This sunny 1989 fantasy by master animator Hayao Miyazaki broaches the issue of female sexuality more boldly than any Western children’s movie would dare.

This animated Japanese masterpiece is a war story as wrenching as any live-action movie.

Sal is not ready for a new political world, whose dawn Lee sketches out here, in which it is not enough simply to refrain from making overtly racist gestures: omission or erasure is equally insulting.

If you're determined to make a fun, feelgood movie, a marriage between a manipulative bigamist and a terrified minor that spirals off into alcoholism, violence and ruination may not be the ideal subject matter. Even if the music is really, really good.

How To Get Ahead In Advertising is often an uneasy mixture of satire and parody that plunges past anarchy into the most foursquare polemic imaginable. But at least it has the courage of every one of its convictions and Grant's doughty performance at its centre almost persuades one that he was not a little miscast. [27 Jul 1989]

It's not exactly a documentary, more a lovingly-filmed homage, but some candid interview material allows scraps of Baker's story to emerge.

It’s Nicole Kidman who steals the show. Forced to endure the brunt of Hughie’s attacks, Rae is both cool and desperate, calculating and vulnerable, with a strange energy that feels young and tender but wise beyond her years.

The allegory is framed in fabulously lurid B-movie terms.

Ken Russell's phallic farce starring Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi is drearily sexist, accidentally absurd and undeniably a stinker. But its defiant disrespect for plot and taste win me over.

Lance Henriksen's gaunt, anguished features have rarely been put to better use than in this superior horror story...Pumpkinhead would give the Predator nightmares. [23 July 1999]

What strikes you is not simply its energy and vitality and its Dickensian storytelling appetite, but its fierce unsentimentality.

Its austere beauty, artistry and wrenching sadness are undimmed after 30 years, and there is nothing distant or still about it.

Only the hardest of hearts could fail to enjoy the great 80s action classic, rereleased for its 30th anniversary: with uproarious explosions, deafening shootouts and smart-alec tag lines following the bad guys getting shot.

LaLoggia directs with creepy effectiveness.

This inspirationally lovely and gentle film has a real claim to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece, or first among equals in his collection, with a simple hand-drawn design whose innocence only becomes more beguiling with repeated viewings, along with its bright, expansive, Gershwin-esque musical score.

The story almost comes off the rails, but Beetlejuice’s charm lies more in the execution. The movie is crammed with visual invention and snappy comedy. The afterlife is richly imagined as a macabre bureaucracy. The living world is no less outlandish, especially with those eye-popping interiors and costumes.

The film never really carries out its implied deconstruction of the all-American family, but Poitier and Phoenix form an enjoyable bond. [23 Jun 2007, p.53]

Twenty-five years on, the story is still charming and beguiling.

It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes.

It's the sort of film you either go along with or fall into a stupor watching. [28 Dec 1989]

With Three Men and a Baby, Nimoy proved himself to be an adept handler of mainstream 80s comedy, updating the far more farcical (and chauvinist) French original Trois Hommes et un Couffin into something more Hollywoodised and slick. But within the slickness, he let his three leads, Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson shine through with their own individual charm.

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

Utterly bizarre and entirely ridiculous – and yet effective, an imaginative Guignol festival, like the goriest of soap operas, in which one wrong move opens a portal to hell.

What Pagnol wrote about his book was much more affecting than anything in this cliche-ridden film, full of cardboard characters and pretty views.

Timothy Dalton's monogamous, deadpan 007 brings a more nuanced interpretation to the central character, whose relationships evolve in ways rarely seen in the earlier films.

RoboCop looks more than ever like Verhoeven’s masterpiece, a classic of 80s Hollywood and apart from everything else a brilliant commentary on the city of Detroit; hi-tech RoboCop is a harbinger of the decline of the automotive industry and the ruin-porn wasteland to come.

A queasy humour remains, thanks hugely to salt-of-the-earth per-formances that hardly look like acting. [15 Nov 2006, p.33]

This is a ramshackle, exuberant affair, peppered with larger-than-life inhabitants, ludicrous scenes and quotable dialogue that have long since grown worn from frequent use.