What makes Freddy truly terrifying, and an inspired invention on Craven's part, is that he exists not in the real world but in the shadowy realm of dreams.

Enigmatic and fascinating.

A tense, slickly executed thriller.

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.

Strong performances anchor a series of unforgettable scenes. Breathtaking and unfathomable.

Horrifying, moving and powerful. Watch it by yourself, late at night and never sleep again. Not a good date movie.

Amadeus skewers the period finery - stunning costumes, production design, sublime music - with piercing intelligence and thematic gravitas.

The sometimes dark sci-fi thriller tone is punctured nicely by Quaid's one-liners, and Capshaw is on good form. Very, very '80s, but lots of fun too.

A solid John Woo fu-action hero actioner from the 70s with a glimpse of his later promise.

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

A fairly dappy and overlong attempt to turn Prince the then emergent rock-funk superstar into a movie star.

Jim Jarmusch tried to create the essential road movie and although he didn't manage that, he has still created a classic that captures perfectly the life of a drifter in New York.

This was sweet and charming at the time but now it just lacks either the comedy or sophistication of kids' fantasy film that we've all become accustomed to.

Dated of course, being typically 80s, but maintains a certain charm.

Arnie still swings that sword with aplomb, but with a story this ludicrous, he's on slippery ground.

Ralph Macchio's transformation from high school geek to butt-kicking tough guy, thanks to a little help from Chinese sage Mr. Miyagi (Noriyuki 'Pat' Morita) and his homespun Oriental wisdom, is entertaining enough.

A delightfully offbeat reminder of how inventive and witty blockbusters seemed when you were a kid.

Jokes so stupid as to seem almost surreal, an amazing range of cultural referents and a smattering of genuinely witty conceits.

Very of its time but enjoyable for all that.

Impressive visual invention by Nimoy and the reliability of his cast mean that Trek III does more good than harm to a franchise still competing with it's younger, more tehnologically advanced adversaries.

While The Godfather delivers certainty and a comforting dramatic resolution, Once Upon A Time In America delivers a profound kind of mystery. While Coppola's film delivers answers, Leone's asks questions. It lingers and plays on the mind; its meanings shift and change like a faded memory or a half-remembered dream.

The sustained furore of humour, visual panache and headlong momentum makes for dazzling cinema.

An otherwise fine sports fantasy is dragged down by an overindulgence in sentimentality.

Hall is very funny as the energetic adolescent pest and a good supporting cast includes the Cusack sibings John and Joan.

Film is elegant but never beautiful, a pretence at Lean’s magnificence contradicted by a lavish but anachronistic score by Vangelis. It is the words and performances which excite; their director is out of his depth.

This film is more known for being the one which introduced Goldie Hawn to Kurt Russell than anything else, which is somewhat unfair as at its heart lies a sweet romance, with good performances from both the leads and an Oscar nomination for supporting actress Lahti.

As a fish-out-of-water comedy-drama, it works well.

Douglas and Turner make a great double act in this exuberantly directed adventure movie with a great start turn from the always enjoyable De Vito. Good stuff.

It picks up in the last hour, though this is a very minor compensation in an otherwise long and listless film.

Compelling morality tale that works on multiple layers.

It’s ragged round the edges, but then Fritz Kiersch is working with a budget Roger Corman would laugh at, and he does a good job.

The movie that really showed Tom Hanks' promise as a deliverer of great comedy and heart-warming pathos.

A brave effort from Richardson with another outstanding performance from Foster.

This is about as noir as Pete’s Dragon, best to accept its superficiality as a boon - Hackford, at least, gives it a slick exterior - and enjoy it is a vacuous thriller and extended Phil Collins video.

The greatest laugh-out-loud comedy of the 80s.

Fine, stylish debut from Alex Cox with some great turns from the two leads.

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.

Tenebrae is essential viewing for fans of the Italian stallion thanks to some of his most arterial gore to date.

It’s a fairy-tale, a glittering New York fable told in a silvery black and white, laden with nostalgia for times and oddities long gone from the hallowed halls of Broadway. Another Allen gem.

Wildly uneven, but funny in a bittersweet tittery sort of way in places.

A hauntingly beautiful film.

Not to everyone's taste, but an earnest and hearfelt tale nonetheless.

Ultimately, BMX bikes and Day-Glo elbow pads just ain't cool. One best left to fond memory.

The Keep wears its crap bits proudly on it's sleeve, its qualities are more hidden and emerge only once you've watched it, dismissed it and then found that it's atmosphere refuses to disperse.

Perfomances are excellent, and despite its moralistic conclusion, the film has since become de rigueur viewing for crack barons, who know a good shoot-em-up when they see one.

Adapted from the Stephen King killer car novel, this John Carpenter film is more like an assembly line vehicle than a customised job, but is nevertheless a slick, entertaining piece of work.

James L. Brooks's clever and witty cry-a-long which has as many guys pretending not to cry, as women unashamedly sobbing.

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.

There is a tender resonance in its cheesy sports drama operating with all the obvious moves.

Consistently compelling, capturing all the ambiguity and tension of the book.

Connery was perhaps wise to call it quits the first time round.

Interesting but flawed.

An entertaining look at the 80s embourgeoisement of 60s student activists steers skillfully between social satire and sentiment.

Lewis Gilbert, and two career best performances from his leading actors, give this film such energy it leaves the pleasant aroma of life and possibility.

As an exploration of cultural discord, Nagisa Oshima's film is pretty thin stuff, despite its reputation. Bowie is a potent irritant, but Tom Conti is solid in support and Sakamoto's mesmerising score sparkles anew.

Better avoided unless you're doing a study on vaguely titillating rubbish 80s animation.

Regardless of its dense intellectual and autobiographical content, however, Mirror can still be appreciated as an attempt to capture the human soul and to show that, for all our diverse individual experiences, we still have much in common on an emotional and spiritual level.

It’s "Ferris Bueller" with an existential crisis. Very funny and very weird.

One of the dreariest outer space swashbucklers of all time.

A toothless, tedious farce which deserves to sink without a trace.

Less a hangover of a sequel than a satisfying belch to rid the world of the original.

One for the die hards. The saving grace here is a knowing sense of humour so lacking in its predecessor, For Your Eyes Only.

Saturday Night Live activist Murphy, capitalising on the promise he showed in "48 Hrs.," steals the show as the quick-witted Billy Ray Valentine in what is certainly more mainstream fare than the earlier SNL staffed capers.

Pure escapist madness. And a helluvalota fun.

Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker's script is tight, and Badham directs the whole thing with economy and pace but it's Matthew Broderick's film.

Surprisingly, even after waiting 20 years, they managed to turn out a smart, darkly-comic thriller with some imaginative twists.

The most disappointing of the original three episodes but still charming and thrilling.

The script self-destructs, but the performances — including Daniel Stern as an expendable sidekick — are fun, and John Badham stages some super stunts with the insectile title machine.

All style and no anything else, especially plot coherence.

Unbound by cinematic convention, Raimi unleashed his free-range camera, and ghoulish, omnipresent sound effects to create a bleak, paranoid atmosphere and a raft of sudden, effective shocks.

Knowingly kitsch, Liquid Sky uses the most basic effects and featuring music and fashion that were cutting edge at the time, it now looks fashionably retro. With lots of sex and violence, it sounds a lot more promising than it is, let down by its poor acting, script and a cast we feel little sympathy for.

Excessive and self-indulgent it's true but still the Pythons at their worst are still worth a look.

Grand in scope, the best thing here is still Sir Ben Kingsley's central performance; the film will always deserve to be seen for this alone.

Scorses's skill as a scene-maker are fully evident and Lewis' quietly rageful performance offers to out-do De Niro in intensity, but neither funny enough to be an effective black comedy nor scary enough to capitalise on its thriller/horror elements, The King Of Comedy sits awkwardly between the two.

Life-affirming and often laugh-out-loud funny, this is feel-good movie-making par excellence.

With its echoes of Graham Greene’s "The Quiet American," the script is inevitably preachy and Weir’s camera glowers over the injustices of President Sukarno’s failing regime in late 1965, but the performances are strong and the drama gripping.

As hilarious as it is touching and tasteful at the same time, Tootsie will offend no one and uplift anyone who watches it.

Well-paced and stunningly shot.

It's Newman's performance itself that really makes this film work and helps it truly get close to Lumet's own '12 Angry Men'.

Very hit and miss and not a patch on the first spoof but when a joke strikes home it'll have you going for a while.

That the fact they come to appreciate one other, the grudging respect of a million clichés, feels so satisfyingly, shows just how successful the film is.

Genuinely creepy, satirical and occasionally daft horror tales with a distinctly moral bent.

It plays a lot like a Porky's holiday comedy for the first half, and then the seagoing killer fish learn to fly and big rubber toothy things terrorise the survivors.

There's the fact that First Blood is a first-rate, taught action thriller.

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.

Seminal feature from Tarkovsky, the master of atmosphere and multi-functional allegory is truly affecting, as well as fodder for countless film studies curricula.

Lewd, funny and immensely quotable, this is one of the very best high school dramas ever made.

Overwrought live-action sequences, surreal-to-the-point-of-bewildering animation - The Wall grabs your attention but doesn't know what to say once it's got it.

The script might have benefited from being directed by someone more daring, instead George Roy Hill settles for more mainstream territory.

Not Woody Allen at his best, this period piece has some clever writing but is not completely convincing.

The Thing is a peerless masterpiece of relentless suspense, retina-wrecking visual excess and outright, nihilistic terror, placing 12 men at an Antarctic station while a shapeshifter takes them over one by one.

Annie remains a heartwarming tale, with fine music and decent acting performances.

An unbelievably long film for so little pay-off. More cowboys, please.

A movie that's too patently "heart-warming" for its own good, and boasting one of the most revolting title-songs of all time.

Definitely of the so-bad-it's-almost-good genre, this kinda stands the test of time in a camp way, mainly because of the charm of Pfeiffer and Carrington.

It's a tale told with considerable warmth and humour, some spiffing explosions and a multiple-hanky act of self-sacrifice to round things off.

There are inconsistencies — why does a brand new house have the standard creaking door? — but the pace is so compelling that it is impossible to carp.

What matters is the affection Wang has for his characters and the portrait of assimilation represented by the characters the amateur sleuths encounter. Whimsical, certainly, but also generous, insightful and funny.