Assets there are: Caine is served with some nice deadpan lines by Rod Amateau, and John Coquillon's photography is characteristically cool. But this is an unpleasant and invidious film, like Soldier Blue creaming the surface off profound racial issues to ease the killing along.

William Goldman's leisurely script and Forbes' dull direction never quite capture the subtleties of Ira Levin's novel about an idyllic Connecticut commuter village where the housewives are a bunch of domesticated dummies.

Quite simply vulgar in comparison to its predecessors (especially Hawks' brilliant His Girl Friday), it relies too much on foul language, inappropriate slapstick, and superficial cynicism.

This is the disaster film which set the style for the genre in the decade to come.

When superfans speak of the superiority of The Godfather Part II, this is not merely to be contrary. Coppola took Mario Puzo’s pulp and darkened it with Nixonian paranoia and the power of political back rooms.

Bitter-sweet and very charming.

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.