A typically plot-heavy script from Ernest Tidyman survives unimaginative direction to deliver that current rarity, an unpretentious action movie. A bit out of its depth at the top of a bill, but vastly superior to the ostensibly similar Jaguar Lives.

Richert's direction negotiates the plot's many pleasurably sharp bends with such skill that one emerges a little dazed, more than a little amused, and nagged by a worrying sense that it could just all be true.

In conception the film remains highly original, and it does deliver enough of the goods to sail effortlessly away with the title of Britain's first official punk movie.

Hard to dismiss completely a film in which Broderick Crawford turns up as 'Brod', but with Olivier overdoing it dreadfully as the crinkly old ne'er-do-well who persuades misfit American teen Lane and French youth Bernard to run off to Venice and consolidate their love by the Bridge of Sighs, it's not one that'll win over hardened cynics either.

Atrociously directed and full of groan-making jokes, but the cast are having such a good time that it's difficult not to respond in a similar way.

The director's smugness effortlessly trumps Robby Müller's camera-work and the good performances (notably from Denholm Elliott). Hard to imagine how anyone could make less of such a promising subject.

Syrupy schlock from perhaps the most sentimental of all Italian directors, a pointless update of King Vidor's '30s weepie about a former champion boxer's attempts to hang on to his doting son when his estranged wife reappears on the scene.

Less subversive than his earlier work; still hilarious, though. [03 Nov 2004]

'Mysterious' events are so heavily laden with symbolism that any possibility of suspense or credibility is sunk even before Nature can start to get really raw. Walkabout and The Last Wave did it much better.

All a bit too earnest, despite the seriousness of the subject, with Fonda setting her jaw and stepping into father's footsteps as Tinseltown's very own protector of humanity; but it's tightly scripted and directed, and genuinely tense in places.

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.

McDowell's comically histrionic performance is, in fact, the single redeeming feature in this lamentably simplistic and unpleasant piffle.

Not entirely successful, but still an imaginative and ambitious attempt to combine historical speculation, conspiracy thriller, and the world of Conan Doyle.

In the final count, nothing is satisfactorily resolved because tensions remain unexplored, while the atmospherically beautiful images merely entice and divert. The result is little more than a discreetly artistic horror film.

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.

You'd have to be blind to miss the moral.

A huge disappointment after The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Gauntlet, this rambling comedy forsakes the subtle, self-deprecating humour of those films and opts for a far rowdier and broader comedy that never really goes anywhere or says anything.

Endless and doggedly in earnest.

The film allows naiveté and knowingness to coexist. Only when it goes all out for cold Batmanesque villainy in the second half does it narrow its focus and lose its way.

Ideally, though, it should prove as gruelling a test of its audience's moral and political conscience as it seems to have been for its makers.

Mercifully, the book has escaped the typical Disney demolition; Bakshi's version, using animation and live-action tracings, is uniformly excellent, sticking closely to the original text and visually echoing many of Tolkien's own drawings.

A hammed-up version of the old chestnut about the ventriloquist who is 'taken over' by his dummy, clumsily adapted by William Goldman from his own novel and infinitely better done in The Great Gabbo and Dead of Night.

The 'camera' takes a conventionally objective viewpoint, perpetually rolling over rolling countryside, which effectively robs the plot of all its terror and tension. And the bunnies are a crudely drawn, charmless bunch, with the final nail provided by the soundtrack's famous voices, who help turn the film into a radio play.

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

It’s Carpenter’s direction that makes Halloween tick, and resulted in it becoming (still, possibly) the most successful indie film ever made.

On the plus side are vast, brilliant sets by Tony Walton, a couple of well-staged show-stoppers ('Everybody Rejoice' in the Wicked Witch's sweat-shop, and 'Emerald City Ballet'), Michael Jackson (the Scarecrow), Richard Pryor (The Wiz), and Diana Ross who, as Dorothy, is just gorgeous.

One-joke spoof on that B movie staple of the '50s, monstrously enlarged scientific mutations. The big red ones have their way with corrupt politicians and (via bloody Bloody Marys) housewife tipplers, while the pastiche '50s soundtrack croons 'I know I'm gonna miss her, a tomato ate my sister'.

Chantal Akerman's feature is one of the few 'feminist' movies that's as interesting aesthetically as politically.

A lot of weak action scenes and weaker lines, but still a vast improvement on Dracula A.D. 1972.

Over-extended and sloppily characterised Agatha Christie whodunit, with Ustinov's Poirot investigating the murder of an heiress aboard a steamer in the 30s.

A ludicrously overblown soap opera set in Italian Brooklyn which races from childhood anorexia to adolescent sexual trauma via wife-battering.

The plot (Stallone scheming himself and his two brothers uptown on the tails of ambitious gimmickry) is shot full of sentimental holes; but the creation of a floridly fantasticated netherworld of low-life high-rollers and their inevitably multi-coloured circumlocutions is irresistible.

Some good special effects, but with strictly tele-standard acting, straightforward space opera plot, grandiose sentiment and slushy love interest, it's really only meat for genre fans.

Engaging tongue-in-cheek exploitation pic.

A shallow, chic confusion of eyes, camera lenses, and saleable images of violence of the sort it now purports to question as an 'issue'.

Reisz nimbly avoids the Big Theme style, finds the pace of his material early, and sustains it brilliantly, emerging with a contemporary classic of hard-edged adventure and three superb character studies.

An unashamed sense of its own fantasy is coupled with classically mounted slapstick; nostalgia mixes with cynicism in seductive proportions; and John Belushi's central performance as brain-damaged slob-cum-Thief of Baghdad is wonderful.

The rich vein of 'innocent' anarchy running through Burt Reynolds comedy showcases around this time is mined again to good effect as his Smokey and the Bandit persona transmutes seamlessly into the ace Hollywood stuntman of the title, and director Needham (an ex-stuntman himself) slips effortlessly into a lightweight satire of the movie biz and an almost Hawksian action-comedy of male-group professionalism.

A combination of brilliantly edited car chases and existential thriller which recalls the sombreness of Melville and the spareness of Leone in a context which is the 'classical' economy of directors like Hawks and Walsh.

This crass moral pantomime is plain embarrassing.

Unsatisfactory as a whole, the film is hilarious and tense in bits.

A risibly inadequate disaster movie.

Third and last in the Bad News series, with Curtis as a Hollywood hustler trying to make a buck exploiting the sad sack little league baseballers, but suffering the obligatory change of heart. Dire.

Beatty ambles nicely enough through the hero's part (remodeled as a quarterback), and Charles Grodin turns up trumps playing another of his chinless, spineless wonders. But Christie's comedy gifts are as minuscule as ever, and the film drags its feet uncertainly from beginning to end.

The narrative goes a bit over the top in the second half, but it's after a large dose of the best kind of escapist good humour.

This sequel lacks the bravura pacing of the original, and though it tries to maintain the biblical tone in following the adolescence of its antichrist anti-hero, immense problems emerge.

Routine hi-jinks ensue, mixing strangely with ecology consciousness-raising, pseudo-scientific jargon, and everyday telekinesis.

One of Hollywood's better 'growing up' movies, this steers well clear of tear-jerker material by tracking the on-off juvenile romance of car-mad (post-Star Wars) Hamill and apprentice hooker Annie Potts through the neon glare of Las Vegas.

The premise of Capricorn One is so intrinsically arresting that it almost saves the film from the sheer incompetence of its script...Pretty soon the project gets bogged down in innumerable difficulties, not helped by the awfulness of most of the dialogue. The climactic introduction of Telly Savalas in a crop-dusting plane must rank as one of the most desperate measures to save a thriller since William Castle hung luminous skeletons from the cinema roof.

All this, along with the tremulous romanticism, might seem unbearably portentous were it not for some lovely comic moments - notably, Busey in the draft-dodging scenes - and the sheer exhilaration of the surfing footage.

Fine biopic which showcases a brilliant performance by Busey as Holly, and conveys a real, raw feeling for the music.

An engaging attempt to take the piss out of the crocodile tears that have been gleefully exploited since Love Story.

Stallone's performance is a superb blend of stubborn-jawed gravity and ironic hamming as he heads, Godfather-like, for a confrontation with the Senate.

The special effects are superb, easy winners in an engaging inter-denominational free-for-all that blends Marvel Comics' Doctor Strange with Corman's The Raven. A successful excursion, spoiled only by the director's habit of plopping in postcard views of the Golden Gate Bridge instead of exteriors.

A skilful blend of the familiar (casting, English locations) and the outrageous (the script's mix of whodunit, disaster movie and telekinetic thriller) produces a beguiling entertainment in which half the fun's to be had from constructing a coherent synopsis out of the loony mess of flashback, foresight, eccentricity and even ecology.

Despite the scandalised yelps about child pornography, a film of disarmingly subversive innocence.

If it never quite rises to the kind of parable one half expects from the Corman factory, it's still OK.

One yearns for a routine cops and robbers story, but Grosbard lingers with illusory impartiality over the technical details of the parole system, the problems of finding accommodation and work, and the nastiness of the backyard pool-and-barbecue life-style of riche America.

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.

This attempted follow-up to Carrie almost entirely lacks its predecessor's narrative thrust and suspense.

The gory, censor-hacked murders (all of women) and the revelation of the nut's identity (he's gone on to kidnap a virgin as substitute for his dead daughter) are all out of the way inside half-an-hour, leaving a lot of dead time to establish this awful movie's single original gimmick: the novelty encounter of two psychos, who end up at each other's throats.

Cliché piles on cliché to the strains of a garbled '60s soundtrack, but the movie's ending goes some way to recognising its failure. Fonda is magnificent.

Very probably the most clear-sighted movie ever made about the ways that shopfloor workers get f.cked over by the system.

Eraserhead is a singular work of the imagination, a harrowing, heartbreaking plunge into the darkest recesses of the soul.

Gruelling yet humorous look at a bunch of Marines through training and posting to Vietnam in 1968, this turns every war film cliché upside down: transistor radios grind out rock music over the life-and-death patrols, and the GIs behave less like soldiers than shambling tourists.

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

At once a lament to the ravages of age and an examination of those tiny foibles which separate reality from dramatic artifice, it’s a baffling and intricate film which, although light on conventional pleasures, still manages to provoke and beguile.

The book's humour was the ribald and understandable explosion of a safety valve; here it is merely an offensive display of stereotyping, sexism and patronising insincerity. A travestied misrepresentation and a notably complete failure.

The well paced script is an effective mixture of worldliness and naïveté: despite the couple's graphic sparring scenes, in which Eastwood more than meets his match, their relationship remains curiously innocent; a kind of fugitive romanticism pervades.

Comedy-adventure with a hit-and-miss list of Disney ingredients: street-smart (formerly 'spunky') Jodie Foster, Uncle David Niven wearing eccentric disguises, sweet Ms Hayes, winsome orphans, a slapstick climax.

Overall Simon's ego-splitting wisecracks make for many good laughs, even though, in contrast to Woody Allen's nervous New York humour, which has the discomforting ring of truth, Simon opts for a playwright's ring of confidence.

Though not as sharp or as unusual as Ritchie's earlier Smile, this is still a delightful, gentle satire on the American ideal of winning, which also takes broad but often hilarious swipes at fashionable health fads.

There's some beautiful dancing and a wealth of detail about the world of classical ballet. Interesting and entertaining.

Whether one takes the two-part movie as a glamorous epic or as a lengthy advertisement for the Italian communist party, it still looks like a major catastrophe.

A real mess.

Only Diane Keaton's performance counters the overall heavy-handedness.

At times deeply insightful, at others wholly crass, Rolling Thunder is a fascinating curio, the meeting point between realism and exploitation.

So here we have God's views on most things from TV to avocados, all enunciated in Burns' inimitably crisp'n'dry manner. Fun ultimately falters with some routine satire, but when the Devil's having such a time at the box-office, this comes as a welcome comic riposte from the other side.

Superb adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game, with Hopper as her amiably cynical hero.

With his sharp eye for the bizarre and for vulgar over-decoration, it's always fascinating to watch; the thrills and spills are so classy and fast that the movie becomes in effect what horror movies seemed like when you were too young to get in to see them. Don't think, just panic.

Sticking quite happily to the level of parody, it's full of energy, good nature, and the gross-out humour of fairly obvious targets (the tits and bums of a sexploitation trailer; the festering stiff of a TV charity appeal for the dead). The central sketch is an excellent spoof of Enter the Dragon. Great fun for an undemanding night out.

There is some startling footage, but Anderson's direction dithers perceptibly, and finally opts for an unpleasant mish-mash of phony ecological concern and meretricious sensationalism. The ultimate indignity the beast suffers is to become a simple extension of Harris' threadbare macho image.

Parallel families, Lassie-style pet dogs who turn hunter-killers, savage Nature: exploitation themes are used to maximum effect, and despite occasional errors, the sense of pace never errs. A heady mix of ironic allegory and seat-edge tension.

Bad news indeed. A quite ghastly sequel to The Bad News Bears in which the subject's incipient sentimentality has been left to run riot, with all charm, humour and believability lost in the process.

A lame sequel to Connor's earlier Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, The Land That Time Forgot, which was at least occasionally lively.

Cornball mish-mash.

It's all drastically boring.

By the time Sorcerer gets around to its rain-soaked, rickety-bridge set piece, you’ll either be obsessed or fully checked out. Give yourself a chance to pick sides.

If the dolce vita-style intrusion is given distinctly Jacqueline Susann-like overtones by the rather dissociated dialogue in the English language version, Conversation Piece nevertheless comes across as a visually rich and resonant mystery, far more fluid and sympathetic than Death in Venice.

Superbly scored, beautifully designed by Boris Leven to highlight the genre's artificiality, and performed to perfection.

Within this spare plot, Sembene raises issues of obvious pertinence to modern Senegal, such as the tension between spiritual and temporal power, Princess Dior's renunciation of her role of victim to take decisive action, and village leaders who are only too willing to betray their Africanness to maintain the status quo.

It has sex objects for all tastes, instant fun, danger and boredom in unequal proportions, strobe-light climaxes, and Donna Summer in stereo. Furthermore, it does away with a storyline and dances on the spot for two hours, taking voodoo, buried treasure, violence and sea monsters in its stride.

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.

Ozu's first film in colour, and he uses it sparingly. Subdued dress sense and domestic interiors are set against splashes of significant red (look out for the kettle!), representing the amaryllis which blooms around the autumn equinox - the perfect image for a film about transition.

Sombre and claustrophobic photography, an intelligent script, and Peckinpah's clear understanding of a working platoon of men, are all far removed from the monotonous simplicity of most big-budget war films.

The film uses the CB craze as a metaphor for lack of human communication, and proceeds in a somewhat elliptical manner, but the alternation of moments of black humour and funny-sad incidents lends it a considerable charm.

Richard Sale's adaptation of his own novel hints at something more intimate. His Hickok is haunted, ageing, and diseased, trapped and uncertain in his own myth. Because of this, the movie occasionally takes an interesting turn, but less often than it should, because J Lee Thompson's direction clings to the increasing number of action set pieces with all the relief of a drowning man clutching a life raft.

A few of his labyrinthine concerns and much advanced animation work (plus optical assistance from once-celebrated avant-gardist Jordan Belson) spice the thin conceit, but it's a doomed project.