Three witlessly routine tales (adapted from stories by Chetwynd-Hayes), drearily executed and graced not at all by such luminaries as Pleasence, Magee and Whitman.

The camerawork is unadventurous (the only variation on static observation of the characters being the nature footage signalling the seasonal changes), but the performances Alda elicits from his co-actors almost justifies this. Within the characterisations, most of the fears and foibles of middle class, middle-aged America may be found. Amusing and worth a look.

Because both dialogue and direction are none too exciting, one's tired eyes wander endlessly over the space base sets, where there has been an overuse of that potent sci-fi movie convention which conveys 'realism' by showing that life on the outer limits will be as dingy and badly lit as a suburban subway, with all the usual vices.

Silly and nasty.

Succeeds best as a witty, knowing commentary on the genre itself. References to lycanthropic lore, literature and cinema abound; gags are plentiful; and the whole thing casts a pleasingly skeptical glance at various social fashions and fads of the times.

Witty, warm, but never sentimental, it also benefits from being set in the fading glories of the resort town of the title: grand seaside facades behind which lie more mundane realities, surrounded by decay and demolition.

Nicholson and Lange make a class act, and the film does restore the overt sexuality missing from the 1946 version. But, disappointingly given his excellent track record with films like Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens and Stay Hungry, Bob Rafelson tries to make art out of high-grade pulp, with a resultant loss of energy.

It does mark a return of sorts to the stylishness of The Omen after the tackiness of Damien - Omen II.

Czech director Ivan Passer’s use of late-summer light is rich and entrancing, while Bridges and Heard give their all: the latter delivers a performance of spectacular rage and intensity. The result is nothing less than a modern masterpiece, and a film ripe for rediscovery.

It's rare that any film follows through its chosen themes with such attention to detail, much less leavening the package with a truly anarchic blend of black humour.

Very good on local colour but a bit sugary in its attitude to the central relationship, it would have been better taking a bleaker cue from Tommy Lee Jones' admirably dry performance.

Ten out of ten to Colin Blakely for his cameo (as an itinerant o'booze), but otherwise this is just another weary hack job from a rootless British film industry in decline.

Steve Tesich's script sometimes smacks of screenwriting classes, but Yates (who worked with Tesich on Breaking Away) easily accommodates these lapses with his unfussy, medium-fast direction. Indeed, he guides his cast around the furniture better than most. The result is an enjoyable entertainment whose box-office failure was thoroughly undeserved.

The material strung together in a script about urban police work is so familiar from countless cop shows that it's difficult to see who needs this movie.

Sheer eccentricity and ambitiousness place Inside Moves above the Kramer class, but ultimately the film only reconfirms that good liberal intentions rarely produce good Hollywood movies.

Though it's obvious after five minutes that this is a complete no-no, the cinema equivalent of a bellyflop, it exercises a perverse fascination.

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.

A grippingly violent parable, a touching, tragic romance and – thanks to legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and an unprecedented attention to historical detail – quite simply one of the most beautiful, immersive films ever made.

The use of pop and opera and the black-and-white photography (by Michael Chapman) are exemplary, the actual boxing a compulsive dance of death.

An effective and unpretentious treat.

If it hardly breaks any new ground either formally or politically, it's nevertheless a moving and highly professional affair, in which Brown and Thompson give particularly good performances.

The film aspires to hommage, it's true, but its references are altogether too obvious. That said, there's a Psycho bathroom pastiche that's almost worth the price of a ticket all by itself; and no collector of movie mush will want to miss it for its good bits, which are more than a few.

Another depressing example of the big-screen gag-string sitcom, it turns exclusively on a plot that grew from a concept that developed from an idea that somebody should never have had - Goldie Hawn joins the army.

A marvelous movie, shot in stunning black-and-white by Freddie Francis.

For all Kurosawa's splendidly colourful recreation of 16th century Japan, and though Nakadai's performance is impressive enough, it's all ultimately rather empty and tedious; it could easily have been cut by almost an hour, while the grating Morricone-like score only serves to underline the fact that the director fails to achieve the emotional force of his finest work.

Still, better than most of its kind.

Cassavetes and the two leads keep maudlin sentimentality at bay until the very bitter end, when the film basically 'fesses up that movie-style happy endings are the stuff of pipe dreams. Terrific.

An actors' movie and an advert for therapy, extremely bitter, but handsomely directed in its elegant pretentiousness, it leaves you the impression that Redford is, despite it all, as cuddly as a teddy-bear.

Scripted by John Sayles, Battle Beyond the Stars rips off all sorts of nice genre items (including a feisty-talking computer and a Russ Meyer-ish Valkyrie) with shameless abandon, the best being the plot of The Magnificent Seven.

It's almost distastefully bad.

A toughened docudrama (schools of BBC/old Warners/Corman) that carries the same force as the improvised weapons Ray Winstone uses to bludgeon his way through the Borstal power structure.

An experience so vacuous it's almost frightening.

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.

If you're still at the age when farting and nose-picking seem funny, then Caddyshack should knock you dead. Buried deep - very deep - beneath the rising tide of effluent is a pleasant enough story of a kind about trying to make it to the top as a caddy while yet remaining human; a movie which could have done for golf what Breaking Away did for cycling. Instead it allows a string of resistible TV comics (Chase excepted) to mug through an atrocious chain of lame-brained set pieces, the least vulgar of which involves a turd in a swimming pool.

The lack of suspense amid the Technicolor carnage disappoints. Subtle it ain't, but the title alone should keep art lovers away.

A movie filled with gags and excellent stunts which remains curiously humourless at heart. Stunted, not stunning.

If you can stomach the lovey bits, the film has a lot of good car stunts, some innuendo for the adults, and the ultimate accolade for the Chaplinesque Herbie - a chance to play opposite a cute Mexican orphan.

There are a few extreme auteurists who claim that everything Siegel shoots is wonderful, but some of his more recent efforts have been frankly disappointing, few more so than this glossy, shallow comic heist movie.

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

A masterpiece.

This second instalment of the Star Wars franchise, directed not by George Lucas but by his former USC tutor Irvin Kershner, is the tautest - an extended ricochet from one incendiary set-piece battle to another which still finds time to attend to plot, pace and character.

Peeters also lays on the gore pretty thick amid the usual visceral drive-in hooks and rip-offs from genre hits; and with the humour of an offering like Piranha entirely absent, this turns out a nasty piece of work all round.

A tame, poorly plotted serving of schlock, less horrific for its ketchup-smeared murders than for the bare-faced fashion in which it tries and fails to rip off Carpenter's Halloween in matters of style and construction.

From a character conceived by Mel Brooks', reads the blurb, and there are various nods to his style of humour throughout this bitty spoof. But the rest relies more on technology than style, and on mediocre effects that can't carry the plot.

With more imagination, more of Faith Brook's send-up of a well-known lady PM, and less of Moore's excruciatingly smug misogyny, this might just have made it to comic levels.

Whether this talent symbolizes racist aggression or mournful shock is left unsettlingly unclear, however, and while Oskar is a sphinxlike contradiction, Schlöndorff has a tendency to sketch the rest of the cast as simple grotesques or symbols of decadence that are unconvincingly humanized in the final third.

A much more conventional and unexciting piece of work.

The leaps made by Scott's agile mind in identifying both victim and usurper leave logic and credence on the starting block.

Amid all the tension, the volcano blows its stack. 'Is anything wrong?' someone asks. 'No, nothing's wrong' says someone else. Something is very wrong.

If you can get over the moralising, there's a treat from Kristy McNichol as the rough talking, Marlboro-smoking kid who can deliver a kick to the cobblers to rival Paul Newman, while Matt Dillon as her 'gentle giant' initiator and the soundtrack (Blondie, Bonnie Raitt) also provide welcome relief.

A nasty and simplistic urban-Western parable for Reagan's America. Stranger-in-town Vincent takes it from a marauding Puerto Rican street gang 'til he can't take no more, then comes on like a righteous Cruise missile to trash the bad guys on a wave of populist reaction. Objectionable.

A crewless Nazi torture-ship malevolently hunts down and sinks Caribbean pleasure cruisers. Good enough. But a Ten Little Indians plot soon takes over which is as rusty as the evil vessel.

Comparisons are odious, but this remake of Hitchcock's thriller continually begs them by trampling heavily over its predecessor. The original anticipated, with some poignancy, a Europe at war. This version uses hindsight entirely to disadvantage.

The first half, unfortunately, is poor: the producers (Casablanca Record) have lumbered it with undigested lumps from the company rock catalogue; there is some pretty variable comedy, dreary travelogue footage, and a very ugly use of filters and soft focus. But gradually a much more interesting film takes over.

A kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Catch-22, or maybe Fuller's Shock Corridor set as an episode from The Twilight Zone. Sounds interesting enough, but isn't.

Tragically, desperately funny: this adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel is John Huston's best film for many years.

Just another miserable muddle from the Lew Grade empire; there's more fun to be had cleaning out your cat litter tray.

The tone sometimes wavers into self-parody, and there are occasional crude patches, but overall this edge-of-seat revenge movie marks the most exciting debut from an Australian director since Peter Weir.

The structure continues to loosen, and although Friedkin - like Coppola - has always had difficulty with endings, this one is so arbitrary it's as if he just gave up.

Despite poor dubbing, this is a more interesting and unusual film than its schlock-horror title and subject matter might suggest. Its pointed attack on exploitative film-making seems somewhat rich in the circumstances, but this is well made, uniquely unpleasant and almost deserving of its huge cult status.

A trio of contrasting personalities, the veterans bring both a mischievous wit and a sense of subdued anger to a familiar comic plotline, and the film achieves a rare balance of laughter and compassion.

Beguilingly sharp at first, but the later stages, with Fonda's toughie reporter tagging along for a story but going all mushy inside, wallow in sentimentality about integrity, ecology and all that jazz.

The company's effects team have excelled themselves in the creation of spectacular settings and holograms, but the script reads as though they simply ordered up a melange of Forbidden Planet and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (with a little bit of R2D2 on the side). Next time around they ought to pension off a few designers to pay for a decent screenplay.

Havana, Cuba, 1959. Lucky they print this on the screen, as it's the first and last coherent piece of information you can glean from Lester's political love story, which mentions neither politics nor love but plays out its actions against a background of both.

The jokes are relentlessly crass and objectionable; the song'n'dance routines have been created in the cutting-room and have lost any sense of fun; Fellini-esque moments add little but pretension; and scenes of a real open-heart operation, alternating with footage of a symbolic Angel of Death in veil and white gloves, fail even in terms of the surreal.

Sellers's performance—as the innocent neuter figure who rises accidentally to political power on the strength of vacant homilies—is remarkable. But Ashby's direction is marred by the same softness that made The Last Detail and Coming Home so morally bland.

The whole thing badly lacks any sort of central thematic focus, and the strangely obsessive Englishness of Greene's world is altogether missing. Craftsmanlike rather than inspired, it's watchable thanks largely to its solid performances.

The comedy runs out of steam when the jerk makes good, but laugh for laugh it's probably a better investment than "10".

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.

Carlino's direction doesn't help: he was responsible for the atrocious Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and The Great Santini suffers from the same triteness, with its Deep South setting and a 'progressive' racial subplot that plunges deep into tear-jerk territory. See it for the acting; wallow in the sentiment.

Almost as if he were scared of becoming too serious, Jewison alternates some incredibly powerful moments with breezy farce, and also proceeds to drown the whole thing under a sub-disco score. The result is a bit like finding lumps of condensed milk in your gravy.

Shoddy, unspeakably inept sci-fi disaster movie, with America and Russia combining forces when a meteor on collision course threatens to destroy the earth.

At once darkly comic and quasi-tragic, Imamura’s often brilliant tale of Eros and Thanatos is perverse, powerful and subversive.

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.

There are lovely moments – the Carpathian landscapes are stunning, Kinski’s performance is compellingly vile, and it ends with a stirringly weird, Fellini-esque plague festival. But some of Herzog’s choices are simply confounding: Isabelle Adjani has nothing to do except look pale and worried, Walter Ladengast’s Van Helsing is so decrepit as to border on pastiche, and there’s a grey, plodding quality to the film which sidesteps oppressive, doom-laden inevitability and goes straight to slightly dull.

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.

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.

It's the usual heavy Wambaugh brew: police procedure closely observed without a trace of romanticism, suggesting simply that life in the force is psychological hell.

A typically loony English-country-house horror from the pen of Jimmy Sangster, which dumps its statutory American leads (Katharine Ross and Sam Elliott) into a hardly-stirred plot-pot of diabolic conspiracy - and slowly congeals.

A deafening sonic yawn signs off this desperate finale to Universal's Arthur Hailey-inspired quartet of in-flight entertainments.

The period atmosphere is evoked with careful delicacy, but the characters rarely become more than stereotypes with performances (Judy Davis excepted) to match.

Once again Schatzberg proves himself a strong director of actors, but keeps the film within the safe confines of semi-sophisticated Adult Entertainment.

Lumpy-but-loveable Charles Grodin is the insurance investigator, sniffing out a swindle among Acapulco's lotus-eaters; Fawcett-Majors (comely but coy) is posing as his wife, while emphasising that a quick bunk-up is out of the question. Together they're in a routine comedy-thriller, which looks good but is neither funny nor thrilling, and carelessly wastes its supporting cast, with Art Carney reduced to caricature and Joan Collins on automatic pilot in a hilarious replay of her rich-bitch nympho persona.

Something of a mess, both in terms of the wayward plot which rambles all over the place, and in terms of the rather muddled juggling of audience sympathies.

Douglas mugs his way through a tedious routine of graceless, mistimed slapstick as his incompetent outlaw repeatedly fails to waylay the miscast Schwarzenegger and Ann-Margret, while director Needham - apparently lost without Burt Reynolds - resorts to hackneyed camera trickery, and only stops the rot with a truly offensive resolution.

Director Teague revels in the regular motifs of guns, money, fast cars and bizarre death, grafts on a layer of social comment lately absent in exploiters, and still slams through it all with an anarchic humour sometimes worthy of Sam Fuller.

An intelligent film with a cohesive plot and an amusing script, this is one of the better Disney attempts to hop on the sci-fi bandwagon.

Scripted by Steve Tesich, it's Yates' best film since The Friends of Eddie Coyle and displays the kind of unsentimental optimism that went out of fashion with Hawks.

Langella offers the best interpretation of Stoker's villain since Christopher Lee, and Badham's film, shot in England, gives him a classy environment to devastate. But the decision to create such a sympathetic vampire (especially alongside Olivier's hammy Van Helsing) leaves the film short of suspense, and so romance has to take most of the weight. As a result, it begins to drift badly at the climax.

The film survives cuts to deliver some great, gross, comic book capers. And rock history gets its most intelligent illustration since Mean Streets.

Learning to fit is what this dodo of a camp is all about, showing that the American Way is big and blowsy enough to take a few off-the-wall-style persons, once the ol' sexuality is straightened out.

It’s the creature’s instinctual murder spree that makes the immediate impression, but that would be nothing without the simmering tensions among the human counterparts. [30th anniversary release]

Unfortunately, the film never integrates its eco-horror plot with the cardboard shocks, and the whole venture stops dead with the script's inane assumption that the heroine will put motherhood above all to nurse an ailing monster.

Take out the killings, and you're left with an anguished (even somewhat boring) stab at urban ennui, heavily influenced by Repulsion and Taxi Driver.

Falk's unflappable whimsicality is put to excellent use, Arkin commands sundry shades of blind panic, and if the car chases sustain the widely held belief that Arthur Hiller could not direct traffic, the script's out-of-nowhere zingers are wonderful.

It's a strong theme, unfortunately undercut by faulty pacing and odd lapses in the tension. Still worth seeing for its latently political story and its gory special effects.