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.

As a vehicle for their considerable comic talents, the enterprise is wheelclamped by type casting.

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

The cast are decent, but not much more. Filmed in Panavision and angled at childre

The performances are all reasonably enjoyable, but it's the sort of film the British cinema could well do without.

Impossibly exotic and glossy, its emotional dynamics make no sense today, so that all we're left with is a trite celebration of Warren and Annette as lovers made for each other.

Martin zips from boyhood to manhood in a ridiculously short period, and in no time at all is getting it together with Beth Logan (Zuniga), who doesn't know about his dad being a creepy-crawly. But when Martin's skin starts falling off, she begins to suspect that it's more than just a case for Clearasil, and resolves to help her loved one sort out his confused chromosomes - too late to avoid the onslaught of latex and squishy special effects for which we've all been waiting, and which is indeed the movie's only interesting commodity. Other than that, it's standard directionless fare.

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

Burton is too old for the part, and Richardson's turgidly literal approach is none too involving.

The film, simplistically assuming the book's central metaphor to be imperialism - hence the military slant - retains the bare bones of Gollding's narrative, but that's all. There's little attempt to hint at the deeper issues.

Often very funny in its topsy-turvy comments on racism, the script unfortunately has to battle against a director determined to use every gaudy trick in the book.

Pacino, as the boy, proves that he didn't need Coppola to make him act, but Kitty Winn is less satisfactory, and the film is finally subject to an iron law of diminishing returns after its plot plumbs the depths and can find nothing to do except batter us some more.

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.

What matters in this type of film is not so much the plot as the way in which an atmosphere is created. Unfortunately, Rosenberg directs flatly, hopping from one set piece to the next, disjointedly throwing characters of varying interest across Newman's path, while the latter - in his coarsest performance yet - remains content to wisecrack and ham outrageously.

This talky would-be satire can find neither an appropriate tone nor a realised human drama to communicate the ideas. But there are some sharp lines and good scenes.

While the star himself effortlessly commands attention, the film around him too often collapses in a welter of rhubarbing locals, piffling model work, and the most cardboard sets Elstree could offer. The result is weird, but not wonderful.

Everything is predictable, except perhaps for the searching close-ups of the star's behind. In other respects, Lowe's performance is quite decent, and he cannot be blamed for the puerile humour of a director who considers putting false teeth into someone's beer to be a good joke.

Live action cartoonery had been underworked since Tashlin mapped its possibilities with Jerry Lewis, but the novelty value of Sellers' disaster-prone Inspector Clouseau, funny French accent and all, wore off quicker than its commercial value.

Passion, certainly, is lacking, and being a 'town' Western, it's all very conventionally domestic.

The plot is all pot-shots and posses, with a bit of Indian hocus-pocus thrown in for comic relief. In other words, more of the same.

The opening scene on a rain-drenched rubbish tip hints at great things, but despite strong writing and an exceptional cast, the plotting is suspect and the murderer's identity is obvious from very early on.

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.

As usual it is technically excellent, but the charm, characterisation and sheer good humour that made features like Pinocchio and Jungle Book so enjoyable are sadly absent.

Only Streisand's second movie, but already (as co-star Matthau grumbled) she was hogging the screen. The trouble is that there isn't much to hog in this elephant which gave Star! a helping hoof in burying the Hollywood musical.

Once again Cimino's ability to handle furious action set pieces is well to the fore: a shootout in a Chinese restaurant and a battle with two pistol-packing Chinese punkettes put him in the Peckinpah class. The connecting material, however, is by turns muddled, crass and dull, amounting mostly to Stanley's interminable self-justification.

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.

The action is lean and tough, the body count huge, and the final shootout an obvious reprise of Peckinpah's finale. But where the latter's vision transformed The Wild Bunch into a savage elegy for the passing of the Old West, Hill can only duplicate its choreographed violence.

Everything seems to revolve around an art fraud, though that's never quite clear since this plot falls into the category kindly known as 'baggy'.