The whole thing veers wildly in quality, and no Eastwood-hater should go within a mile of it; but few lovers of American cinema could fail to be moved by a venture conceived so recklessly against the spirit of its times.

Played straight, this could make some quite serious points about the predicament of the unemployed (Pryor as prostitute), but the film finds it easier to opt for cheap laughs.

Rather groovy little fable, based on Peter Beagle's fantasy about a unicorn's search for company.

Benton's movie is eventually suffocated, perhaps by the gloss of the Manhattan auction world in which it is set. The plotting becomes rushed and implausible, while Streep falls into the breathless clichés of screen neuroses.

This debut feature from Seidelman (ex-New York Film School) may be small and unambitious, but its old tale of the little girl lost in the city is told with energy and verve. Seidelman's sure feeling for the squalor and glamour of urban decay, and her speedy, stylish editing, combine with a pulsating soundtrack from The Feelies to create a febrile sense of Lower Manhattan street life: fast living on a permanent adrenalin high.

There's a sharp sense of humour at work in this school-of-Carpenter siege movie, even if, for all its ironic observations on madness in American society, it never cuts free of genre routine.

A film which creates drama more out of gesture and nuance than dialogue, and employs a lush setting which overwhelms instead of pointing up the characters' emotions.

Despite the unlikely script credit for Rita Mae Brown, Jones's debut feature is little more than a Halloween clone, reliant on buckets of blood and sudden surprise rather than suspense.

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.

As a Stallone vehicle this is sleek, slick and not unexciting, but crassly castrates the David Morrell novel on which it is based.

As always, Tarkovsky conjures images like you've never seen before; and as a journey to the heart of darkness, it's a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's.

Although one may mourn the lost opportunity to say something about the Stones other than that they are twenty years older than they were twenty years ago (cue 'Time Is on My Side'), a Stones concert is still worthwhile entertainment.

Richard Benjamin directs the smartish script and the chaotic tomfoolery quite brilliantly; but all concerned mishandle the soppy section where O'Toole gets misty-eyed about his discarded daughter. Still, the pace picks up for the magnificent comic climax.

Clearly we are not meant to care when the eldest boy (Magner), who has been contacted by a demon on his Walkman and is gradually acquiring the rotten teeth and gooseberry eyes of the possessed, wastes the entire family. Awful.

Wenders' first American movie is no conventional biopic, but a stunningly achieved fiction about the art and mystique of creating fiction.

While there can be no doubt that in true tabloid style Class of 1984 feeds on everything it is condemning, as an energetic comic strip it has considerable fascination.

There's the usual array of school stereotypes (the lecher, the stoned surfer, the hustler), a rock score, and endless attention to the rituals of dating and mating. Taken purely on this level, it's a relatively witty example of its kind, with an enjoyable performance from Penn as the stoned surfer, and some good lines. But it lacks the frenzied energy which allowed Porky's to beat all competitors in its field.

That old Shakespearean magic survives even this loosest of adaptations, and by the end one is wallowing in the length and indulgence of it all.

All in all, it's just another flick to appal.

Likeable.

Puberty Blues and Porky's look positively progressive beside such sickening junk. Boaz Davidson should stick to sucking Popsicles.

Williams is cuddly enough as the man whose talents for nurturing a family are constantly undermined by a malign fate, and there is a performance of some dignity from Lithgow as a six-and-a-half-foot ex-pro footballer transsexual. But it's the kind of movie which is brave - or stupid - enough to ask the meaning of life without having enough arse in its breeches to warrant a reply.

The dialogue is Texas crude, the sentiment Bible Belt coy, and the songs conveyor-belt Broadway: stale air on a G-string.

It's a spectacular return to the shimmering, mesmerising deep-focus animation associated with Disney's classic period: a marvellous use of lighting to create atmosphere, dew-drops glisten from every tree, and the villains are as primally terrifying as cartoon villains should be. The choice of material (Robert O'Brien's novel Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH) is less fortunate, since it lacks the wonder of early Disney, and the mouse heroine is far too insipid and twee. It's still a pretty effective family film, though.

The Thing has emerged as one of our most potent modern terrors, combining the icy-cold chill of suspicion and uncertainty with those magnificently imaginative effects blowouts.

The characterisations are turned on their heads.

The simple storyline is quickly grounded by flying chunks of exposition that director/actor Eastwood tries to ignore. Eastwood the director disregards many Cold War possibilities, preferring to dawdle over a first hour that mooches along while Eastwood the actor enjoyably dons various disguises, playing a man who can't act (or so everyone tells him) and is happiest left alone with his gippy nerves.

Pacino can do you a volatile, middle class intellectual with one hand behind his back, and along with his streetwise brood has all the best and funniest lines.

Such niceties as a plausible plot and three-dimensional characters are trampled under Weejun-shod foot, but sheer energy, a handful of good tunes (including a great theme song from the Four Tops), and some very funny one-liners save the day.

Foregoing the special effects bonanza of its predecessor, it settles for low camp humanoid melodrama.

Although the sub-religious gobbledegook (including a tiresome midget medium) is hard to take, it is consistently redeemed by its creator's dazzling sense of craft.

Blank's special brand of ethnographic film documentary finds a curiously appropriate subject in that weirdest of all capsule cultures: the on-location film crew.

Miller's choreography of his innumerable vehicles is so extraordinary that it makes Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark look like a kid fooling with Dinky Toys.

Some amusement is derived from watching a film that so obviously had to be worked out backwards. The bits in between feature likeable Martin as a keen but clumsy detective - with all the good lines, which is no bad thing because he's the best part of this fairly amusing, clever exercise in editing.

Veering wildly between a quite well-written satire on the contemporary American political scene and a very ham-fisted nuclear blackmail thriller, its sheer eccentricity is quite engaging.

While the writer conjured up everything he could remember about Alien, the rest of the New World crew were working out how to reproduce Scott's film for about 50 bucks.

Editor Marshall Harvey stitches the messy pieces together with considerable panache.

A worthy but irretrievably dull homily (based on the novel by Chaim Potok) about the conflict between adolescent friendship - two Jewish boys, one orthodox and Zionist, the other a Hasidic - and filial devotion within the demands of the faith.

Marvellous amalgam of sadistic thriller and fairytale romance, drawing on a wild diversity of genres from film noir to Feuillade serial.

The idea of pitting karate champion Norris against a virtually indestructible psychopath is intriguing, but the resulting confusion of clichés proves disappointingly incompetent.

Same old gore and poignancy, but some garish characters and the nightmare quality of the New York hotel give it more low budget charm than it deserves.

In style, the film’s ambition sometimes oversteps its ability, but it’s a rare London gangster film that has something to say about the city and says it with wit and little resort to bloodletting

Hopper keeps things light and off-the-cuff, allowing his performers free rein - sometimes too much, as in the case of the screechy and shrill Farrell - to explore grim territory without falling into heavy-handedness.

The most delicious blackly comic collision of sex, food and murder, Bartel's film arrives as a delightful surprise from the former court jester of Roger Corman's exploitation stable.

There is so much to like and admire in Edwards' intricate comedy about sexual identity which is neither vulgar nor preachy, combining a Clouseau-esque bedroom farce - and the prospect of characters coming out of the closet in all possible ways - with a convincing love story and just enough show-stopping musical numbers...Don't miss this one. It sends sparks.

Spacek and Lemmon are fine as the missing man's wife and father, but what makes the film so overwhelming in places is its unending night-time imagery of a society coming apart at the seams. Costa-Gavras underpins his campaigning content with all the electric atmosphere of a paranoid conspiracy thriller, and ensures that Missing will remain the cinematic evocation of a military coup for years to come.

With Ustinov's energetic impersonation of Poirot and Anthony Shaffer's traditionally structured script, Death on the Nile offered a fair recreation of Agatha Christie's world, but this time Christie herself would rightly have disowned the film.

Not a lot to it, but the sense of period is acute, the script witty without falling into the crude pitfalls that beset other adolescent comedies, and the performances are spot-on.

At times the perversely slow beat of each scene can irritate, but that's a reasonable price for the film's super-saturated atmosphere.

Craven tries to do this 'veggie-man' horror in a suitable DC Comics style; and with Louis Jourdan as arch-villain 'Arcane', not to mention Adrienne Barbeau (Mrs John Carpenter) as the Thing's object of desire, he's definitely on the right track. At other times, the picture is right off its trolley.

Even Parker's direction, with its unerring sense of pace, cannot disguise an awkwardly episodic narrative which just cannot find a sense of an ending.

Transplanted Australian director Schepisi confidently threads his own route through Peckinpah territory (a Mexican patriarch demanding honour; a graveyard resurrection), less concerned with Peckinpah's gothic haunting than with teasing dark, absurd ironies from the symbiosis of sworn enemies.

If you have a weakness for exotic scenery (filmed in Canada, Scotland, Kenya), and some curiosity about the everyday life of prehistoric humankind, you will probably take some mild pleasure in this saga of the Ulam tribe's search for a way to light their fire.

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.

Sentimental comedies must walk a fine line between mawkishness and insipidity: although this one slips off the wire occasionally, a strong script, careful treatment and some spirited performances keep it aloft.

A hesitation in dealing fully with the central relationship, coupled with an over-reliance on slow-motion photography, finds the film losing momentum almost before it leaves the starting blocks.

Dennis Potter's remarkably intelligent transatlantic adaptation of his BBC serial turns the pitfalls of 'Hollywoodisation' into profit, now stressing the 'pennies' over the 'heavenly' symbolism by specifically locating Arthur Parker's grubby melodrama in the Chicago of the Depression, and culling his liberating daydreams from not only the era's popular music, but its even more culturally resonant musicals, recreated with both MGM opulence and biting Brechtian wit.

In fact, ruthlessly ironing out Berger's subtleties of tone in favour of a rumbustious Animal House collision between Belushi and Aykroyd, it becomes increasingly tiresome, with few funny moments to leaven the proceedings.

Disconcerting in its kaleidoscopic shifts in tone, it's nevertheless too absorbing simply to dismiss.

Two of Hollywood's best-loved veterans deserved a far better swan song than this sticky confection.

It's precisely its pretensions which make this a surprisingly agreeable cross of angst-ridden '70s road movie with Hitchcockian thriller.

Mad axeman action yet again, cravenly conformist in every department.

Harper proves she can sing, O'Brien proves he can't act, and Sharman films inventively, but fringe theatre material does not a big screen musical make. Rocky Horror succeeded in its spot-on sense of style, but here the style, like the whole concept of rock musicals, seems a decade out of date, bypassed by films like Quadrophenia which integrate music and story in a different way.

Mostly pretty silly and uncertain whether to be tongue-in-cheek, it has one or two good scenes and some intriguing hardware, including the Looker (Light Ocular Oriented Kinetic Energetic Responsers) disorientation gun.

It might be possible to extort money from Benjamin and Prentiss to forget you've seen this.

Maggie Smith and Alan Bates successfully personify the cold spirit that Rhys held to be pre-war England, but Adjani manages merely to reduce Marya's fatalism to spinelessness. The direction, intimate yet retaining a sense of distance, is true both to Rhys and to Ivory.

Riveting, exhilarating stuff.

Considering neither Bisset nor Bergen had ever shown the slightest acting ability before in movies, their performances in the Bette Davis/Miriam Hopkins roles in this loose reworking of Old Acquaintance are very capable.

Gruesome almost to a fault, but not quite, it emerges as an efficient shocker.

When it became obvious that the film's mix of cutesy sentiment and vague scariness wasn't working, the company ordered whole sequences to be rewritten, re-shot or re-edited, then imposed a stupid ending that explains precisely nothing.

Any notion that a topical social issue will be taken as seriously as it deserves is decisively scotched long before the thoroughly predictable romantic ending; but Paternity is difficult to actually dislike, largely because of its engaging duo of stars.

Even on the level of unintentional humour this fails to entertain: the mark of a truly dreadful movie.

Forget the story, 'cause there isn't one, but see it for the gory bits and marvellous gutsy make-up. Yech!

Straight-line conflicts, low-light visuals: the film's basics, its strengths, and its critical Achilles' heel are all those of the classic American male action movie.

The two Roberts (Duvall as cop, De Niro as priest) turn in potentially great performances, but are given precious little to work with.

Most of the humour on display in this would-be screwball comedy has an inanity which follows suit with this central conceit.

Although the direction is occasionally a little precious - with studiedly stylish tableaux accompanied by Ravel - Sutherland is suitably haunted and cold as the confused assassin, and John Alcott's superb camerawork, on location in an icy Canada and a leafy Suffolk, is a definite bonus. And there are some fine supporting performances, particularly from Warner, Hurt and, most memorably, McKenna.

Spacek herself is given free rein, and turns in all that you'd expect and more, including a number of marvelous little insights from her own Texas childhood. Something as slight as this could never have got off the ground without her, but she makes you glad it did.

The narrative, from a story by Peter Straub, juggles ambiguously - if not carelessly - with themes thrown up and better developed in The Turn of the Screw, Don't Look Now and Rosemary's Baby... But there is much to commend in Farrow's performance, complemented by Colin Towns' softly chilling score, which is more than can be said for Conti and Dullea.

This particular wet dream is wrapped in a vacuous blackmail plot (which enables the young hero to fantasise that he's f.cked Sylvia to death, and her to reveal her heart of gold) and padded with lots of horrible Adult Oriented Rock (Clapton, Rod Stewart, etc).

Amazing, though, what a competent director, cameraman and cast can do to help out a soggy plot. Tolerably watchable by comparison with the average Halloween rip-off.

An astonishing in-depth portrait of the interlocking worlds of police and hoodlum results, with no punches pulled and no easy solutions.

In the cold light of day, it must be admitted that Landis leans too heavily on the shock effects provided by Rick Baker's lycanthropic transformation make-up.

There are occasional glimmers of what might have been in the fresh performances of the actresses. But it plods where it should sparkle, like a celebration where the champagne's gone flat.

Deadly Blessing isn't a very good movie, but it holds out distinct promise that Craven will soon be in the front rank of horror film-makers.

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.

Fantasies that are gratuitously sexist and Fascist (macho whoring and warmongering), and whose roots reach all the way back to post-hippie paranoia, feed the tangled plot-lines of a movie that, given the orchestral overkill and surprisingly low profile of heavy metal music, should disappoint even the teenage wet-dreamers it's aimed at.

A pathetic shadow of the Frank Tashlin/Jerry Lewis Artists and Models.

Overlong towards the end but beautiful to look at, the pastel tones on the new material blending with black-and-white archive still and movie footage, which instead of distancing the music even further places it vivdly in its period.

Unsatisfactory both for fans of star-studded prison escape dramas and for football fans hoping to see cunningly devised tactics from Pele and his squad of internationals.

On an afternoon as wet as those on the island, the film would pass the time agreeably, nothing more.

Endless? It's interminable...As excruciating as the Diana Ross/Lionel Richie title tune.

This 'affectionate parody' of the swashbuckling Zorro myth is so determinedly amiable that one feels distinctly caddish for regretting that the laughs are not even more frequent. It fails only in that Leibman's villain shouts too much, and that the set pieces, the skeleton of most film comedy, are under-considered.

The pleasures are right in your face, beginning with the million-dollar idea of turning NYC into a walled-off prison where criminals run free. Even born-and-raised New Yorkers (of which Carpenter was decidedly not) could smile at that histrionic setup; it’s an outsider’s joke made funny by our willingness to be entertained.

One of the more homely Disney animated features, neither hip like The Jungle Book nor (pardon the expression) trippy like Fantasia. We're back in that serene Disney woodland where bright flowers dot heavily shaded glades and snow plops off branches like ice-cream.

It's far from unmissable, but it's valuable rock history with some great noise.

Though, like many of Edwards' films, it lurches uncertainly from slapstick farce to mordant humour in an extremely hit-or-miss fashion, this surprisingly bitter satire on Tinseltown - in which a producer (Mulligan) beefs up his latest turkey of a movie by introducing some pornographic sex scenes and having his wife/star (Andrews) bare her breasts on screen - does hit the mark once or twice.

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