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

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

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.

Farmer, as scripted here and played by Lange, unsurprisingly remains something of a cypher.

Goldie's inspirational shot at playing Sly Stallone and Burgess Meredith is undone by the trite, inner-city Hollywood context she always favours. Instead of 'believe in yourself', the message becomes simply 'make believe'.

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.

Rosman's debut movie was a pretty fair show-reel promising, falsely it seems, more and better to come.

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.

The Who's ludicrous rock opera was in fact tailor-made for the baroque, overblown images and simplistic symbolism of Russell's style, which only means that this is both the movie in which he is most faithful to the ideas and tone of his material, and one of his very worst films.

The film has its moments, but is rendered virtually unwatchable by Furie's mania for weirdly mannered camera angles (you spend half the time peering round, over or under obstacles behind which the action is strategically placed) and enormous, pointless close-ups.

Mediocre action pulp.

A late Wayne Western, depending heavily on recycling better (and no better) earlier pictures.

Mulligan's adaptation of Joseph Olshan's novel doesn't merely flirt with pathos, it positively marries it.

Slick, silly romantic thriller, with Dunaway as an insurance investigator falling for McQueen, the property developer led to commit a bank robbery through boredom. Much obvious 'significance' (the pair playing chess; symbolic, see?), much glossy imagery (courtesy of Haskell Wexler) fashionably fragmented into interminable split-screen nonsense, and little of any real interest.

What the film lacks, however, is the epic vision to match its epic pretensions, something to bind together the action and the ideas.

Hitchcock, seemingly too dour or too uninterested to turn in the title's promise of a Cold War ripping yarn, settles instead for a dissection of the limits of domestic trust.

There are some funny moments, and though she hams it up at times, Barkin is very good in her first comic role. But Edwards milks the comedy, keeps the sexual comment to a minimum, and brings the film to a silly, cop-out resolution.

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 quaint time machine and Oscar-winning special effects hold one's interest initially, but the overall effect is one of glossy emptiness.

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

The Fourth War may have been conceived as the thinking person's Rambo, but in the event it isn't a patch on First Blood; for a simple story, it's quite a mess, the very dubious voice-over hardly clarifying a clumsy sense of chronology.

A virtual two- hander, the narrative proceeds by contrasting Berenger's edgy pragmatism with Zane's unwilling induction to the art of murder, though the director's inventive bullets' eye-view shots still fail to dispel the suspicion that the film has little new to say.

Besides a smattering of good gags, David Webb Peoples' script touches on numerous intriguing questions (notably, what constitutes heroism?) while piling irony upon irony. But while Garcia waxes credibly sincere, Hoffman hams, and Davis simply looks lost: small wonder, given Frears' leaden direction, which contrives to scupper suspense and comedy through sluggish pacing and misguided camera placement.

Despite winning several Oscars, Olivier's (condensed) version of Shakespeare's masterpiece makes for frustrating viewing: for all its 'cinematic' ambitions (the camera prowling pointlessly along the gloomy corridors of Elsinore), it's basically a stagy showcase for the mannered performance of the director in the lead role (though he's ably supported by a number of British theatrical stalwarts).

Resnikoff fails to sustain the tension established in the opening sequences, and the plot quickly degenerates into a repetitive pattern of possession and exorcism for the victims requisitioned by Channing's soul to do its bidding. With the exception of Phillips, the performances are remarkably unconvincing.

Watchable mainly for the sheer skill and drive of Preminger's direction, although at 220 minutes even that long outstays its welcome.

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

The occasional elegiac tone lamenting the passing of the West seems entirely out of place. Only Michael Parks, still aping James Dean at nearly 40, provides some welcome distraction.