It’s a gripping story – though perhaps those involved have told it so many times over the years, they’ve lost their sense of excitement; this may well be for aviation fans only.

One for the fans … but some nostalgic entertainment here.

A sweet, odd diversion – more eccentric, maybe, than Travolta intended.

There is something stolid and at times monotonous about the way this is presented to the audience – as ever with Nemes, the force of gravity is increased, making everything 20% heavier and denser. And Barábas’s performance is frankly actorly rather than real in his incessant frown of righteous resentment. It’s a minor movie from this always interesting film-maker.

A well-meaning film about the white liberal experience in South Africa – but, if you want to know about Steve Biko, look elsewhere.

The film is beautifully shot in saturated colour by Robby Muller, the cinematographer of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas and many other remarkable looking films, but has one of those minimalist screenplays that drives one mad since nobody says anything which makes much sense at all. Its direction seems to ask us to look past the characters for significance, while enjoying their offbeat lifestyles. [07 Dec 1989]

Much improved by its new cut, Revolution is an atmospheric depiction of soldiers' lives in the American revolutionary war – despite its flaws.

It's an obvious rip-off of George Romero's superior 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. [12 Apr 2007, p.34]

A somewhat double-edged Arthurian romance. There's a sharp side, with Sean Connery the noblest of kings, Julia Ormond an impressive Guinevere, and some genuinely epic imagery; on the blunt side, the tragedy is Camelot-via-Tinseltown: Richard Gere's Lancelot is far from convincing and the armour is just too shiny. [31 Dec 2005, p.49]

The sheer laborious silliness of Avatar feels like harder work the second time around and its essential problem is more prominent. [2022 re-release]

It has to be said that there is a level of cheerfully self-aware ridiculousness, which means that 300 is not entirely without entertainment value.

The cast certainly seems to be in on the whole joke, or at least must have felt all those hours in the makeup chair getting swaddled in latex was worth it in the end.

Refn delivers some shocks - but not the shock of the new.

Mandy Lane feels bogus and compromised: an unreconstructed horror romp in the guise of a nerdish intellectual.

The furrowed-brow seriousness of X-Men is its least attractive quality, but that is the mood that dominates in this film. It's hard to see how anyone other than hardcore fans will find much to entertain them.

Tamahori, director of Along Came a Spider, does a competent, if over-fussy job, but the pace flags in the showdown in Iceland.

There are some good gags and routines here, but loads of them, particularly the one about what it was like being eight and getting hit by your mother, have been done with far more invention and wit by Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy.

Despite all those fierce confrontations and tribal divisions, exhaustively rehearsed and mythologised, nobody's really a bad guy and nothing's really at stake.

Is it a psychological thriller or a giddy horror of the evil-in-them-there-hills persuasion? This split-personality number can't quite decide.

On the Road does, ultimately, have a touching kind of sadness in showing how poor Dean is becoming just raw material for fiction, destined to be left behind as Sal becomes a New York big-shot. But this real sadness can't pierce or dissipate this movie's tiresome glow of self-congratulation.

It's a film which fatally fails to hold your focus: events seem both predictable and mumbled; the monochrome looks grubby, the splashes of colour and blood joke shop cheap.

It is oddly like an Agatha Christie thriller with all the pasteboard characters, 2D backstories and foreign locale, but no murder.