The monochrome photography and pseudo-documentary interpolations can't disguise the basic Harold Robbins material, and the good performances (Hoffman and Perrine) stand little chance against Fosse's withering direction: the subject matter needs far defter psychological handling than it gets.

An astonishing, compulsive film, directed with a crackling energy.

Flat, generally laughable hokum, and the film ends up nowhere near as interesting a comment on the psychological aspects of disaster as Juggernaut.

A highly inventive updating of the Phantom of the Opera story to the rockbiz world - complete with borrowings from Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

A ridiculous sequel, bad enough to be enjoyable, what with its jumbo jet crammed full of Hollywood celebs - Gloria Swanson, Myrna Loy, Sid Caesar, even Linda Blair (as a teenager being rushed to a kidney transplant) who looks like she is going to vomit over two nuns.

Against the novelty of the canine stunts one has to balance some terribly variable acting, poor lighting, and spotty photography. Attendant adults will probably find it a long haul.

There are points when the director allows his voice to ring a little loudly from behind the camera, but the richness and depth of both the photography and the characterisation manage to brush any signs of preachiness and sentimentality from view.

Reisz's direction is panoramic, with aspirations towards the epic, when it should have been closer in and faster. The result is a highly melodramatic and romantic film, for all the veneer of disillusion, whose weighty statement too often swamps the potentially strong suspense.

John Ryan's performance as the husband is particularly astute, and Bernard Herrmann's score milks the suspense for all it's worth.

As much as any surrealist arthouse flick, Texas Chain Saw feels like a nightmare made real, an inescapable but entirely authentic vision of pure hell.

Ozu's pessimism is deeply reactionary, and the idiosyncrasy of his methods is more interesting for its exoticism than anything else; but anyone who finds the socio-psychological problems of post-war Japan engaging will find the movie both fascinating and rather moving, simply as evidence.

Roger Corman's production, following up on his own Bloody Mama, is something of a delight. Although covering the familiar ground of bank robbing during the Depression, the film persistently and boisterously treads its own path.

Humankind's fate is left in the hands of several unusually inept and colourless scientists, the ants get the works from the special effects department, and original ideas (so often a casualty in sci-fi cinema) take a back seat.

The themes are dignity and compromise, freedom and betrayal; if it all gets bogged down occasionally in its macho-violence trip, it's nevertheless very exciting, very witty, and elevated above its action-movie status by Aldrich's deliberate references to Nixon in Albert's characterisation of the warden.

Mazursky has escaped Fellini's shadow; when everyone's back from going to 'look for America', he might have something interesting to say.

It remains a how-to model for making something that fancies itself a slow-burn thriller—until it isn’t slow-burning whatsoever.

Readable equally as a bleak, brutal exploitation movie and as a horrified, humanist cry from a disturbed soul, Alfredo Garcia is a worthy rediscovery.

Like Hawks, Altman feels rather than thinks his way into a subject, with a special interest in how people relate to one another in moments of crisis. In the process he shows more of what's happening in America than most newsreels, coaxes jazzy and inventive performances out of his actors (Prentiss and Welles are particular treats), and asks for a comparable amount of creative improvisation from his audience while busily hopping from one distraction to the next.

The wealth of sketched-in technical detail is fairly engrossing, and the energy of this Halicki production (he also wrote, directed, stars and supplied the vehicles) is arresting. It's a pity that it had to descend into such routine carnage.

The sense of location is strong, emphasising a hostile, nightmarish terrain; but Winner's recourse to caricature when dealing with police and thugs, and his virtually overt sympathies with the confused, violent Bronson, make for uncritical, simplistic viewing.

A syrupy kids' yarn from former Disney animal-movie specialist Tokar, backed by appropriate soundtrack odes from the Osmonds and Andy Williams.

Hollywood begins to package its feasts, and That's Entertainment! has all the flavour of the Vesta dehydrated line.

In 1974 a director (Polanski), a screenwriter (Towne) and a producer (Evans) could decide to beat a genre senseless and dump it in the wilds of Greek tragedy.

Excellent performances; fascinating film.

Opening with a brilliant sequence in which Segal is reborn on the operating table, and building towards a finale in which the scientists realise that they can do nothing to control this hi-tech monster of their own making, the film's bleak futuristic vision also benefits greatly from some extraordinary sets, and from writer/producer/director Hodges' confident direction.

Despite some insipid characterisation and one or two lapses, things move along at a fair pace and there's a surprising plot all about property speculation in San Francisco. Can Grandma Steinmetz save her home from the grasping magnate Alonzo Hawk? The comedy is on the whole inventive, occasionally aspiring to almost surrealist heights.

With superbly handled action sequences, excellent cinematography, and a Morricone score worthy of his Man With No Name efforts, it's a film to be seen.

Looks like a throwaway Eastwood vehicle, through which he drifts as the older partner, allowing Jeff Bridges to strike most of the sparks and steal the movie as his good-natured sidekick.

There is no real social conflict in the film, and it becomes just a period variant on The Last Picture Show, without the vigour of that film or the irony of the original James novel.

The script, about small-timers who wished they were bigger, is soon totally undermined by Fonda's most complacent performance to date and Susan George's sub-Goldie Hawn antics. By way of compensation, the locations are quite pretty and the car stunts are handled with a certain verve.

Though by no means a perfect film, it is a much more coherent work than it is given credit, held together by Siegel's exuberant eye for the incongruous.

Things begin well, with Fisher adding some atmospheric touches and Cushing suggesting a man undermined by his excessive rationality. Unfortunately the script, which treads a wavering line between jerky comedy and seriousness, soon dissipates anyone else's better intentions.

A small masterpiece that places the mood and general ethos of the '50s with absolute precision and total affection.

The film may be a brilliant visual record of the Floyd playing, but sadly the music works on you more if you just close your eyes.

A percussive, Velvet-y score by John Cale and several casting surprises (including the long-absent Barbara Steele) help keep both pace and interest high. It's no more than passable as a thriller, but the density of invention and energy in other respects is enough to shame a dozen contemporary major studio movies.

A bleak and devastatingly brilliant film.

Grier is an actress able to convey an amazing and unflinching strength, and she reveals the film for the dross it is.

Horror film director Hessler and special effects man Ray Harryhausen combine brilliantly to trace Sinbad's mystical voyage. The effects aren't simply fascinating for their own sake - they genuinely convey a sense of the magical and otherworldly.

The Amicus studio is better known for omnibus horror films like Torture Garden and Tales from the Crypt, and this flaccid feature suggests they would have done better to stick to that winning formula.

The cast is good (though it remains very much Lester's film), the fights appropriately energetic, and it all moves along at a fair pace, sprinkled with a number of good gags.

The story is simple but the imagery more than compensates: from the tragic-beautiful opening – Yuki’s mother dies in childbirth (and in prison) as white flakes drift peacefully by the barred windows – through a series of shocking, angry flashbacks, to the striking, unexpectedly emotive final shot, this is beautifully controlled, almost sedate action cinema.

Never portentous, never a mere spoof, this is a touching, intelligent, and - in its own small way - rather wonderful movie.

The script gradually falls apart into a mess of philosophical pottage under the whimsically pretentious Tolkien influence. But visually the film remains a sparkling display of fireworks, brilliantly shot and directed.

While the cinematography has dated rather badly, the story and the performances of both Tyson and her supporting cast are more than powerful enough to make it worthwhile viewing. [04 Sep 2008, p.72]

William Friedkin’s full-throttle adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel works because it fuses the extreme and the everyday.

While never as disturbing as the first film, it fails to convince because of the turnaround in Harry's character, and because it posits in facile fashion degrees of taking the law into one's own hands: Harry's acceptable, the gun crazy kids aren't. That said, it has some fine action sequences, and is far less objectionable than the later Sudden Impact.

All a bit soulless, but at least there's no equivalent of the 'Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head' sequence. All those who liked the earlier film should enjoy this as much.

In its desire to make no concessions to Dirty Harry and its ilk, it destroys any potential interest with almost wilful perversity.

With Schaffner unable to find the necessary perspective to prevent the film from becoming unevenly episodic, it ends up looking as if it were tacked together by at least three different directors.

Despite Robert Towne's often sharp script - about two veteran sailors detailed to escort a young and naïve rating to prison, and showing him a sordidly 'good time' en route - and despite strong performances all round, one can't help feeling that the criticism of modern America hits out at all too easy targets in a vague and muffled manner.

A superbly chilling essay in the supernatural.

Whereas the later film built up an impressively complex series of narrative strands and psychological motivations, this is far more one-dimensional, and is so laxly structured that its rambling story seems to last longer than the (almost) three-hour Prince of the City.

An inferior reworking of The Thing from Another World, which still manages to keep interest alive despite some poor special effects, a flat jokiness and stereotype characters.

With Jodorowsky's meaning somewhat opaque, it's slightly tedious going, but you certainly get plenty to look at.

It's performed beautifully, laced with a quietly ironic wit, and quite lovely to look at.

Good baddies, good poignant bits, and an archery contest that degenerates into all-action American football make up for the familiar, repetitive plot and the several lapses of taste and intelligence inevitable in medieval Nashville.

With the script glossing whole areas of confrontation (from the communist '30s to the McCarthy witch-hunts), it often passes into the haze of a nostalgic fashion parade.

Marvellous, toughly eccentric thriller which confirmed that Siegel had more responses to '70s paranoia than a mere Magnum blast, and decisively removed Matthau from the wasteland of Neil Simon wit.

A muddled and slick youth film. Excellent sequences of his quarrelsome study group tearing one another apart under fierce competitive strain - and a fine performance by Houseman as their olympian, sadistic professor - make the film watchable.

Badlands is as psychologically precise as it is splendidly visually observant. But it also exudes a timeless, mythical and tragic quality which is all the more remarkable for the languorous ease with which its story unfolds.

Scorsese directs with a breathless, head-on energy which infuses the performances, the sharp fast talk, the noise, neon and violence with a charge of adrenalin. One of the best American films of the decade.

Coldly described, the set and costume design and the hothouse atmosphere represent so much high-camp gloss; but once again this careful stylisation enables Fassbinder to balance between parody of an emotional stance and intense commitment to it. He films in long, elegant takes, completely at the service of his all-female cast, who are uniformly sensational.

The Mother and the Whore is an icy comment on the New Wave, informed throughout by Eustache's striking visual intelligence.

Though the baseball scenes themselves are secondary and none too convincing, De Niro nails the sentimental tearjerker stuff.

There's a boldness, confident stylisation, and genuine weirdness to the movie that totally escaped other post-spaghetti American Westerns, with a real sense of exorcism running both through and beyond it.

Worth seeing for Lee, but still unforgivably wasteful of his talents.

Despite the impressive desert locations and an array of tanks (to represent the ills of modern militarism), it's still staged like a student revue. Most notable moments are the garden of Gethsemane scene, where Jewison cuts in leering Pharisees and crucifixion details from Flemish masters to supremely kitschy effect, and the scene of Christ being flogged, shot in sadistic slow motion.

Everything becomes one long car chase, and in the end it's just a matter of the fat bald bully getting his comeuppance at the hands of the not-so-fat toupeed hero.

Like a Thunder Road filtered through the perceptions of the '70s, it's an invigorating and touching movie.

A complete mess, with biblical references (for some reason the central love story parallels the Fall), hallucinatory sequences, laboured borrowings, and moronic direction, yet quite enjoyable in its rubbishy way.

The cast lend the film an authority that Yates' curiously pedestrian approach fails to provide, and Mitchum's agonies over codes of underworld honour segue perfectly into his subsequent explorations of loyalty and obligation in The Yakuza.

French actor-filmmaker Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece still holds up as a feast of subtle sight gags, playful noise and, above all, visual wonders.

Milius filters his story through countless B movies and detective stories, indirectly paying homage to all the different media that have contributed to the Dillinger legend, but keeps things the right side of nostalgia.

Trivialising the theme, saddled with some terrible dialogue, needlessly tricked out with a lot of countdown-style dates, it founders into innocuous routine.

Like Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it both records and condemns the passage of time and the advent of progress; and there is a sombre, mournful quality which places the film very high up in the league of great Westerns.

Good, solid stuff, assembled efficiently enough to be pretty persuasive.

Modern cynicism and efficient acting hold the potential mushiness at bay, and the pair's picaresque odyssey through the Kansas dustbowl, during which they vie for control over their increasingly bizarre partnership, is admirably served by Laszlo Kovacs' marvellous monochrome camerawork.

What makes the film is essentially the character of Coffy as played by Pam Grier with increasing alienation: a nurse out to get the men who are responsible for her little sister's addiction, she makes a conscious decision to manipulate the sexual situations which the men around her force her to engage in. It is a performance that defies and subverts the genre.

Winner directs with typically crass abandon, wasting a solid performance from Lancaster and a story that a director like Jean-Pierre Melville might have made something of.

Hollywood movies have rarely spoken such tough and tender truths.

Comedy horror that really does give Vincent Price a chance to do his stuff, with deliciously absurd results.

In retrospect, it does indeed appear as a highly efficient gut-ripper, with far more suggestion than De Palma's later work of the loose-end flux of real life going on in the background. There is, however, much early evidence of his rampant misogyny, his increasingly blatant stealings from Hitchcock, and most unforgivable of all, his clear distaste for the people he creates.

Despite cries of outrage from hard-line Chandler purists, this is, along with Hawks' The Big Sleep, easily the most intelligent of all screen adaptations of the writer's work.

Innocuous animated fare (with songs) from Hanna-Barbera, based on EB White's fantasy.

It's an interesting example of how a stock Western plot can assume some fairly explicit political ramifications once it is transposed to a modern setting (not that that is any recommendation).

Sembene makes his point with a humour all the more powerful for the anger it induces at the genocidal antics of the whites. A conventional film, but it succeeds in its aim, clarifying the logic of the colonial struggle through a specific example.

The band ride after half a million's worth of stolen gold so they can turn it in for the 50,000 dollars reward; it's that sort of film. Loads of male camaraderie and big country theme music, plus Ann-Margret riding along as a box-office concession and to get the rest of the cast horny in a U Certificate sort of way.

Wittily directed by May, and neatly scripted by Neil Simon (from Bruce Jay Friedman's story A Change of Plan), though somewhere the film loses its thread and forgets how to draw things decently to a close.

Peckinpah's own control of the escalating frenzy is masterly; this is one of his coldest films, but a great thriller.

It's a terrific piece of junk: the top-notch screenwriters (Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes) never let a cliché slip through the net, and Neame's anaemic direction ensures that every absurdity is treated at face value.

Admirers of Playtime won't be too disappointed, but for the Tati heretic it's a long, slow haul between the occasional brilliant gag.

A glossy, violent, pointless movie from the team who later perpetrated Death Wish; mildly entertaining if you want to watch Bronson suggesting silent, brooding menace for the umpteenth time.

What it tells you most about is those kitschy concepts of 'stardom' and the like on a soap-opera/backstage drama level.

Impossible not to admire the total withholding of irony in Claxton's approach to this kamikaze project.

A patently absurd and funny movie, involving a series of spectacular fight routines, often filmed in slow motion, which are highly acrobatic and exciting.

This sub-$100,000 exploitation movie fused the sleazy intensity of the grindhouse with the piercing intelligence of an art film, and remains a brutal but rewarding experience.