Its strongest card is the outrageously charismatic Schwarzenegger, but its view of musclemen and physique contests in general has a charm not unlike Rocky.

Rosenberg here confuses seriousness with tedious solemnity, and with the star glut has produced a compacted TV series.

The direction is agonisingly pedantic for a comedy, and leaves O'Neal and Reynolds totally exposed, mugging away in charmless and clumsy fashion.

With an imaginative use of locations, carefully controlled atmosphere, and superb performances all round, it's an often impressive, always watchable modern noir thriller, based on credible human motivations.

Apart from the flash new environment, this version vaunts its modernity by vulgarising everything in sight, making the characters mouthpieces for foul language and equally foul sentimentality

The results of this technological bonanza are pretty mixed.

Nothing jells at all - least of all the central conceit of the hero becoming shaggy (sometimes the dog's a dog, sometimes a man with fur). It's also not much fun seeing Jones, Pleshette and Wynn getting older and older, staler and staler, playing the parts they've been stuck with for years.

The fifth Pink Panther effort might seem marginally disappointing even to diehard Clouseau fans, with slapstick gags for the pratfalling clown hung very loosely on increasingly implausible jetsetting plot antics.

An overlong, sentimental and lifeless biopic of Woody Guthrie.

Rocky is an old-fashioned fairytale brilliantly revamped to chime in with the depressed mood of the '70s. Although its plot - nonentity gets to fight the heavyweight champ - is basically fantasy, the film deftly manages to suspend disbelief by drawing back at its more implausible moments.

Silver Streak, the train which travels from LA to Chicago and houses a murder, dawdles rather than streaks. Characters and plot ramble at will, and no matter how high Colin Higgins' script flies, Arthur Hiller's direction remains with feet and hands firmly on the ground.

Although uneven, the result is still a lot better than Hollywood's last look at itself (Day of the Locust) and its last slice of Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby).

This still-prescient vivisection of modern culture’s vapidity crackles with the nervous energy of midtown’s hothouse broadcasters.

Far more than a sterile exercise in suspense: Communion constantly keeps the audience on its toes with a wealth of incidental detail, excellent set pieces and technical versatility.

Efficient enough as formula suspense, but it fails to confront the implications of its subject, preferring instead evasiveness and fast cynicism to pull it through.

The remarkable thing is the way characters, jokes and meaning are dovetailed into a single rhythmic flow that makes the film look like TV's Laugh-In redesigned as a Minnelli musical. Highly enjoyable.

God Told Me To overflows with such perverse and subversive notions that no amount of shoddy editing and substandard camerawork can conceal the film's unusual qualities.

It's gruellingly long, the four-track stereo relentless, and the music a mechanical recreation of Zeppelin standards (eg. 'Whole Lotta Love', 'Stairway to Heaven).

The current minor boom in American horror films has two notable features: the single-minded concentration on the nuclear family as a point of attack, and the consistent rejection of happy endings. This tale of a family taking a spooky old mansion for the summer would be strictly formula stuff were it not for these elements; but veteran Eugène Lourié's art direction helps.

Adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, this thriller is quite effective in its basic set pieces, even if the overall thrust seems a trifle ponderous.

Paul Williams’ annoyingly hummable honky-tonk soundtrack punctuates proceedings, which graze the zenith of that seventies inclination towards sexualising teen performers (think ‘Minipops’ in America).

Scantily clad Ms Munro, vengeful telepathic pterodactyls and cut-price explosions comprise a familiar mix, but it's daft enough to enjoy if you're in a schoolboy mood.

Too much of this is tedious, rather like off-cuts from his recent movies, but the reasonable photography and good action material help. Country singer Jerry Reed makes a good heavy, and when Reynolds keeps it simple, his direction suggests the makings of a modest craftsman.

A subtle, touching valedictory tribute to both Wayne and the Western in general.

The script, which labours under polysyllabic mumbo-jumbo at times, is infantile, while the performances, apart from a sprightly Danner as Fonda's TV cohort, are spineless.

Schrader and De Palma's tribute to Hitchcock's Vertigo may lack the misogyny and bloodbath sensationalism of De Palma's later work, but it's still dressed up in a mortifyingly vacuous imitation of the Master's stylistic touches.

The film's unlikely trump card is Richard Widmark as a credibly sceptical supernatural investigator, who romps through the proceedings with a disarming stoicism, but regrettably faces his devilish opponent Lee only in the closing sequence. It's a good deal more interesting than the rest of the possession cycle, but still a disappointment.

Pitched at cartoon level, with a bizarre collection of speed enthusiasts crudely taking care of the comedy, it relies almost exclusively on the exceptional stunt work, the plot only occasionally dropping into first gear for some boring and irrelevant dramatic stuff.