiming more for the intellectuals. It's a surprise, then that this film lacks both the flamboyancy of his earlier work and the depth of his latter, landing somewhere unsatisfactorily in the middle.

Dull thriller which isn't very thrilling.

Iain Softley directs his feature debut with simplicity and feeling, and you don't have to have been a Beatles fan to get with the beat. Gives you hope for the British film industry.

Waters' attempt to reach a bigger market sees him lose his own unique identity.

Not stellar Lynch but still an enjoyable film noir.

A witty, stylish and imaginative variation on the vampire movie.

Old-fashioned comedy with superb performances and insightful glimpses into the world of newspaper journalism.

Deliberately provocative, infuriatingly melodramatic, this is a film that begs not to be taken seriously, and requires a ready suspension of moral discernment for maximum enjoyment.

It is, in fact, far from funny, although at moments it does touch upon amusing.

While not to everyone's tastes, this is without doubt one of the most exhilarating films of 1994.

Sirens is a harmless, occasionally intriguing, confection offering just that bit more than an eyeful of Elle in the buff.

Depp puts in a reliable performance as the put-upon son who finds solace in the company of waitress, Juliette Lewis. All three deliver memorable performances along with a strong supporting cast.

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.

A surprisingly sweet romantic comedy debut from Ben Stiller.

The fuzzy thinking allows for gorgeous outdoor photography and a few too many dead spots, but Seagal the director shows real muscle by staging one of the screen's best-ever exploding helicopters and allowing Seagal the star to spit out tough talk, as when he refuses to shoot Caine because, "I don't want to dirty my bullets."

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

While the script occasionally plummets to the nadir of un-funny, there are plenty of MTV-style pop interludes to keep the little ones from drifting, and a stonking version of Money (That's What I Want) by Zendetta that is reason enough to sit beside them.

Neither terrible, boring nor soporific, just not very funny.