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.

Script, photography and performances (including Dillon before he decided to become a teenage Stallone) are all top notch, while Kaplan directs with pace, imagination, and a fine ear for dialogue and music.

It provides the thinnest of excuses for rerunning the 'dramas' of the night before, but it doesn't do anything to salvage the venerable formula.

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.