Despite some ingenious effects, a generally trivial exercise that never matches the punch of the original.

Waters raids de Sade in pursuit of extremes, but the difference between him and Warhol (or that other arch-exponent of extreme disgust, Otto Muehl) is that Waters' grotesquerie is decidedly trivial.

Occasionally Hill comes up with some nice touches of the unexpected: a few moments of black humour, the suggestion of a deliberate pastiche here and there, but on the whole he's too resolutely fashionable a director to really get behind Vonnegut's idea of time-tripping. It ends up the wrong side of unadventurous.

Often topping lists of the best films of all time, and a great influence on many great directors of the last half century, not least for its purity of expression, this remains one of the most approachable and moving of all cinema’s masterpieces.

Filmed in the usual crisp AIP style, with dazzling sunlight and ominous shadows.

Full of stunning visuals, the ideas in the film more than compensate for the awkward scene-setting of the beginning.

Third of the Rosenberg/Newman collaborations, and a wry, leisurely relief after the heavyweight experiences of Cool Hand Luke and WUSA.

Redford and Segal are both good, parodying their normal images, as the thieves who steal the Sahara Stone from the Brooklyn Museum and spend the rest of the film chasing after it. Like Cops and Robbers it's a lightweight film, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Although the film is well performed and beautifully shot by Robert Surtees, its ideology is highly objectionable, celebrating as it does the turning of the boys into hardened killers.

Try to get Siegel’s masterful camera rise out of your head: gun-happy Harry looming over his jabbering perp, who screams like a stuck pig as the shot recedes high into a dense night fog. This is not a cop film. It’s a monster movie.

Taking elements of both the Western and the British horror film, Peckinpah's masterstroke was to shoot Straw Dogs absolutely straight, without the reassuring signposts of either type of film.

Meticulously schoolmarmish, John Hale's script lays out all the power plays behind Elizabeth Tudor's battle to keep Mary Stuart off her throne, but fails to provide much else.

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

An idiosyncratic romance, and a far lighter movie than is usual from Cassavetes. Detailing the problems that background and character bring to a relationship, he creates a captivatingly witty and sympathetic picture of a pair of misfits deciding to make a go of it together despite numerous incompatibilities and adversities.

Ashby forever treads the thin line between whimsy and absurdity and tough sentimentality and black comedy. It is most successful when it keeps to the tone of an insane fairystory set up at the beginning of the movie.

A sexless, inhuman film, whose power derives from a ruthless subordination of its content to the demands of telling a good story. A glossy, action-packed ritual which is fun to watch but superficial to think about.

It starts off with some marvellously cruel moments, and Scott's performance towers over the proceedings throughout. But Hiller's direction is pretty shoddy, while the script eventually loses its way and begins to look increasingly hysterical, at the same time shamelessly trivialising Scott's crisis.

Must all films for kids be so shoddy, though? The music is appalling.

Old-fashioned, overlong costume epic, comfortably reactionary in its view of the Tsar Nicholas as a saint who knew not what he was doing to the Russian people, and of the revolutionaries as potential tyrants reaching hungrily for power.

Simply a rivetingly murderous game of cat and mouse that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Very hard to take with the film sitting up and practically slobbering in its eagerness to prove how loveable it is. A pity, because the score isn't half bad (the show-stopping 'If I Were a Rich Man' almost gets lost), the choreography has possibilities, and Topol is distinctly personable.

It's meant to make you feel sad for what's lost, but a vitality throbs through it.

The casting of Seyrig, trailing memories of Marienbad, is inspired, and her swooning performance bewitches the entire cast. Kümel casts his own spells with alternating blue washes and red dissolves, and skilful location work that doesn't allow you to see the join between hotel exteriors and interiors - in Ostend and Brussels respectively.

The real problems, however, are that Friedkin's nervy, noisy, undisciplined pseudo-realism sits uneasily with his suspense-motivated shock editing; and that compared to (say) Siegel's Dirty Harry, the film maintains no critical distance from (indeed, rather relishes) its 'loveable' hero's brutal vigilante psychology.

The film is often sentimental, sometimes brilliant as well as horrifying, and it is intriguing to speculate on what Buñuel, whom Trumbo originally wanted to direct, would have made of it.

Would-be thoughtful Western which ultimately resorts to killing and ketchup to make up for its lack of style and originality.

It abounds with intelligently applied stop-frame, slow motion and colour treatment knick-knacks which heighten the excitement and visual impact.

No matter how thickly Russell piles on the masturbating nuns, tortured priests and dissolute dauphins, there's no getting round the fact that it's all more redolent of a camp revue than a cathartic vision. Derek Jarman's sets, however, still look terrific.