Dragoti's dire, dishonest, seldom humorous social comedy has all the nauseating hallmarks of a big-budget sitcom. Can't wait for the John Waters remake.

Despite the barrage of one-liners and almost farcial plot twists, Zieff's light touch and some unselfish ensemble acting make this team genuinely endearing.

Amid a plethora of 'garbage genre' movies which fail to fulfil the promise of their titles, this is something of a relief, aided by a genuinely funny script, a tip-top performance from Maher, and film trivia aplenty for those who want it.

Surely the nadir of the rehash genre, a string of unconnected party pieces by a cast whose world weariness would imply that they know exactly how cynical this whole venture has become.

As if the plot weren't perfunctory enough (bags of Yankee dollars, corruption in high places, CIA asassins), we take extended breaks from it to contemplate Quinn's gradual recovery of his roots, culminating in the grateful islanders serenading him with a reggae version of the title song.

This is extremely silly, good natured, superficial stuff; a lot depends on whether you take to Bill and Ted's unique lingo (which contorts surfers' expressions) and their gormless behaviour.

Martin zips from boyhood to manhood in a ridiculously short period, and in no time at all is getting it together with Beth Logan (Zuniga), who doesn't know about his dad being a creepy-crawly. But when Martin's skin starts falling off, she begins to suspect that it's more than just a case for Clearasil, and resolves to help her loved one sort out his confused chromosomes - too late to avoid the onslaught of latex and squishy special effects for which we've all been waiting, and which is indeed the movie's only interesting commodity. Other than that, it's standard directionless fare.

Things plod to their inevitable conclusion, helped along by the script's assortment of stereotypical underdogs and manipulators, and with Candy hamming up the oppourtunity to get into lots of tight spots while wearing funny disguises. At their silliest, such moments actually provide light relief from an otherwise unremarkable comedy caper.

Making excellent use of Nolte's controlled toughness and Short's hysterical freneticism, Weber plays the comic action hard and fast, grounding the humour in believable reality that has spiralled out of control.

If the film finally fails to shock or surprise, it's nevertheless both imaginatively shot and wittily scripted, and strikes a nice balance between gentle parody and a queasy unease associated with bona fide genre suspense. Superior performances by Quaid, Hurt and Madorsky.

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

Cunningham apes Ridley Scott and James Cameron competently enough, and there are scary moments, but he has not got the 'vision thing'. This simply rehashes the phony trappings of countless TV shows, to baldly go where we have been before.

John Patrick Shanley's screenplay, touching on themes of betrayal and corruption, honesty and trust, promises and teases but suffers from coitus interruptus.

A disappointing sequel to Clive Barker's innovatory body horror pic, which - while making some effort to flesh out the Cenobite mythology - simply performs cosmetic surgery on the original.

His tendency towards self-destruction gets into full swing, and he brings his ex-wife (Greene) to Dallas for what amounts to a distressing, seemingly pointless stroll down memory lane.

But even though tear-jerking has never been so blatant, your tears of laughter are replaced, dammit, by tears of grief.

The film offers several entertaining sequences, but Splash it ain't, for while that film took a similar scenario and beautifully conveyed romantic notions of innocence, this is marred by cruel and juvenile gags.

Not a patch on Cocoon; what merit this sequel has comes entirely from the superb cast of veterans, with very little help from a script which seems to have been ghosted by Justice Shallow. The story is so badly recapitulated that anyone not familiar with the situation will wonder why some of the cast seem fitter than others.

Cornball adventure ensues, punctuated by healthy helpings of singing, dancing and general merriment.

The script seems a collection of loose ends and rewrites; the direction is deeply dispirited; and with the exception of O'Toole and a couple of engaging vignettes, it's a complete turkey.

Schepisi's matter-of-fact direction and the rather undernourished screenplay don't mine much beyond the lousiness of the press and the unknowableness of the victims, but Streep (the best thing she has done in ages) carries it along.

While some of the supernatural stuff about witch-doctors and Mojo dolls is a bit daft, Holland's sure handling of the suspense and shock moments lends the film a sharp and scary edge.

The black-and-white visuals disturb for only so long, and while themes of indoctrination and conspiracy prove initially intriguing, the film quickly descends into fistfights and gunfire. Still, there's little about the comic strip action to suggest that we should be taking this too seriously.

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.

Tiresome.

Henriksen is superbly anguished throughout, his pectorals and cheekbones competing for the most exciting on-screen spectacle award.

One problem here is that the jokes aren't funny; another is that Sally Field is funny by mistake.

Mulligan's adaptation of Joseph Olshan's novel doesn't merely flirt with pathos, it positively marries it.

An uneasy blend of neurotic comedy and mawkish sentimentality.

Shot entirely on location with its child actors recruited from the streets, Salaam Bombay! enters into its subjects' lives with rare authority and absolute compassion, the material generated largely from workshops that Nair and her team ran for a period of months prior to filming. A revelation for audiences of any background.

A predictable plot and cheapskate effects deaden Elvira's occasional witty lines, while references to the horror genre make the film busy without going anywhere. Vamp high camp, where Elvira is more mistress of the dork.

Richardson brings terrific dedication to the role including a perfect American accent, but it's an airless, exhausting film.

An uneven blend of crime thriller and rural romance, this aims for an adult complexity but misses the target by a mile.

Some poignant and charming moments undercut the Munchkin aspect of the ethnic elderly portrayed here, but on the whole Silver's direction spoon-feeds chicken soup covered in a slightly unpalatable patina of schmaltz.

Both acting (particularly Phoenix) and characterisation are top-notch. A film about lives indelibly marked by the past, and by the lies we tell each other just to protect ourselves, it displays the narrative sophistication and ironic grasp of moral and emotional nuances characteristic of Lumet's best work.

Jade Calegory, who plays the boy-hero in this cuddly alien yarn, was born with spina bifida, and the film is neither sentimental nor exploitative in dealing with its wheelchair-confined star. Unfortunately, there's little else to commend.

Isn't in the same class as Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, but still provides plenty of prize pickings for kids, kooks and academics.

The boys all brag about sex but look like Mother Fist is their main mistress. The values stink, the music stinks, and Lemmy from Motorhead is a dickhead, but the movie is totally compelling. Rather like watching a car wreck on the opposite side of a motorway.

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

A low-budget sequel which tries, and fails, to make a virtue out of adversity by substituting cheap mechanical effects for the expensive light and magic of Parts I and II.

Midler gets to play her vulgar, trashy self twice over, Tomlin introduces a little comic variety as the gutsy blue collar worker and the drippy sister, and Abrahams handles the mechanical plot with skill, if not style. The frenetic fun reduces everyone to a cipher; it's difficult to care about any of them.

Utterly ridiculous, the dialogue exquisitely dumb, the acting soooo bad, it's one for cheap laughs.

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

Garris plays it for laughs, and despite dull moments (and the obvious plagiarisation of Gremlins), does a pretty good job.

Sex sequences are disappointingly non-specific: blurred nipples and vaguely flickering tongues, set to That Disco Beat and invariably followed by post-coital blubbing.

Like its predecessor Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio's wordless eco-doc is visually stunning, but undermined by a fairly serious flaw.

Davis' direction is Miami Vice-tight, though with frequent attempts at humour: this, together with the caricature psycho-baddie (Silva), and the mixture of spectacular, bone-crunchingly realistic violence with a stab at topical socio-political commentary, makes for a very uncertain tone.

A winning, if uneven, blend of affectionate nostalgia and supernatural scariness.

There are some nice comic moments though; in fact relying as heavily on its disquieting black humour as on images of physical disgust, the whole thing works far better as comedy than horror.

An animated achievement almost without parallel.

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.

The new recruits have standard issue hilarious-style problems - route marching, press-ups, food, the local brothel - but most of all they have psychotic, cruel-to-be-kind drill sergeant Walken. Why Walken plays him so dulcet and limp is beyond comprehension.

The Apocalypse Now-style Wagnerian soundtrack that accompanies the air boat chase across the Everglades almost raises a smile. Otherwise it's business as usual: fart jokes.

Despite a screenplay by the esteemed Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Scent of a Woman), this lacklustre espionage thriller is bogged down with the sort of clichés you'd expect from the height of the Cold War.

The ensemble acting is excellent. Remember, kids, it all comes down to Self Respect.

This is a pleasant but overgenerous and predictable film, so eager to embrace the good in people that it never fully succeeds as drama.

Boorman's autobiographical film about family life during the Blitz is subversively light on the blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice, and a joy throughout.

Sometime stunt co-ordinator Baxley directs this feebly-scripted, sporadically exciting crime pic like a showpiece for his former speciality.

A tacky rock'n'roll drama which regurgitates clichés without any sense of shame.

At last, a real part for Nicholson to sink his teeth into.

Swiftian satires on popular taste can backfire badly, and Spike Lee's attempt at black consciousness-raising through the armature of Animal House movies almost dies of the contusion it is trying to lance.

Crisply photographed and directed with understated grace, the film can feel a little standoffish given the emotive subject matter. But with strong performances from the young leads and a vice-like air of mounting tension, it’s well worth revisiting.

Nice to see Poitier back and full of pep, albeit in a routine thriller.

It's a rich, ambitious film, repetitive and voyeuristic in its eroticism, but exhilarating in its blend of documentary and fictional recreation to depict the Soviet invasion.

This is bitter-sweet compartmentalised, with the saccharine spooned on at the end. Even then it lacks flavour.

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

A witty anti-road-movie with a subplot on the nature of the artist.

Another of [Godard's] essays on the impossiblity of making movies in our time, this has all the dreariness of a pathologist's dictated notes.

Offering only hackneyed insights into the war, the film makes for stodgy drama. But Williams' manic monologues behind the mike are worth anybody's money.

Unlike O'Bannon's film, this is merely repetitive and dull, the tedium relieved only by the graphic brain-eating and Philip Bruns' deliciously OTT performance as the mad Doctor Mandel.

Though the film finally opts for ear-bashing histrionics, its prevailingly pedagogic tone is both coy and tricksy. The dialogue is relentless in its banality, the stereotype characters unattractive and poorly motivated, the plot protracted and predictable.

With its silly script, lame acting, naff special effects, and laughable model work, this unfunny supernatural comedy looks like the sort of film its leading characters - a pair of teenage home movie-makers (Lively and McDaniel) - might have made themselves.

There are moments of jaw-dropping inspiration, and many that are just impenetrably odd. But this is immensely winning for the rawness alone.

Robbins' handling of the human element is as sickly and soggy as a dunked doughnut, and the script makes gonks out of its characters. But the flirting frisbee scenes are pretty neat.

A lively black comedy, surprisingly stylishly directed by DeVito (his début), it thankfully soft-pedals on the hysteria front to concentrate on verbal non-sequiturs and quirky characterisation. If it all gets a little soft-centred towards the end, there's more than enough vitality and invention to be going on with.

In the final scenes, the film slides into a Hardyesque fatalism, with the loose ends tied up a little too neatly, resulting in an air of literary contrivance. It nevertheless succeeds, like the earlier film, in tapping the well-springs of one's emotions.

It is shamelessly sentimental, and could well send the hardboiled home to kick the cat.

Incestuous desires run rampant in the original novel by VC Andrews, but all the movie has to offer is soft-focus innuendo. As fantasy stripped of all its metaphorical trimmings, the sublimely ridiculous plot is more likely to reduce an audience to laughter than to tears.

Musically, it's a matter of opinion, but from the sparse funk of the title tune to the bebop blow-out around Charlie Parker's Now's the Time, this guiltless grooving in Eden fizzes with brilliantly choreographed wit and invention.

Gail Morgan Hickman's complicated script manages a couple of nice twists, but it's too formulary to pursue the ambiguities it reveals. Most enjoyable is the clear thread of self-parody, which keeps the laughs and bullets coming thick and fast.

Tossed together from a Hanif Kureishi screenplay which labours so many right-on themes that none leave their mark

Powered by a driving rock score, this is by turns sleek, reckless, and smoothly effective, like a Ferrari with a psycho killer at the wheel.

Surface stuff, with neither actor up to the ambiguities, but entertaining enough around the car chases.

Suspect remains a routine Jagged Edge follow-up.

Schroeder's direction of Charles Bukowski's script is consistent with the film's throwaway mood, stresses the upbeat, and mercifully eschews seriousness, cleverly relying on Robby Müller's efficient colour photography to create atmosphere.

Joanou, later to find greater exposure with the concert picture U2 Rattle and Hum and the Oldman/Penn crime movie State of Grace, directs with a lot of energy, but the material just isn't there.

There are splendid economies, too: Rogers' mirrored dressing-room registers first as a social humiliation for the cop, who can't find the exit, but later his intimacy with her surroundings gives him an edge over a killer. There's little waste, though the thriller element could have been tuned up a bit.

Western iconography, noir-ish lighting, and visceral horror are fused with an affecting love story in this stylish 'Vampire Western', which (unlike Bigelow's rather static debut feature The Loveless) is driven forward at a scorching pace, a subtle study in the seductiveness of evil and a terrifying ride to the edge of darkness.

Combining state-of-the-art stylishness with comedy and suspense, Wang turns an otherwise straightforward conspiracy thriller into a pacy, racy fable with distinctly oddball dimensions.

The exquisitely framed images, the allusive script, the droll witticisms are counterbalanced by Dennehy's literally enormous performance, which threatens to tear the film's formal symmetries to vividly memorable shreds.

The overall result, unsurprisingly, is patchy in the extreme. Weiss' title piece - fragments guying the portentous scripts, wooden acting and non-existent budgets of Z-grade '50s sci-fi movies - is obvious but occasionally spot-on with its appalling sets and repetitive use of the same bit of landscape.

What is missing is any real tension or psychological detail that might lend plausibility to all the hocus-pocus about East-West political and military intrigue.

There are a couple of rocky moments, but the large cast of unknowns go through hell convincingly, and illustrate the randomness of mortality.

It possesses a mythic clarity, yet there's also a welcome complexity at work, in the vivid characterisations and the unsentimental celebration of community and collective action. The result is witty, astute, and finally very moving.

This sequel to House offers another blend of humour and horror, but the gags aren't particularly sweet, the chills aren't particularly spicy. On the whole an indigestible affair, which fortunately passes quickly through the system.

It is Depardieu who supplies the heart and soul of the film with a performance of towering strength and heartbreaking pathos.

The result is a well-meaning bore, which isn't sure whether to play it for laughs or to make a serious point, and ends up missing out on both fronts.

More of a clever comic parody than a jokey pastiche, this lively kiddies' horror pic delivers frights and laughs which are rooted in a sure and sympathetic grasp of Monster Movie mythology.