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.

With Williams giving a virtuoso fast-mumbling performance as the hero, and gags ranging from expertly choreographed slapstick to subtle verbal infelicities (Popeye muttering about 'venerable disease'), it is far too sophisticated to function merely as kids' fodder. Often, watching the actors contorting themselves into non-human shapes, you wonder how on earth Altman did it; equally often, you feel you are watching a wacky masterpiece, the like of which you've never seen before.

The narrative is a little plodding, but adult punters will soon slip back into reverie for the lost visions of Saturday morning cinema, and their kids can get off on the extraordinary undercurrent of febrile sexuality. Acting honours go to von Sydow as Ming the Merciless and Mariangela Melato as his dark-eyed henchperson.

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.