If it weren't for the gimmicks (and the sadism is so gratuitous it could be nothing else), then the film could easily pass for a minor caper thriller of the '60s, all convoluted plot and calculated kookiness. But cyphers (both female leads) and question-marks (who'll get the money, who'll survive - who cares?) dominate the script as every labyrinthine twist becomes more plodding.

Predicting that we might soon weary of downhill action, this virtually plotless ski picture is decorated with hot tub frolics and a wet T-shirt contest.

It's all a brave try, though Gibson is perhaps not up to the demands of a Christian's progress from naive rating to self-loathing exile, and Donaldson's direction often verges on the stolid.

Schrader and De Palma's tribute to Hitchcock's Vertigo may lack the misogyny and bloodbath sensationalism of De Palma's later work, but it's still dressed up in a mortifyingly vacuous imitation of the Master's stylistic touches.

There's almost enough in-joke ingenuity to justify the total absence of plot.

Despite sturdy acting from a starry cast, actor Barry Primus' directorial debut is a lacklustre affair.

A bizarre mix of actors goes some way towards bolstering this flyweight caper; but the last third degenerates into farce, with nuns and thugs playing cat-and-mouse in a Reno casino. A one-note movie.

More confusing than illuminating, it's a film which will rely more on its reputation than its achievement.

Hutton succumbs firstly to a thin role, and secondly to the film's lack of any strong viewpoint about its leading men. As usual Schlesinger is more than half in love with what he might be satirising.

This spin-off from the TV series featuring the large purple felt dinosaur of awesome good nature is emetically wholesome. The screenplay doesn't stray much from the series' 'listen, sing, and rush off to the next thing' formula.

Based on a true case history of a schizophrenic - here a woman with three personalities: a slatternly housewife, a seductive flirt, and a smart, articulate woman - this is worthy but somewhat turgid and facile, a typically Hollywoodian account of mental illness.

There are striking images here (especially in the scenes outside Salt Lake City), Martin gives a very likeable performance, and individual scenes display intelligence and wit. But it doesn't hang together very well, jump-cutting between slightly portentous artiness and light comedy, and never really adding up to very much at all.

William Goldman's leisurely script and Forbes' dull direction never quite capture the subtleties of Ira Levin's novel about an idyllic Connecticut commuter village where the housewives are a bunch of domesticated dummies.

This stab at the soft underbelly of American middle class paranoia looks increasingly contrived once the film loses direction in the daylight outside, and a realism intrudes that the film-makers just don't know how to handle.

Grier is an actress able to convey an amazing and unflinching strength, and she reveals the film for the dross it is.

Adamantly sincere but utterly redundant populism from Bob "Porky's" Clark, a boy scout's stab at Bonfire of the Vanities starring Timothy Hutton's noble adam's apple (gulp!), which he thrusts this way and that for all the world like an ostrich with a social conscience.

Background details of hospital life are handled much more astutely than the main plot. It's a big mystery how Zieff (of Slither and Hearts of the West) allowed it to go off at half-cock.

The whole thing feel(s) more like a naughty snapshot than any artistic achievement.

Interesting only in so far as it reveals Eastwood's nonchalant attitude to the blockbuster. Unlike Sutherland, who tries desperately to act his way out of Troy Kennedy Martin's laboured script, Eastwood just strolls through the film, along the way creating its few cinematic moments.

The story, about a rock star with a prison background, was tougher than some of the other Presley pictures, but the musical numbers especially were shot in the MGM tradition, which was totally wrong for rock.

It's an odd plot-potty, frenetic movie, shot at some snow-blown Canadian location with irrelevant panache. Cage looks cold most of the time, and has retractable stubble. The rest of the cast look like they're waiting for summer.

It starts off with some marvellously cruel moments, and Scott's performance towers over the proceedings throughout. But Hiller's direction is pretty shoddy, while the script eventually loses its way and begins to look increasingly hysterical, at the same time shamelessly trivialising Scott's crisis.

Occasionally Hill comes up with some nice touches of the unexpected: a few moments of black humour, the suggestion of a deliberate pastiche here and there, but on the whole he's too resolutely fashionable a director to really get behind Vonnegut's idea of time-tripping. It ends up the wrong side of unadventurous.

Very hard to take with the film sitting up and practically slobbering in its eagerness to prove how loveable it is. A pity, because the score isn't half bad (the show-stopping 'If I Were a Rich Man' almost gets lost), the choreography has possibilities, and Topol is distinctly personable.

After the first half sets up intriguing racial/political/biological conundrums, the second simply lets them go hang. Energetically directed with a fair smattering of funny lines.

The suspense of the manhunt in the swamps never really overcomes the dead weight of Kramer's 'message', but pleasures are to be found in the supporting roles of McGraw and Chaney.

Half-hearted, half-baked, and at least half-watchable.

It's a bookish joke which comes unstuck: after nearly two hours the tension has evaporated, and all that's left is a curdle of jokes and brutality.

Flat, generally laughable hokum, and the film ends up nowhere near as interesting a comment on the psychological aspects of disaster as Juggernaut.

Norris, the Great White Hope of the Hollywood martial arts movie, beefcakes his way through an Oriental Connection drug ring with a bullet-proof spiritual aura and a dated fantasy line in abode, wardrobe and transportation.

The action meanders around to a hackneyed end, and because Hardcore is softcore, it doesn't convincingly convey that climate of self-hatred which pervades the sexual ghetto.

The trouble with this biopic is that it attempts to convey too many aspects of the Jerry Lee Lewis legend.

Regrettably, it's a mediocre slasher with a terrific gimmick.

In the end only Channing, reprising her award-winning stage role, manages to inject some authentic feeling into this somewhat mechanical enterprise.

An overlong, sentimental and lifeless biopic of Woody Guthrie.

Skilfully crafted and doggedly performed, the film pushes too hard and too far; it strives for the inspirational but falls well short of inspired.

The body count is rising, Sly's pecs are blowing up, and Rambo himself is becoming more of a brand-name than a character, a mascot for masochism and murderous self-assertion.

The abiding memories of Don't Look Back are lack of privacy, dull cliques, stumble-drunkenness, very insecure British artists (Price, Donovan), and Dylan's bored, amused sparring with anyone trying to point him in the direction of Damascus.

Never hysterically funny but scattered with pleasingly OTT moments and throwaway lines, it looks as if Cassavetes merely wanted a) to prove he could make a blandly stylish commercial piece, and b) the cash.

It's a great idea for a movie, but Allen fatally opts for a Fellini: Amarcord approach of formless narrative, larger-than-life coincidence, and rambling ruminations on what times there used to be.

Miller dolls up a routine passage-to-manhood saga with widescreen mountain locations and a camera that only moves to show off the expensive production values. The presence of Kirk Douglas in two roles (his scallywag performance and his gritted one) attempts to give the film the gloss of an American Western, fooling no one.

Fred'n'Ginge fans won't need a nudge, but the uninitiated should start with almost any of their other movies.

The real problems, however, are that Friedkin's nervy, noisy, undisciplined pseudo-realism sits uneasily with his suspense-motivated shock editing; and that compared to (say) Siegel's Dirty Harry, the film maintains no critical distance from (indeed, rather relishes) its 'loveable' hero's brutal vigilante psychology.

The Bricusse songs (including If I Could Talk to the Animals) have their charms, and the pre-CGI spectacle of some 1,500 live animals often works its magic on very young viewers, but you're mainly left with sympathy for Fleischer and his crew, since the whole thing was evidently a nightmare to shoot.

Self-touted as an authentic picture of Sioux manners and customs, the film to some extent delivers the goods (despite sacrificing a great deal of credibility by absurdly casting Judith Anderson as a malevolent old crone). But the Sun Vow sequence, lingered on in enervatingly gloating detail, ultimately defines it as exploitative.

Verges on the nasty for the nippers; sails close to déjà vu for fantasy fans; fated, probably, to damnation by faint praise.

Underdogs are the grist of sports movies; even so, it's unusual to find a hero so ill-equipped for the task at hand. Directed with composure, but no great fervour, the film's conspicuously uninterested in American football, and much concerned with testing the limits and the resilience of the American dream.

While he's lying through his teeth or improvising a sales pitch that might save his skin, Williams is funny and convincing; but once he starts getting dewy-eyed and sincere, flesh-crawling embarrassment takes over.

Enacted against the stunning backdrop of the Amazon jungle, the action has a rousing, epic quality. What it doesn't have, however, is passion. The climax is brutal, De Niro and Irons are impressive as the opponents who become soul mates; yet The Mission manages to be both magnificent and curiously uninvolving, a buddy movie played in soutanes.

Brooks' direction seems a little too stolid for all the sleazy, flaming passions.

Suspecting that all this plus the cheerleaders might fail to excite, the film-makers also pack in twenty songs.

An idea worthy of Harlan Ellison, but disappointingly fumbled. Taylor handles most of the aircraft carrier material like a recruiting film, and though the script manages a few deft twists and turns, and even a neat final frisson, it ultimately works more on the tease level of a TV episode than as a movie.

With the screenplay dabbling with too many issues and stereotypes, the characters are largely one-dimensional and the relationships unconvincing.

It's as if Pakula had got on a fairground horse that has gone out of control, and is undecided whether to go with it or try to stop it.

Having all the strengths and excesses of a middlebrow film (visual beauty, lush soundtrack, arty direction), this adaptation's appeal to the senses leaves them cloyed.

The screenwriters work many nice little observations into their occasionally over-quippish script, but this is considerably smaller than the sum of its parts: it gets the detail, but misses the big picture.

It's hard to care much about Jamie Conway, an aspiring novelist who is dissipating his substance in New York on cocaine and parties: Fox hasn't the range to play anguish, so the explanatory voice-over is less a survival from the best-selling novel than a necessity.

It's not unenjoyable, but it isn't half the pastiche that Psycho II was.

Some of it comes off well, and Newman is superb. But the film shows tiresome signs of its origins as a stage play (by Arthur Kopit), and the good moments aren't quite enough to make up for its overall predictability.

Despite typically hip disclaimers, WW2 is in many respects a standard sequel, careful to rerun not only the (very sketchy) form of the original, but often the content as well. Odd, then, that this should be much funnier than the first film.

Despite the neat comic inversion of its central premise (this time it's the spacemen who are taken in by Welles' classic hoax), the film soon comes a cropper as the chaotic script descends into a mêlée of limp and disjointed knockabout gags.

The generally strong performances do justice to scriptwriter Barry Michael Cooper's evident desire to avoid the New Jack stereotyping of many contemporary black crime movies; the fluid camera and lush jazz score ensure that it looks and sounds classy; and much of the time the director's understatement and attention to detail are a distinct advantage. However, matters are not helped by an actorly tone, some plot-stopping big speeches, and an often sluggish pace.

Scantily clad Ms Munro, vengeful telepathic pterodactyls and cut-price explosions comprise a familiar mix, but it's daft enough to enjoy if you're in a schoolboy mood.

Certain scenes achieve a genuine tension, as when Hackman has to watch a captured chopper pilot sent into a waterlogged minefield by NVA soldiers; but this is immediately undercut by a retaliatory bombing raid that destroys a camouflaged NVA hideout, regardless of civilian casualties. Like the film as a whole, such scenes elicit sympathy more for the tacitly guilty Hackman than for the innocent victims.

Some moments of Gothic atmosphere though, don't quite dispel the feeling that much of the plot is devoted to developing situations where its leading ladies might be disrobed for the camera.

All kinds of fraught encounters ensue before the pals are reunited - and I drifted off myself. A live-action feature, it scores high on the cute-ometer, what with narrator Dudley Moore working himself into a frolicsome frenzy, a singalong signature tune, and more animals than you'll find at Whipsnade.

Scott, a name in TV commercials making his first feature, brings little overall thrust, working instead in short bursts.

A Tex-Mex stew that looks to have all the right spicy ingredients, but emerges under gringo chef Richardson as not exactly indigestible, merely flavourless.

Harmless piece of Neil Simon fluff, rather flattened by Hiller's steamroller direction.

After suffering endless abuse, Daniel wins with just a few well placed whacks: those expecting standard wish-fulfilment fantasy will be disappointed that (in tune with the philosophy, of course) he didn't give the punk a pasting.

The real problem here is technical; Eastwood the director is far less sure-footed than he was with the likes of Play Misty for Me or The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Paranoia can of course be an excellent dynamic for movie-makers, and within its own dream-like structure, Red Dawn is both compelling and witty (the town's drive-in becomes a 're-education camp'). But it also contains moments that are repulsive in the grand right wing tradition, all the more so since Milius, who once held the fascination of a rebel, is here voicing sentiments that the Reagan administration actually believes.

Ford's flamboyantly Oirish romantic comedy hides a few tough ironies deep in its mistily nostalgic recreation of an exile's dream.

At best, the formula works like vintage Bond (explicitly so in the title sequence). But too much time is wasted with stale Star Wars plagiarisms, including the screen's dullest robot.

Despite a gritty screenplay by Pete Dexter from Kim Wozencraft's factual book, Zanuck's debut feature fails to keep its dramatic sightlines clear.

This routine sequel has a trio of nice cameos, but no surprises.

Framed as a deathbed reminiscence, the film does tend to ramble, and seems particularly uneven in its mixture of back-projected wildlife footage, studio and location work, while Peck's weighty Harry Street remains resolutely aloof, to the point where he will not deign to expire.

As Wisdom (the name represents the single feeble attempt at irony), Estevez demonstrates an undeniable charisma, but in the roles of writer and director he is less successful. What initiative there is in this retread gets swamped by silliness, slackness and sentiment.

A flimsily plotted but visually impressive addition to the endless Freddy Krueger saga, with an unsavoury gynaecological flavour.

Quite simply vulgar in comparison to its predecessors (especially Hawks' brilliant His Girl Friday), it relies too much on foul language, inappropriate slapstick, and superficial cynicism.

There are a few laughs, and the first third is compellingly tense, largely due to the anticipation of the ‘thing’ dropping. Aside from Daniel Pemberton’s excellent, pins and needles score, the movie lacks rhythm. Yes, it got me thinking – but mainly about its shortcomings.

Little expense has been spared in putting this adventure fantasy on screen, with vintage planes and automobiles by the yard, striking Art Deco production design and breathtaking Thai coastal locations. A pity that the performers are so uncharismatic, with leading man Billy Zane plastic and soulless in Lycra, and not much more winning when he switches to playboy mode to woo free-spirited politico's daughter Kristy Swanson (pertly anonymous).

What De Palma delivers is merely a mediocre yuppy nightmare movie, stylistically flashy but with little pace, bite or pathos.

With Schaffner unable to find the necessary perspective to prevent the film from becoming unevenly episodic, it ends up looking as if it were tacked together by at least three different directors.

Everything except the dubbing of the French supporting cast is a model of craftsmanship, but as the plot escalates into increasingly arbitrary excesses of fantasy and heads for the predictable pay-off, the movie looks more and more like a potboiler.

This sequel, sans Spielberg but obedient to his spirit, simply fails to regenerate the original's gut-grinding fears that make you dread ever scratching a spot again. And the contribution of Giger's design work has only added one near-unwatchable sequence.

An ambitious but sadly misguided attempt to make a contemporary silent comedy which opts for simplistic plotting, sentimentality and mime as it tells of a homeless, black New York street artist's attempts to trace the mother of a baby girl whose father's murder he has witnessed.

Not as awful as you might expect, since the nun's training is shown in fascinating detail and the later doubts are quite subtly expressed. Solid performances, too, but it's still a long haul (made no lighter by Franz Waxman's abominably insistent score) for anyone not committed to theological problems of faith, conscience and obedience.

Visually superb, though: a doomed attempt to make Fordian metaphors speak a language of corrupting, intimate anxiety.

Plus marks for the presence of the old-timers, but overall it's a walk on the mild side.

The portmanteau horror movie makes a hesitant comeback with this jokey teen splatter pic.

The film is burdened by curious details and observations, and its preoccupation with all things aquatic (little sister is an ace swimmer, Mom dresses up as a mermaid for New Year's Eve, etc) is overworked. Characterisation suffers, with Charlotte and her mother too self-absorbed to engage our sympathies. Crucially, they just aren't funny.

Another theatrical metaphor fails to transfer to the screen. This adaptation of Michael Frayn's stage hit undoubtedly has its moments, but will still disappoint those who laughed themselves silly at the original.

While confined to the futuristic prison interiors, the film works reasonably well; but once Lambert springs his wife from the women's section and escapes, the limitations of budget and narrative imagination start to show. As it moves away from the ensemble feel of the early scenes, this quickly degenerates into a part explosive, part sentimental star vehicle.

Despite abundant action and a start involving a fistful of murders, the overall effect is sluggish.

Substantially recut by Boorman after his original version was derided in America, but it's still easy to see why New Yorkers jeered. Boorman completely avoids gore and obscenity, treating the original as a kind of sacred good-versus-evil text, and weaving its sets and characters into a highly traditional confrontation of occult forces.

Mike Todd's inflation of Jules Verne, with Niven as Phileas Fogg and the Mexican comedian Cantinflas as Passepartout, becomes an interminable travelogue interspersed with sketches in which star-spotting affords some relief (there are cameos from hordes of luminaries ranging from Dietrich and Beatrice Lillie to Keaton and Sinatra).

Kaufman's account of the triangular affair between Henry Miller (Ward), his wife June (Thurman) and Anais Nin (Medeiros) in '30s Paris is certainly good to look at, edited like a dream, and about an hour too long. Intelligently scripted, particularly good on the pain in relationships, it doesn't shed much light on the literary commerce between the writers.