Mamet's glee in tracking the rackets and his ear for the great American aphasia - 'I'm from the United States of Kiss My Ass' - more than compensate for the sometimes flat direction, and the performances are splendid.

A serious, intelligent and disturbing horror film.

Gripping...A very convincing nightmare, and if Hackman gives too rounded a performance to approach the omniscient evil of Laughton's original, Patton assumes the mantle as Brice's henchman, while Costner confirms his arrival as a star. Clearly, they can remake 'em like that any more.

The director has a feel for this shopping-with-Mummy's- plastic milieu, but the theme of peer group pressure and the almost universal human need for acceptance is compromised by a script of very Californian piety. Otherwise a slight but not unenjoyable movie.

Confused plot and digressive globe trotting notwithstanding, the best Bond in years.

An enjoyable if slightly innocuous biopic based on the brief life and short-lived fame of teen rock'n'roll idol Richie Valens.

While it's mostly just a matter of waiting till feeding time, there is a hint that somebody was trying to foist some Symbolism onto the shark: as mother and son suffer an attack of the Oedipals, the creature keeps popping up grinning. Sadly, this attempt at a bit of Art (which could have had hilarious consequences) is ditched, and the film concludes with a few people getting chewed before a messy happy ending amid chunks of exploding shark.

If this family fodder is functional, it's due largely to its production design and cinematography, which endow the city of Chicago with an effectively menacing aspect.

While the anatomical special effects are imaginative enough, the manic rather than magical tone fails to achieve the sense of awe that made Fantastic Voyage - clearly this film's inspiration - so fascinating.

For all its uncompromising toughness, the film, like the kids, gets out of hand, its bleak portrait of alienated, antisocial behaviour increasingly wrecked by hysterical performances (Glover especially), a sentimental teen-romance subplot, and melodramatic contrivance. There are some good, frightening scenes of volatile lunacy, but the whole thing badly lacks a controlling distance and perspective; much inferior to Hunter's script for Jonathan Kaplan's superficially similar Over the Edge, it continually teeters on the verge of self-parody.

First-timer Gornick's direction is so painfully inept that not one of the episodes is even slightly scary, let alone horrifying. The only terrifying thing about Creepshow 2 is the thought of Creepshow 3.

As the action shifts from boardroom to bedroom, the film degenerates into a silly bed-hopping farce, and the corporate back-stabbing gets filed away until the final reel, when the whole thing is resolved by a wave of the wicked wife's magic wand. The same old capitalist fairytale, in other words.

Most of the set pieces are predictable in this formula comedy, though there is a sprinkling of chuckles in the sight gags.

Despite the film's conspicuously minuscule budget and shaky narrative structure, it is funny. If you value enthusiasm and imagination more than glossy sophistication, you'll laugh.

A particularly nice touch is the ability of one of the teenagers to pull people into her dreams, allowing Langenkamp and the threatened kids to gang up against Freddie. The neat script also fills in a little more of the Freddie mythology, including a suitably tasteless account of his conception. A creepy score and Russell's sure grasp of the skewed logic of nightmares helps to sustain the ambiguity between the 'real' and 'dream' worlds, while Englund's Freddie now fits like a glove.

Stone's eye-blistering images possess an awesome power, which sets the senses reeling and leaves the mind disturbed.

As in Big Trouble, there is much playing around with oriental mythic nonsense: underground caverns, magic daggers, even a trip to Tibet. But where the movie really misses a trick is its inability to reproduce the balletic splendours of martial arts. The surprise is Murphy, who relies more on his undoubted charm than on the stream of wisecracks he usually delivers.

For all its state-of-the-art animation techniques, Spielberg's production remains resolutely conservative: visually it's virtually indistinguishable from Walt at his wimpiest.

Gang of comic-strip killer car-thieves is led by lip-curling psycho Packard (Cassavetes). The town (comprising one house, a burger joint and no citizen who isn't a teenager or a cop) is overseen by Sheriff Randy Quaid, who displays all the reverence the script deserves. Best joke is having one of the thugs know a word like wraith.

A film that never feels remotely real, content to wallow in dead-rock-star mythology and tedious druggie indulgences.

The mixture of mutual need and mistrust in the relationship between Vince and Eddie is only one of the motors in a film that sees Scorsese's direction at its most downmarket and upbeat - never have pool tables, balls and cues looked so rich and strange - and has one of the most protean and compelling music soundtracks (Clapton, Charlie Parker, Warren Zevon, Bo Diddley) in ages.

Ignore the ridiculous [spoiler omitted] ending of this film, and you have a much more fatalistic exercise in which Coppola eschews easy laughs in favour of the exposure of feeling and the fact that these people's lives, however empty, matter to them. Turner is in the Oscar class.

The claustrophobic setting and semi-improvised tone might suggest something closer to sitcom than cinema (had Jarmusch seen Porridge?), but Robby Müller’s stately monochrome photography single-handedly lifts it into the realm of Proper Art. It’s a sad and beautiful world indeed.

The Ben E King theme song and all the imagery of tousled adolescents preening themselves like miniature James Deans rekindle memories of old jeans commercials, but the film is so well-observed and so energetically acted by its young cast that mawkishness is kept at bay.

Structurally, it could be compared to Kurosawa's Rashomon for its subjective cross-examination of Nola's loves; but this delightful low-budget comedy, with its all black cast and black humour, is 100 per cent Lee.

Howard T Duck, of Marvel Comics, might well have a beef against Lucasfilm for transforming his magnetic comic strip personality into a zipperless polyester duck-suit (filled interchangeably by eight different actors, each apparently under four feet in height) in this aimless movie.

A loud, obnoxious, single-idea schlocker...There's carnage galore, but minimal interest. King himself described it as a 'wonderful moron picture', and he was half-right.

Carpenter has always been a skilful genre mechanic, breathing life into old forms; if he stubs his toes up against the bamboo curtain this time, there is still more enjoyable sly humour than in most slug-fests.

A pity that the directors prove less ruthless than their own creations, but there is more than enough here for people who enjoy murder attempts on cute pet poodles.

There is not nearly enough violence. No one is eviscerated. The villains, all mumblers to a man, are not punished by having their tongues cut out. The body count is only somewhere in the high eighties - and most of these are simply gunned down with a deplorable lack of invention. Very little is done by way of eye-gouging, limb-crushing or tooth-extraction.

Cuteness is never far off, though Badham has enough sense of pace, and the robotics are sufficiently inventive, to keep the laughs coming. Only Guttenberg's tongue-twisted Asian sidekick (Stevens) is off-key.

You can see it coming, but it still has the delicious anticipation of the slow burn. And it all gets much worse. Director Richard Benjamin has the rare gift of knowing just where the funnybone lies, a certain taste for Keaton-esque slapstick, and a very fine comic performer in Hanks.

Sadly, the script is so patchy that most of the genuine laughs are squeezed into the first half; the rest is a rather tacky and confused extended joke about the nuclear arms race, which is tasteless only because it fails to be funny.

The London scenes are enjoyable – the ‘look kids... Big Ben... Parliament’ roundabout routine should be a staple of every family trip to the capital – but overall, it’s not quite funny or memorable enough.

Tense rather than terrifying, and with a strong black comic undercurrent, it rests on the mordant observation that zombies or no zombies, chances are the living will tear each other apart. A fitting conclusion to a remarkably astute series, a landmark in the horror genre.

Essentially, this is sci-fi with a heart, albeit one made entirely of cheese. Both director and writer sometimes seem unsure whether to pitch the tale as knockabout comedy or sentimental fable. It's to the lasting detriment of the movie that Howard opts for the latter. Resistible.

What dulls the enterprise is that Ritchie so keeps his distance from every character that we seldom give a damn. Subdued performances by Mars and Baker are hard to imagine, but here they are.

Bond struck camp long ago, so it would seem pointless to complain about the dilution of Fleming's cruel stud into a smirking dinner-jacket with a crude line in double entendres. But the problem here is that the elements which act as consolation in late Bondage are missing.

In each instance, the limp pay-off undercuts strong performances (manic Woods and sympathetic Drew especially), and the usual caveats about cumulatively unsatisfying portmanteau pictures certainly apply.

Seidelman brings a hip '80s SoHo sensibility to this emancipated screwball comedy, even if the plotting (a mistaken identity farce involving that old chestnut, amnesia brought on by a bump to the head) is square as a square peg. Madonna has never found a better fit than the role of Susan, a thrift-store free spirit - and even then Arquette gives as good as she gets with a deliciously kooky comic turn.

Toning down the smut for a PG-rating, and bringing in veteran comedy director Paris, who made his feature debut with 1968's Jerry Lewis vehicle Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River, ensured slightly more in the way of comic consistency for this modest sequel.

Reiner's splendidly confident, witty teenage variation on It Happened One Night.

Some delightfully unexpected visual gags and off-the-wall one-liners, along with the good-looking period settings and a wealth of minor characters, give the film its strength. It becomes a little predictable in the middle, but the pace picks up in time for the classic final shootout. Despite lapses, infectiously good-humoured.

This near-future tale, in which Selleck heads a police division tracking murderous machines, is technically quite as accomplished as Crichton's previous work, carrying a strong atmosphere of menace and some virtuoso effects (including a tracking shot behind a bullet that makes the Bond movies seem old-fashioned). But once it turns from the hardware and the action to people, you can hardly believe your eyes or your ears.

De Palma actually has the gall to combine the plots from both Vertigo and Rear Window in one big voyeur-fest and pull it off with a certain sly efficiency.

Not a lot to it, certainly, but the acting and performances combine to produce an obliquely effective study of the effect of landscape upon emotion, and the wry, dry humour is often quite delicious.

During the 94 minutes of this delightful movie, the Muppets graduate from college, hit New York, are parted and reunited minutes before curtain-up, with Kermit saved from amnesia by a right hook from Miss Piggy.

Despite the donkey that arrives and ODs on the pharmaceutical buffet, the 'wild' party resembles a dance routine from an Annette Funicello beach movie. To his credit Hanks behaves throughout as though he's actually in a worthwhile movie.

This is actually director Avildsen's first hit since Rocky, and it has the same mixture of calculation and apparent naïveté. It borrows its formula from both East and West with good humour, and is completely free of intelligence, discrimination and originality. No wonder it's a hit.

A jangling, lunatic sugar rush of a movie, in love with everything it satirises and bursting at the seams with psychotic energy

The first half chugs along quite happily, but whereas in Airplane the jokes could simply be strung on a hand-me-down storyline, here the demands of the plot start to play havoc with the levity. Signs of desperation have begun to creep in some time before the end.

Pretty bland, but you have to admit co-producer Belafonte had an eye for talent, spotlighting HipHop legends-in-the-making Afrika Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force, the Rock Steady Crew, and Grand Master Melle Mel and The Furious Five.

Lester manages to maintain a fair level of suspense, and he is greatly helped by Scott, giving his best performance in years as the demonic CIA man sporting a sneer and a pony tail, but King's supernatural ideas need a human focus or they seem nearly idiotic. And, unlike the central figures in Carrie or The Shining, the heroine of Firestarter is just a rather wet little girl who happens to throw fireballs.

Let yourself go and be rewarded by the sight of a hero running home to victory through clouds of fire.

Romantic humanism may not be fashionable in these cynical cinematic times, but few directors reveal the tragicomic lives of ordinary people with such sensitivity and humour.

The script is sharp and funny, the direction sure-footed on both the comedy and action fronts, and the whole thing adds up to rather more concerted fun than Indiana Jones' flab-ridden escapade in the Temple of Doom.

The couple drive into town, body in the boot, looking for help, but they won't find any in the script, which totters from one cliché to the next, eventually disappearing up its own cornhole in a conflagration of cheap FX.

Howard demonstrates exactly the correct soft touch, skirting the myriad problems of taste; and Hannah, who was the punkish replicant in Blade Runner, is somehow, very much, right there.

Ross, who began his career as a dancer and choreographer, brings plenty of gusto to the material and the performances are ebullient, but this is still a cynical and manipulative exercise with little feel for the teen culture it purports to celebrate.

Eerie, chilling, at times engaging. But Mann's attempt to superimpose an analysis of the emotional attraction of Fascism simply doesn't work within the Heavy Metal magazine cartoon format.

The action's good, the photography excellent, the sets decent; but the real clincher is the fact that Bond is once more played by a man with the right stuff. Civilisation is safe in the hands of he who has never tasted quiche, and who, on the evidence here, at least, can perform a very passable tango.

Hughes still manages to play on the anxieties of middle America with fairly devilish skill.

For all its ingenuity, Cujo does lose an awful lot of ground from the fact that rabid St Bernards tend to evoke pity rather than terror.

A right royal turkey.

Another of those mildly titillating high-school films, soulless and self-satisfied, realising the youthful fantasy of being initiated into the joys of sex by an older woman.

Ultimately it's left to Mad Max wizard Miller to steal the show with an extraordinary remake of Richard Matheson's story about an airline passenger who spies a demon noshing the starboard engine.

This finds Bond on better form than he's been for some time. The action sequences are tighter, the visual gags more inventive, and if the plot is no great shakes, the whole thing is served up with a decent approximation to the old panache.

The first half has a sardonic edge to it, but the more seriously the movie takes itself the sillier it gets.

While the film lacks the thematic depth and darkness - and the virtuoso style - of Hitchcock's, it does a fair job of recreating the exhilarating blend of horror and black humour, with a fair quota of outrageous narrative digressions and perplexing twists along the way.

The opposition of good and evil is devoid of any subtle shading, so just sit back and enjoy the spectacular dogfight over downtown Los Angeles.

There's absolutely nothing to it, beyond Ms Beals cavorting in a leotard, lots of sheeny backgrounds courtesy of Lyne the former adman, and a Joe Eszterhas screenplay mixed through with cliché concentrate as female blue-collar worker proceeds from showgirl at a men's club to the big audition for the Pittsburgh ballet school. The star, it has to be said, is not at her most convincing as a welder (how does she afford an apartment the size of an aircraft hangar?), nor should we forget that most of the serious terpsichorean gymnastics were done by uncredited French dancer Marine Jahan.

Granted the producers wanted to repeat their success, but taking the same stars and copying the same jokes merely makes for a thin rehash.

A copy rather than a sequel, this has none of the intelligence, wit or tempo that graced the first swarm of hungry fish.

Allen's version of Smiles of a Summer Night keeps the period country house setting but reduces the characters to six: two medical swingers, an elderly academic and his much younger fiancée, and a long-married couple whose sex-life has ground to a halt. His best invention remains his own screen persona, and the Bergman borrowings here provide it with a warm, romantic and old-fashioned setting.

A sympathetic but slightly clumsy rewrite of The Wizard of Oz, with a whizkid programmer (Bridges) trapped inside a computer world. The film boasts some impressive computer-generated animation, but for all its inventiveness, Tron never reaches a level of excitement commensurate with its effects budget.

As audience movie-making in its purest form, the film is a delight, but it's also so obviously based on Stallone's own personal struggle with success that the mind boggles as to what Rocky can possibly do next.

There are scenes that grab – Abrahams’s dash round Trinity quad; the chats between Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as dons who dress up prejudice in fine words. But the parallel stories tend to cancel out, rather than complement, each other. Oddly, for a film about triumph over adversity, there’s nothing as uplifting as the opening and closing jogs along a windswept beach.

The seductively exotic surface of this mythically underpinned fantasy might be offset for some by much graphic gore, but if you can buy the romantic metaphors for the primitivisms of sexual obsession, the film delivers down the line.

A minor but infinitely more appealing comedy vehicle for Pryor than the earlier "Stir Crazy"...An amiable but hardly memorable two-against-the-world farce that can't quite persuade you Pryor's talents are being properly used.

Impeccably liberal in its orientation to 'issues' - the power and responsibilities of the press, the impact of misinformation - this avoids the excesses of Stanley Kramer-like telegraphy, only to come up looking aesthetically wet.

Unfortunately, Reynolds the director is as uncertain about the tone of the picture as Reynolds the star is about his screen persona. So while the action veers from lightweight action to extreme violence, Reynolds' character vacillates between macho tough guy and sensitive, vulnerable leading man.

An extraordinarily inventive fantasy in which schoolboy Warnock is rescued from a dull suburban existence by a band of renegade dwarfs, who emerge from his wardrobe and whisk him off on an incredible journey through time and space. Sometime Monty Python animator Gilliam fills the screen with bizarre images, and directs with a breathless ingenuity.

How else than as camp can you take Faye Dunaway's waxwork Joan Crawford screeching for an axe, or throwing a scenery-chewing fit over her daughter's use of wire coathangers in the wardrobe? Perry doesn't help, with his credit sequence tease withholding our first glimpse of the stellar visage, and his determination to pose 'Joan' in geometrical symmetry with the lines of her spotless deco domestic mausoleum. Really no dafter, perhaps, than some of Joanie's own Warner Bros melodramas; the trouble is, it thinks it's Art.

Where Antonioni's images made you think, De Palma's merely make you blink, and the baroque plot confuses as often as it frightens. Still, plenty of style, a modicum of thrills, and a suitably s(l)ick ending. Collectors of character performances will enjoy Lithgow's right-wing nut.

The camera's vision is a fresh one, and though the wolf's eye view sequences threaten at first to become a nuisance, they are soon justified as a dramatic device, and ultimately as essential to the plot.

One-joke comedy which indulges Moore's perpetual drunk act as his wastrel playboy attempts to mend his ways in order to get his hands on an inheritance and a blushing bride.

For about half the film, Carpenter's narrative economy and explosive visual style (incorporating some marvellous model work of the new Manhattan skyline) promise wonders. The trouble is that his characters neither develop nor interact dynamically, so the plot gradually winds down into predictable though highly enjoyable histrionics.

Worth a try, but without his Art Dept clothes on, Bond is like the naked Emperor. Look, Ma, no plot and poor dialogue, and Moore really is old enough to be the uncle of those girls.

Reitman, who also originated Animal House and Meatballs, manages a reasonable success rate at pulling off the numerous verbal and sight gags with which the script is peppered.

Looks like something knocked off on rest days from Smokey and the Bandit II. The last five minutes, when they show out-takes of flubbed lines, etc, are hysterical. The rest is strictly for those willing to pay for a series of TV chat show performances.

A warm-hearted comedy involving a bunch of orphan kids promises neither a rewarding evening nor the best use of Pryor's considerable talent. The plotting is sloppy at times and this is undoubtedly a minor film, but its rewards are surprising.

For all its audacity, a misguided folly.

The plot of Nighthawks makes no sense. Its thrills are strictly visual. Stallone (the cop) gives a restrained performance for once, and Rutger Hauer (the terrorist) shows why he was to make it big in Hollywood.

Jim Jarmusch's 16mm feature debut, made not long after the writer/director graduated from film school, is an oblique study of a young man (Parker) adrift on the streets of New York. As he roams, he has chance encounters with a car thief, a saxophone player and a grizzled war veteran, among others. Learning their stories, he begins to seem more and more isolated.

Based on a novel and a disowned script by the late Paddy Chayefsky, Russell's noisily grandiose swipe at psychedelia embellishes what is no more than the cosily familiar story of the obsessive Scientist Who Goes Too Far and Unwittingly Unleashes, etc.

Despite an excellent and promising cast, this Hollywood attempt at a mainstream feminist comedy is flabby and bland...Complacent, and even worse, not very funny, despite the efforts of the ever-excellent Tomlin.

In this madcap comic farce, the homage to '30s screwball is explicit in the title, unflagging pace, and plot: a liberal lawyer (Hawn), married to an uptight DA (Grodin), gets messed up by a rogue ex-husband (Chase), their ex-convict servants, and her six dogs. A little of Adam's Rib or The Philadelphia Story creeps in as you drift into wondering how Cary Grant or Katharine Hepburn would have mastered the roles of slightly cracked, snobbish professionals.

Eastwood at his least appealing in a poor sequel to the already disappointing redneck comedy of Every Which Way But Loose. The story is similarly thin - trucker Eastwood, accompanied by his orang-utan buddy Clyde, gets involved in repetitive brawls with sundry unsavoury brutes - while the humour is far too broad and the direction plodding.