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.