Alan Ormsby's script, about a new kid in a Chicago high school who hires the biggest guy in school to fend off a lunch money protection racket, is (unusually) directed not for nostalgia value but from a perspective of adolescent insecurity, and helped along by fresh performances from a cast of inexperienced young actors.

Three years after Smokey and the Bandit took the hard-drinking, fast-driving, trickster ethos of the American redneck into the big box-office league, Reynolds has proved he just does what he does best: show off. A lightweight chase caper that Reynolds must truly be sick of by now, but which he has elevated into something impossible to dislike.

Ultimately, the film amounts to little more than a consummate study of suspense technique, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

For a comedy double-act who make their money out of people stoned beyond discrimination, Cheech and Chong are probably better than we deserve...The plot is, er, like an irrelevant hassle, and the observations on sub-culture work better than the slapstick paced for the brains of the wasted, but there are enough of these - especially a welfare office freak show - to serve as a reminder of how good the high times can be.

Corny, but not enough for Lynch, who also throws in the escape of a homicidal maniac wrongly imprisoned for the child's murder, and a confusion of red herring conflicts which mark the plot as a poor imitation of John Carpenter's patient terrorism of good by evil. But if you forget motivation, the visual trick-or-treat of slow revenge is entertaining enough: a weirdo janitor dribbling at the window; the victim's year book photos pinned with shards of shattered mirror. Jamie Lee Curtis is superb as Miss Naturally Popular and Prom Queen-to-be, isolated in empty high school corridors.

With their unerring eye for potential, the distributors didn't release this hilarious black comedy to cinemas in Britain. Zemeckis subsequently went on to make Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and loadsa money. Infinitely more caustic than these blockbusters, Used Cars runs on a contemporary screwball motor with a slapstick chassis

It should be disastrous. But psycho ground controllers (Stack and Bridges), laff-a-second pace, and bludgeoning innuendo make this the acceptable face of the locker-room satire.

The only thing blue about the movie is the sea, and the way you'll feel after wasting your time on this dose of 'tasteful', TV commercial-style, nudity.

That Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi adore this music is not in question – it’s lovingly chosen and brilliantly performed – but the film sometimes feels like a work of cultural tourism, particularly in scenes set in a gospel church and a Chicago street market. These lively musical sequences also sit awkwardly with director John Landis’s bizarre predilection for wholesale destruction: sure, smashing up cop cars can be fun, but Landis takes things to a tiresome extreme.

By its attribution of every evil to simple human greed, the melodrama remains hamfisted; while Rosenberg's direction signals 'realism' with crude denim-blue tints in every image. After two hours and ten minutes one is left only with a numbing awareness of Redford's charmless charm, the macho image unable (unlike Eastwood or Reynolds) to even contemplate self-irony.

Basically, it's the charming tale of a New Jersey shoe-salesman who fantasises about being a cowboy, and takes a group of assorted weirdos on the road with a travelling show. Not a lot to it in terms of plot, but Eastwood manages to both undermine and celebrate his character's fantasy life, while offering a few gentle swipes at contemporary America (the Stars and Stripes tent sewn together by mental hospital inmates). Fragile, fresh, and miles away from his hard-nosed cop thrillers, it's the sort of film only he would, and could, make.

The film badly lacks a central narrative hook. It is too obviously a starring vehicle, and - unlike Saturday Night Fever, which did present some insights into a subculture - its major events are crudely imposed on the setting. In fact, the film's virtues derive not from Travolta at all, but from Bridges' obvious enjoyment of the country milieu, and the fine performances he wins from Travolta's co-stars. Debra Winger, as his wife, lends her part far more spirit and sympathy than the writing deserves; but the trump card is Scott Glenn as the villain, looking uncannily like a new Eastwood.

The road movie/buddy movie situations and emotions gain an intriguing perverse edge from the setting, with its genuine freaks and sideshow illusionism, as well as from Alex North's wonderfully unsettling score and Harry Stradling's dark cinematography. Better on electric, eccentric ambience than for its final rush of plotting, but such risk-taking movies are a welcome rarity.

Concentrating on familiar rituals - the funeral, the hoe-down, the robbery (a stunning tour de force in slow motion) - Hill pays tribute to such directors as Ford, Hawks and Ray, emphasises the mythic aspects of the Western, and focuses on the subjects of kinship and the land (probably suggested by Scotsman Bill Bryden's screenplay). This last theme is emphasised by Hill's coup of casting real-life brothers as the members of the gang. A beautiful, laconic and unsentimental film.

It's a crack at the American Dream which carries all the exhilaration and depth of a 133-minute commercial break.

For all the modern gloss, what with poverty and nervous breakdowns it's still highly conventional stuff, but lovingly constructed to produce unremarkable but heart-warming entertainment.

Expanding enormously on the fantasy elements of his earlier films, Carpenter has turned in a full-scale thriller of the supernatural, as a sinister fog bank comes rolling in off the sea to take revenge on the smug little town of Antonio Bay.

Unfortunately, the film is so determinedly stylish (Gere's costumes, Giorgio Moroder's soundtrack, John Bailey's noir-inflected camerawork), and the performances generally so vacuous (only Elizondo's detective really breathes), that it all becomes something of an academic, if entertaining, exercise that fails to stir the emotions.

Gung-ho American World War II bomber pilot falls for an already married English rose during teatime rendezvous in war-torn Hanover Street. Anaemic and foolish.

It's basically kleenteen fun. If you're worried about the Ramones, rest assured; they make a very adequate chunka chunka chunka sound.

As befits both its tortuous hand-to-mouth genesis and the devastating conflict it reflects, this is a film of pure sensation, dazzling audiences with light and noise, laying bare the stark horror – and unimaginable thrill – of combat. And therein lies the true heart of darkness: if war is hell and heaven intertwined, where does morality fit in? And, in the final apocalyptic analysis, will any of it matter?

Class conflict and small town chauvinism are the subject of Yates' ingenious youth movie, a film which intrigues as much by its portait of working-class America bitterly opposed to the affluent society as by its large measure of lovingly-crafted fantasy.

Moonraker is mercifully much better than recent Bondage, with fantastic special effects, some excellent buffery (cracks at Star Wars, Close Encounters, Clint Eastwood, to name but a few), and the usual location-hopping style that makes Versailles feel like Disneyland.

It's not an action film: there's little in the way of exciting set pieces, and Eastwood's restrained performance is low-key almost to the point of minimalism. Rather, as he slowly tries to tunnel out with a pair of nail-clippers, it's an austere depiction of the tedious routines of prison life, and of the courage and strength of spirit needed in coping with unpleasant warders, tough fellow-inmates, and a life sentence.

An old-fashioned sequel which plumbs depths and hits heights, in which the lovable Rocky Balboa gets another crack at the world heavyweight championship.

Over the course of three wild sequels, Coscarelli expanded his bizarre universe in a variety of imaginative and deliriously entertaining ways – but the original set the standard. [Remastered]

Undoubtedly the zombie movie to end 'em all... The horror/suspense content is brilliant enough to satisfy the most demanding fan, and the film uses superb locations like a huge shopping mall to further its Bosch-like vision of a society consumed by its own appetites. But take no munchies.

Nicely performed by a strong cast, especially Field and Leibman, it's often mawkishly soft, but surprisingly touching.

Anyone expecting gritty realism will be disappointed, because Hill is offering something better: shooting entirely on NY locations at night, he has transformed the city into a phantasmagoric labyrinth of weird tribes in fantastic dress and make-up who move over (and under) the streets as untouched as troglodytes by the civilisation sleeping around them. Mixing ironic humour, good music, and beautifully photographed suspense, it's one of the best of 1979.

Crichton's adaptation of his own novel falls badly between genres, never quite making up its mind whether it's aiming for comedy or suspense, and not succeeding very conclusively at either. The characters stay largely undeveloped, while - despite superficially peculiar features - the robbery is stripped of the ingenious exposition of the novel to become just another heist.

Though it lacks the awesome allegorical ambiguousness of the 1956 classic of sci-fi/political paranoia (here paid homage in cameo appearances by Kevin McCarthy and Don Siegel), Kaufman and screenwriter WD Richter's update and San Francisco transposition of Jack Finney's novel is a far from redundant remake.

Under Hamilton's moribund direction, this becomes a Bond-in-uniform saga, with a can-they-spike-the-Kraut-guns-in-time plot. All the potentially exciting set pieces (traitor in our midst, whose side are the Gucci-clad partisans on?) are thrown away with a disregard for the basic mechanics of suspense, and the climax is literally cardboard thin.

The film is sunk by a series of preposterous performances. There are more phony German accents than in a prep school version of Colditz, and Levin's expert plotting is buried beneath an avalanche of lines like 'Vat are we goink to do?'.

Nicholson's second film as director, a wonderfully beguiling Western in which he plays a sad sack outlaw (ex-cook to Quantrill's Raiders) snatched from the gallows by Steenburgen's prim spinster (taking advantage of a special ordinance occasioned by man shortage after the Civil War), who weds him and puts him to work mining for gold. Tender, bawdy and funny in its shaggy dog ramifications.

Some of the performances (Hurt, Davis) give it an illusion of depth, but it's mostly expert in avoiding moral resonance and ambiguity: everything is satisfyingly clear-cut, just as every shot and every cut are geared to instant emotional impact. Political, moral and aesthetic problems arise when you try to superimpose the film on the 'truth' it purports to represent. As a head-banging thriller, though, it makes some of Hollywood's hoariest stereotypes seem good as new, and it panders to its audience's worst instincts magnificently.

As the most fun comes not from watching the movie but from recalling great lines later, it would seem that the audio success of C & C has not translated too well into visuals.

The film has moments of humour, but they are integrated into a totally serious structure which isolates the family's countervailing tensions with a scalpel-like penetration. Only in a single character, the failed husband of one of the daughters, does the tone falter towards soap. Otherwise the approach is rock steady and, if the film's surface invites superficial comparisons with Bergman, its real roots lie in the very finest American art.

Suspension of disbelief might have been possible had this been a ripping good yarn; but the kids are just plain silly, and it's a toss-up to decide which is more unconvincing, the shark or Scheider.

Fundamentally a quite serious movie, relevant to contemporary personality problems and stresses, but shot through with a wicked streak of black humour. It doesn't always come off, but Romero makes stunning use of his Pittsburgh locations to create a desolate suburban wasteland, and at its best it is rivetingly raw-edged.

Crichton's excellent adaptation of Robin Cook's novel is one of the most intelligent sci-fi thrillers in years. A simple enough story, but one told in such chilling fashion that visitors to hospitals will never feel the same again.

Henry 'The Fonz' Winkler's first starring feature purports to deal with the 'forgotten' subject of Vietnam veterans. But well-meaning references to a lost generation are quickly dropped in favour of routine odyssey as Winkler travels from NY to Eureka, California (yes, afraid so), teams up with Sally Field (casualty of a non-military engagement), and comes on like the only sane man in a crazy world (of course he's certified and on the run). One brief interlude of interest features Harrison Ford as a speedy but kinda slow vet who'd make Clint Walker look smart.

Zinnemann blows it most of all in the Fonda-Redgrave relationship, and no credibility is given to Hellman's ferocious talent and dominant personality.

The film has its moments - Kiel's indestructible heavy racks up a good score - but the rest is desperately weak.

Friedkin hints at political themes, but the film suffers most from condescendingly over-emphatic direction, and a generally tedious, relentless grimy realism in the opening half hour

There is one lovely character, though - Orville the albatross, who runs an airline service armed with goggles, scarf, and a sardine tin for his passengers to sit in.

The direction, by a former stuntman, concentrates on the action and happily leaves everyone to their own devices, with almost nothing to do. Field shows what natural acting is all about, and Reynolds' send-ups of himself are, despite repetition, becoming more likeable. Here his kidding around is exactly in tune with this fast-moving but essentially lazy vehicle.

He invites viewers to laugh with him at him: rather a subject than an object of ridicule, he lances his neuroses preemptively, controlling the exposure. It’s a limited strategy, but still glamorising in its way – if you can’t be Bogart-smooth in all things, such a fund of wisecracks is a start.

It's really just an old-fashioned piece of wish fulfilment, rather duplicitously dressed up in foul language and sexual references in a cynical attempt to look modern. That said, there are still some nice touches of absurdist satirical wit hanging out along the sidelines, given extra bite by Dede Allen's superbly pacy editing.

This being a Disney comedy, nothing too drastic happens; and attendant adults can rest assured that, because Dad is so dithering and ineffectual, awkward questions about potentially incestuous relations, sadly, do not arise. Good performances struggle gamely to overcome the increasingly predictable plot.

De Palma’s grasp on King’s material is never in doubt: this is a truly throat-grabbing horror movie, sporting a handful of pitch-perfect set-pieces, not to mention one of the few examples of effective split-screen.

Carpenter scrupulously avoids any overt socio-political pretensions, playing it instead for laughs and suspense in perfectly balanced proportions. The result is a thriller inspired by a buff's admiration for Ford and Hawks (particularly Rio Bravo), with action sequences comparable to anything in Siegel or Fuller. It's sheer delight from beginning to end.

After a period of directorial uncertainty, the film demonstrated Eastwood's ability to recreate his first starring role, as the mythic Man with No Name of the Italian Westerns, and to subtly undercut it through comedy and mockery.

This apocalyptic movie mostly avoids physical gore to boost its relatively unoriginal storyline with suspense, some excellent acting (especially from Warner and Whitelaw), and a very deft, incident-packed script.

Bowie’s performance is riveting, drawing on his history of mime to play a man who is almost, but not quite, one of us.

Amiably engrossing satire on the 'win ethic' that offers a take-it-or-leave-it approach to its serious points about enforcing precociousness on kids, but consistently delights with its panoramic comic invention.

This is a story of identity, and the lack of it. And it’s fascinating.

The material inspires affection, given its knowing pastiche of everything from Universal horrors to '50s grade-Z sci-fi, and a shamelessly hedonistic, fiercely independent sensibility that must have seemed a welcome relief from the mainstream bombast of other '70s musicals.

Another episode in Allen's Jewish-neurotic romance with Diane Keaton, this time with Napoleon's invasion of Russia interfering. This allows a string of terrific visual gags using battles, Death the Grim Reaper, swords, grand opera, village idiots, snow, Napoleon and Olga Georges-Picot. As less than half-a-dozen lines are bum, Love and Death is an almost total treat.

Best of all is Steven Spielberg’s direction: the camera moves like a predatory animal, gliding eerily across the surface of the vast Atlantic, creating sequences of almost unbearable suspense.

It's stunningly beautiful, mesmerising, exhausting, uplifting, amazing - all the things you could possibly expect from a masterpiece.

Shot in a straightforward adventure style, with Eastwood as the art lecturer cum cold-blooded assassin hired to kill his victim while climbing the North face of the Eiger, the movie is little but a series of nice panoramas and clichéd action sequences.

It may lack the authority-baiting, satire-with-a-purpose edge of Life of Brian, but Holy Grail is the looser, sillier, ultimately funnier film, packed with actual goofy laughs rather than hey-I-get-that cleverness.

Roger Moore's interpretation of Bond is blandness personified. It is left to Christopher Lee, playing a kind of Westernised, Dracula-esque Fu Manchu, to lend some semblance of style and suavity as Scaramanga, the man with a hideout in Red China and a hankering after the status of gentleman.

By and large, a rather pitiful parody of the Universal Frankenstein movies, taking typically Brooksian liberties with characters and plot, resorting to juvenile mugging, and relying to a great extent on fairly authentic sets and photography for its better moments.

This is quite simply one of the saddest movies ever made, a tale of loss, grief and absolute loneliness, an unflinching stare into the darkest moral abyss.

Four bombed-out astronauts journey endlessly through the galaxy, whiling away the time with jokes, sunlamp treatment, personal diaries on videotape, and games with their own pet alien. Sheer delight.

'Oh Lord', says the preacher in a suitably grave voice, 'do we have the strength to carry out this task in one night, or are we just jerking off?' Maybe Mel Brooks should have asked himself that question about this movie.

Plenty of one-liners, and it has the best banana-skin joke in film history.

Too full of incident to reflect a typical night in reality, it's nevertheless funny, perceptive, pepped up by a great soundtrack, and also something of a text-book lesson in parallel editing as it follows a multitude of adolescents through their various adventures with sex, booze, music and cars.

Low on documentary conviction and political context, but an intriguing exercise in concealing the obvious.

Two hours long and anti-climactic, but Bond fans won't be disappointed.

Scarecrow’ feels like an existential fairytale squarely rooted in the reality of America’s fraying backroads and small towns. It’s all a little rambling and anarchic, but later scenes in a jail have real bite. And when the sadness behind Lion’s smile is revealed, it’s also genuinely moving.

Seven sketches parodying a sex manual, in which Allen strung together "every funny idea I've ever had about sex, including several that led to my own divorce."

Photographed by the admirable Bruce Surtees, but a curiously strangled Western which can't make up its mind whether it wants to wring straight action out of the range war between poor Mexicans and a tycoon rancher (Duvall), or to explore the moral standing of the disreputable character (Eastwood) who takes law and order into his hands.

Dismally lurid stuff, ham-fistedly directed and low on credibility.

Apart from a clumsy climax, a wry and exhilarating bit of entertainment.

Eastwood's first film as director, and first exploratory probe for the flaws in his macho image as outlined in Siegel's The Beguiled. A highly enjoyable thriller made under the influence of Siegel (who contributes a memorable cameo as a bartender).

It's a long way down from even the second in the series.

Allen's second feature, a tribute to the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, is a wonderfully incoherent series of one-liners centered around a puny New York Jew's unwitting and unwilling involvement in a South American revolution.

After a spendidly traditional opening sequence, the message about the dangers of scientific research begins to loom ponderously large, with banks of super-computers dedicated to science fact but the dialogue (Good God, it's growing!) still mired in fiction.

Tale of the eagerly criminal career of Virgil Starkwell is as unpredictably structured as Annie Hall, if not yet anything like as sustained in tone and mood. But it has plenty of hilarious jokes and concepts, like the ventriloquists' dummies at prison visiting time, and the return home from a chain gang break with five shackled cons in tow.

This sequel to Planet of the Apes isn't bad, but degenerates the original conception into routine comic strip adventure.

Muddled campus revolt comedy, distinguished by Elliott Gould's marvellously grizzly performance as an ageing dropout who decides to drop back in again, and resolutely keeps his nose glued to his books in self-defence. Robert Kaufman's script casts a nicely caustic eye not only on the juvenility of the student demands, but also on the hopeless desiccation of academia.

The Bond films were bad enough even with the partially ironic performances of Connery. Here, featuring the stunning nonentity Lazenby, there are no redeeming features.

The understated performances and reluctance to emphasise plot result in convincing characterisations, to such an extent that the often narcissistic Redford actually allows himself to come across as a dislikeably selfish, arrogant and icy man. And the location skiing sequences, revealing Ritchie's background and interest in documentary styles, are simply astounding, even for those with little interest in the sport.

Outrageously overrated... the film indulges in bland satire, fashionable flashiness, and a sodden sentimentality that never admits either to its homosexual elements or to the basic misogyny of its stance. Add to that a glamorisation of poverty and an ending that makes Love Story seem restrained, and you have a fairly characteristic example of Schlesinger's shallow talent.

The plot, concerning the battle of wits between an honest cop and an ambitious politician for possession of the key witness in a Mafia exposé, is serviceable but nothing special. But the action sequences are brilliant, done without trickery in real locations (including a great car chase which spawned a thousand imitations) to lend an extraordinary sense of immediacy to the shenanigans and gunfights.

Whenever it seems there might be a glimmer of hope, Romero cruelly reverses our expectations. The nihilistic ending, in particular, has to be seen to be believed. Chuckle, if you can, during the first few minutes; because after that laughter catches in the throat as the clammy hand of terror tightens its grip.

The film's central irony is not the usual one of public success at the expense of private pain, but the complex one of success at the expense of personal knowledge. Streisand never looks into the mirrors that Wyler surrounds her with. Well worth watching.

A supremely intelligent and convincing adaptation of Ira Levin's Satanist thriller.

A caustically witty look at the American South and its still-surviving chain gangs, with Newman in fine sardonic form as the boss-baiter who refuses to submit and becomes a hero to his fellow-prisoners. Underlying the hard-bitten surface is a slightly uncomfortable allegory which identifies Newman as a Christ figure. But this scarcely detracts from the brilliantly idiosyncratic script (by Donn Pearce from his own novel) or from Conrad Hall's glittering camerawork (which survives Rosenberg's penchant for the zoom lens and shots reflected in sun-glasses).

An effective shocker which has the blind Hepburn alone in the house when psychotic villain Arkin and his hoodlum pals (Crenna and Weston) arrive to retrieve a doll containing heroin which her husband (Zimbalist) unwittingly brought through customs for them. Though based on a stage play (by Frederick Knott), the skillful use of interiors for once transcends the visual limitations.

Roald Dahl's implausible script is padded out with the usual exotic locations, stunts, and trickery.

One of Ritt's best films, with fine performances all round, impressive Death Valley locations, and superlative camerawork from James Wong Howe.

Based on Kurosawa's Yojimbo, it sets a fashion in surly, laconic, supercool heroes with Eastwood's amoral gunslinger, who plays off two gangs against one another in a deadly feud.

Sweet revenge for anyone who has sat through a foreign film suffering from a torrent of bad dubbing. For his first auteur-credit (!), Woody Allen got hold of a 1964 Japanese exploitation thriller and exploited it for his own ends, dubbing it delightfully with gags and Hollywood clichés. Enough one-liners to leave you with happy memories. A jolly oddity.

Sleek and quite fun all the same, with SPECTRE holding the world to ransom after stealing a couple of nuclear bombs, Bond almost getting his in the villain's shark-infested swimming pool, and a cleverly choreographed underwater battle to provide the icing on the mix.

Any kid growing up in the early ’60s will remember this one for several reasons: Birley Shassey’s screamer of a theme; Bond’s shocking use of a beautiful girl as a human shield; bullion-obsessed baddie Auric Goldfinger’s top hat-wielding henchman, Oddjob; Honor Blackman’s risquely monikered Pussy Galore; and, above all, Bond’s stupendous, gadget-infested silver Aston Martin DB5, the car that spurred a thousand Corgi purchases.