A likeable shaggy dog of a movie, assuming the music's to your taste.

Much is unemphatic, but all of it carries the moving weight of conviction. And it ends on a healing grace-note which passeth all understanding.

Hiller's sledgehammer direction turns the problems common in education into an endless parade of clichés, feebly propped up by wacky humour, inarticulacy, ham and corn. Avoid.

While the weight of Roeg's success is usually stylistic, this is more of a harkback to the cosmic scale of The Man Who Fell to Earth, with enormous themes streaming through a strange tale.

Martin is his usual combination of flat cynicism and crazed childishness, indulging in some inspired Jerry Lewis-like clowning with his arms and legs hopelessly out of synch.

Right from the opening sequence the film is a clumsy catalogue of pain and death, from the mutilated victims of the torturer to the trail of wasted baddies who were foolish enough to incur Bronson's wrath.

Central to the film's deft balancing act between shaggy dog humour and something just a little more serious is Morton's expressive performance as the alien, though the rest of the cast also plays admirably.

This sequel to Enter the Ninja and Revenge of the Ninja rapidly auto-sequels itself, as plot and duels repeat every few minutes. It being a Golan/Globus product, smoke and strobes are as special as the effects get, and helicopters crash inexpensively, behind hills.

he entire cast speaks in horribly intrusive American accents, but Forman makes some perceptive connections between Mozart's life and work.

Erotic, surely, only for the very easily pleased, with Dereks J and B and Cannon Films converging to form a matrix of sustained, tawdry silliness.

Often very funny as well as gorgeous to look at in its ineffable blend of realism and rhapsody, it comes on a little like a free jazz improvisation on the vulnerability of the human heart to the ecstasies and disenchantments that attend it in permanent orbit.

Funny and moral? Nah. Tiresome? You bet.

A film about desire and its control is hardly what one might expect, but then Eastwood has always been Hollywood's most experimental star. And he's still one of the best.

As a night out this is as good a piece of solid, down-the-line schlock as anything to come along since Halloween III.

Dreary jousting, production values that make Monty Python and the Holy Grail look lavish, and an excruciating synthesiser score make this a real trial.

Is this family movie just an excuse for the star to romp around wearing not an awful lot? Very probably.

Woo claims it started out as a zen movie about internalised conflicts, but it plays like a regular martial arts melodrama; only the tone is darker and more cynical than usual.

Menopausal male Wilder gets the frustrated hots for comely Ms Le Brock in this broad, unfunny Hollywood remake of the broad, only vaguely funny French original Pardon Mon Affaire (which at least had long-faced Jean Rochefort in its favour).

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.

The humour couldn't be blacker, and the quality of invention is outrageously high.

A time-travel yarn of the past arrives in the present persuasion. The 'what the hell's happened?' passages are, as usual, more diverting than the 'what the hell can we do about it?' scenes, the latter involving merely flashing lights, showers of sparks and talk of imploding vortexes.

It's pleasant enough, as a view of small-town Americana, but played very straight.

A dismally unfunny shambles.

Photographically busy, though to no meaningful purpose, mildly amusing at best, the piece finally expires with what could be, but probably isn't, a parody of a feel-good ending.

There are nun jokes, mafia jokes, big breast jokes, karate jokes, Jaws jokes, more big breasts. It's a long ride.

A predictable quest plot is unwound with tremendous verve, and the only real disappointments are some ropey special effects. But Fleischer's zest for action carries it all along splendidly.

A sad re-run of the Mean Streets idea (awkwardly adapted by Vincent Patrick from his own admirable novel).

Not for the purists, maybe, but the last half-hour, as Firmin plunges ever deeper into his self-created hell, leaves one shell-shocked.

The message is that there is no message; if this isn't action cinema in its purest form, then it's pretty close.

An all-time low for the Enterprise and her crew, with Spock dead, the ship condemned, and everyone else looking about 104. Decent SFX, but a little more action wouldn't have gone amiss.

While Leone's vision still has a magnificent sweep, the film finally subsides to an emotional core that is sombre, even elegiac, and which centres on a man who is bent and broken by time, and finally left with nothing but an impotent sadness. 

A cinephile's film, stuffed with influences and allusions which, together with the precocious brilliance of every single image, can become numbing at times rather than stunning; but the absolute assurance and ingenuity make this a debut as startling as Eraserhead and every bit as spectacular.

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.

Soft porn from Columbia Pictures (let's name 'n shame 'em) without a single redeeming feature.

A justifiably angry film, fast and full of violent action, though there's plenty of humour too; and the lack of originality is amply compensated for by its manifest sincerity.

Hawn, atypically cast and supported by all-round excellent performances, proves that she can act. But still this bitter-sweet concoction is very much Demme's: not only in the warming celebration of friendship and community values (the unsentimental generosity extended towards the characters positively glows), but also in the assured handling of period, place, music and mood.

The first version played with moral dilemmas but reached only Bible-class conclusions. By '84 independent and liberated women can pay to see themselves represented as slutty, avaricious and brutal.

Rhetoric apart, the film offers some stirring entertainment, and a memorable ham sandwich from Richardson, allowed to steal the show as the grandfather in what proved to be his last film.

Very little seems to happen in this social vacuum, and none of it is memorable.

Part vigilante movie, part sitcom, part tearjerker, part cracker melodrama, it's redeemed by yet another of Garner's graceful, effortless performances.

Reiner's brilliantly inventive script and smart visuals avoid all the obvious pitfalls, making this one of the funniest ever films about the music business.

Cox's weird and wonderful first feature defies description, with a plot and characters at once grounded in the seedy reality of Reagan's America and effortlessly enhanced by flights of pure, imaginative fantasy. What distinguishes the movie is its offbeat, semi-satirical sense of humour, seamlessly woven into its wacky thriller plot. But there are endless things to enjoy, from Robby Müller's crisp camerawork to a superb set of performances, from witty movie parodies to a tremendous punk soundtrack.

A curiously indigestible phenomenon, like being forced to eat five courses of avocado by an overbearing dinner-party host.

Somewhere in the Hollywood hills there's a computer loaded with a software programme called BuildaStar. A hack punched in the script requirements for this intended star vehicle for Selleck: an action yarn pitting an American loner against evil Nazis, bent coppers, a sultry girl-friend; sardonic sex with a lashing of perversity and gratuitous nudity; dare-devil stunts and chases for excitement.

It does confirm Argento's dedication to the technicalities of constructing images - Grand Guignol for L'Uomo Vogue, perhaps - but you'll still end up feeling you've left some vital digestive organs back in the seat.

Amiable but half-baked remake of what was anyway one of Preston Sturges' least satisfactory comedies.

The jokes are firmly embedded in plot and characterisation, and the film, shot by Gordon Willis in harsh black-and-white, looks terrific; but what makes it work so well is the unsentimental warmth pervading every frame.

Traditional immigrant films from Hollywood (The Godfather?) end in fame, money and beautiful women for the inheritors of the new found land's promise; but El Norte gives us a vision of the downside of the American dream. The film's concentration on the plight of its young hopefuls, however, is done with much humour and compassion, so that the tragedy of its message is very bracing.

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.

Tarkovsky remains as much a metaphysician as anything else, and Nostalgia isn't an entertainment but an article of faith.

This lumbering, overwrought, and wildly self-indulgent adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's frail short story is clearly cranked up with the full quotient of sincerity and conviction.

Obviously made on a TV budget, the plot is weedy, and the film is saved only by some neat stunts and the splendour of the Australian landscape.

Johnson may not quite have Lubitsch's lightness of touch, but he puts an excellent cast through their paces with great verve, and the charm is as potent as ever.

Hurt and Dennehy are excellent, as ever, but Marvin is badly miscast as a ruthless smoothie; and the film as a whole, while never less than involving, seldom generates any real suspense as it moves towards a curiously muffled showdown.

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.

A plummeting lift, seances, a spontaneous combustion set-piece and prophetic-of-doom photos are timed to keep us engaged, but never coalesce into a joined-up plot.

A shamelessly artless horror movie whose senseless story - a girl inherits a spooky, seedy hotel which just happens to have one of the Seven Doors of Hell in its cellar - is merely an excuse for a poorly connected series of sadistic tableaux of torture and gore.

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

Borden charts the explosive coming together of the women as they forge their own liberation, handling her story with audacity and making even the driest argument crackle with humour, while the more poignant moments burn with a fierce white heat.

A gentle, loving, noble, angry and heartrending film.

There are plenty of movies which seem to have been made by madmen. Possession may be the only film in existence which is itself mad: unpredictable, horrific, its moments of terrifying lucidity only serving to highlight the staggering derangement at its core. Extreme but essential viewing.

Kaufman (like Tom Wolfe, whose book The Right Stuff this is taken from) is well enough aware of the media circus surrounding the whole project, but still celebrates his magnificent seven's heroism with a rhetoric that is respectful and irresistible.

A thrilling film, with a head, a heart, and muscle.

As a thriller it's a bit soft, as sci-fi it's a bit simple.

Low key and, despite the music, rather likeable.

The scripting is unimaginative, derivative, and desperately predictable as the film limps through its jokily cautionary tales.

The web of relationships between English and Japanese is too schematic in its polarisation of characters, Oshima's handling of the narrative is not so much elliptical as awkward, and Bowie's performance is embarrassingly wooden.

Here Von Sydow's a rival beer manufacturer hoping to take over the world by drugging his brew, but the plotline (derived from Hamlet) soon goes flat.

It may well satisfy a low IQ, pubescent (probably) male Iron Maiden fan, but the rest of us are poorly served.

Tarkovsky goes for the great white whale of politicised art a history of his country in this century seen in terms of the personal and succeeds. [18 Aug 2004, p.90]

Just as Douglas discovers that he can go only so far along the extra-judicial path, so the film's line of reasoning twists part-way, falters, then ties itself into tangled and inconclusive knots.

Strong on stunts and special effects but often rambling and ponderously lurching into comedy, it's not the greatest of Christmas treats, but does have enough cherishable moments between the wordy longueurs; and in Lysette Anthony's Princess Lyssa, a heroine for whom many a young Turk would walk through fire and ice.

Not so much a comedy about American values as a 2,500 mile skid on a banana skin. The visual gags come thick and fast, and are about as subtly signposted as the exit markers on a freeway. An exercise in the comedy of humiliation which is the stuff of shamefaced giggles.

The script, for which Chapman and Cook must bear some responsibility, is a three-minute Python skit bloated out to feature length, involving buried treasure, revenge, and machinations close to the throne. Depressing stuff.

Unfortunately the pacy humour of the first half soon dwindles to a weak climax, and Pryor hams shamelessly, yet again proving that he's best in serious parts or as a stand-up man. Enjoyable, nevertheless.

A wanton, playful film, belying the stated despair by its boiling energy.

Visual sensualities will have a feast, but you'll have to read Whitley Strieber's novel if you don't want to emerge with a badly scratched head.

Ultimately, though, it's an uneasy blend of horror and whimsy, with the allegory being hammered a little too hard for comfort. It's also marred by some dreadfully tacky special effects and set designs.

At once maudlin and doggedly sarcastic, the film gives you the uncomfortable sensation of being condescended to by an idiot; it is, transparently, a product of the advanced technology it purports to despise.

Both flap their eyelashes and flash their toothpaste smiles, but are insipid and boring as they go through the motions of nude swimming, clinging wet T-shirts, shared bubble baths and lyrical love scenes. Puerile dross which dares to speak with feeling of the value of sex while making such an obvious play for the soft porn market.

As senseless violence goes, this is very senseless and very violent. Norris is a Texas Ranger, Carradine an oily Senator smuggling weapons to 'Central American terrorists', but the storyline has more non sequiturs than bodies, which is saying something.

A bizarre, often hilarious melee of weird drugs, weird sex and off-the-wall camp.

However one rates the bosom as an erogenous zone, it takes the talents of a Russ Meyer to make it interesting for eighty minutes. Watching the unflagging, unfunny efforts of five callow youths to see the homecoming queen's breasts, one only wonders if ever in the field of endeavour so much has been done by so many for just two.

Race fans won't be disappointed, but the real bonus comes from a perfect performance of tough understatement from Bonnie Bedelia as the three-time winner. The wheel may be a flash chrome slot-mag, but the heart is gold.

Lightly likeable, but the kids at whom it's aimed would probably rather be leaping in the aisles to Duran Duran, while their parents would opt for a rerun of Rebel Without a Cause.

There is absolutely no feeling for the period, and the actors make no attempt to rise above the script's feeble idea of verbal sparring. But the Yugoslav locations are scenic, the aerial stunts are efficient, and there's an explosion every time interest starts to flag.

Mixing early-’80s nostalgia with mild social anthropology, the film successfully crystallises the optimism and vivacity of the early New York hip hop scene and suggests that film and TV portrayals of the Bronx as a savage and inhospitable hellhole were perhaps greatly misjudged.

For all its simplicity, this is bold, heartfelt filmmaking. A masterpiece.

Of course the film raises more questions than it comes near to answering, but its faults rather pale beside the epic nature of its theme, and Kingsley's performance in the central role is outstanding.

The show is strewn with throwaway sight gags absent from the stage version which, while mercifully never quite sliding into camp, serve to apply a much needed cattle prod to Messrs G & S. The sets are superb.

Local Hero, which concerns the frustrations of a Texas oilman's attempts to buy up an idyllic Scottish village, ranks as a lyrical anti-urban comedy in the great tradition of films like I Know Where I'm Going and Whisky Galore!; and its essential triumph is to prove that comedy can still contain a gentle, almost mystical, aspect without necessarily being old-fashioned.

The Entity doesn't emerge quite as one-dimensionally nasty as its synopsis suggests. The film's men are so uniformly creepy, and its heroine so strong and sympathetic, that apart from a couple of unpleasant moments the story often seems less like horror than feminist parable, especially when Hershey (giving a fine performance) is reduced to a laboratory object with her home recreated in the psychology department.

If Jaffe's previous production credits aren't sufficient warning that this is one for Sensitive Drama suckers, the opening shot's a giveaway.

Rosman's debut movie was a pretty fair show-reel promising, falsely it seems, more and better to come.

Farmer, as scripted here and played by Lange, unsurprisingly remains something of a cypher.

Henson, creator of the Muppets, has put all his energies into creating a spectacular range of live-action creatures who prance and gobble their way across the screen with an unprecedented conviction.

Admittedly this is a legal "Rocky, convincing rather than realistic, witty rather than analytical, but it amounts to a far more effective indictment of the US legal system than ...and justice for all, and is the first courtroom drama in years to recapture the brilliance of the form.

The script is sharply written, while Jewison is a lot more sensitive to the material than he was on that earlier Levinson-Curtin effort, And Justice For All. But though engaging and agreeable, the film is never wildly funny.