As usual, Hyams makes good use of the locations, and stages the stunt sequences with great skill, but his handling of the romance and father/daughter conflicts is at best uncertain, at worst embarrassing.

Built on fantasy stereotypes – friendly little folk, evil witches, misunderstood heroes, guys on horseback with bloody great swords – it nonetheless contains enough epic action, narrative momentum and spit-and-sawdust pre-CGI special effects to hold the attention.

Forest Whitaker's cameo adds plumage to what is otherwise a well-plucked turkey, humourless and plagued by a script full of stilted mumbo-jumbo.

With an assured visual style, Harlin stokes up the temperature to near-riot conditions before exploding the screen with electrifying special effects mayhem - floors glow red hot, barbed wire is vivified, the very pipes take on murderous life. A tough, entertaining, intelligent hybrid of hard-ass prison drama and horror-shocker exploiter.

Polanski's thriller boasts several superb set pieces, even if it doesn't quite snap shut on the mind the way Chinatown did. Funny and unsettling.

Unfortunately, the political parallel between the ideological repression of Baby Doc's regime and the stultifying effects of the zombifying fluid is only sketchily developed, leaving us with a series of striking but isolated set pieces.

This hilarious and touching romantic comedy recalls the integrated plotting and sophisticated dialogue of '30s Hollywood. Russell is excellent as overgrown kid Dean; Hawn gives her best performance to date as the hapless heiress turned gutsy wife and mother (the kids aren't just cutely naughty, they're truly obnoxious); and Marshall's faultless timing makes the most of Leslie Dixon's neatly contrived situations and snappy dialogue.

A couple of overgrown brats seems an appropriate focus for John The Breakfast Club Hughes first adult movie, but if his direction is slick, his script lacks wit and perception. Essentially, it's the stars' keenly observed nuances of character that make this comedy amiable enough.

The film doesn't look good; it's as if the flat lighting and boring set of the TV show had infected everything else. And Big Arnie's quilted outfit makes him look like a duvet.

The initial stages of this epic movie are somewhat stodgy, but once Attenborough achieves his momentum there's no holding him. The performances are excellent, the crowd scenes astonishing, and the climax truly nerve-wracking. An implacable work of authority and compassion, Cry Freedom is political cinema at its best.

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.