The snowman's a bland shuffling blob (from Jim Henson's Creature Shop) with two expressions, an all-purpose smile and a vague look of resignation.

In this 'movie-isation' of the justly top-rated Nickelodeon TV cartoon, the producers have left the formula intact, changing little beyond extending the running time, fleshing out the animation (unobtrusively), inserting an 'Indiana Jones' pre-movie sequence, and giving the Pickles family a new member (baby Dylan).

There are striking images here (especially in the scenes outside Salt Lake City), Martin gives a very likeable performance, and individual scenes display intelligence and wit. But it doesn't hang together very well, jump-cutting between slightly portentous artiness and light comedy, and never really adding up to very much at all.

Ironically, the very slickness of the film and the attention grabbing 'sensitivity' of Hans Zimmer's score at times become intrusive. Essential viewing, none the less.

It's by some way the best of the killer doll series, and as stylish and witty a horror movie as you could want.

Shot on actual locations in just nine days by Levin, a former documentarist, and improvised within a detailed scene-by-scene outline, this is a perplexing mix of truth and falsity, spontaneity and cliché.

Hauntingly sad, the film elegantly deranges the viewer's sense of time: this seemingly unchanging world is in fact riven by off-screen incidents - which change everything.

A film of alarming intensity.

It's a long time since Towne matched the calibre of his screenplays for Chinatown and The Last Detail, but he's still a solid bet for three-dimensional characters; as a director, his third effort has a fluidity and coherence lacking in Personal Best and Tequila Sunrise.

Modest, but immensely engaging.

The animation has little depth of field (galloping horses hover inches above the ground), the colours are watery, and there's not much Englishness in the settings. The characters, too, are unimaginative, with only bad boy Ruber (voiced by Oldman) providing any originality (his song and dance number is the one highlight).

As Wilde, descending from would-be-doting husband and father to follower of his own 'nature', and finally ruined and disgraced martyr on the tree of English hypocrisy, Fry is utterly convincing.

Challenging, witty, adventurous and utterly singular.

John Barry's score, with its reiterated 'autistic kid' theme, would have sounded corny to Ivor Novello, though it's in keeping with the general principle of patronising the audience.

This spin-off from the TV series featuring the large purple felt dinosaur of awesome good nature is emetically wholesome. The screenplay doesn't stray much from the series' 'listen, sing, and rush off to the next thing' formula.

Characteristically, Kiarostami's Palme d'Or winner is low on narrative drive, slowly but steadily revealing more and more information, visual and verbal, until we are totally caught up in his protagonist's psychological and ethical dilemma.

Immensely inventive and entertaining, the film may not have the enigmatic elegance or emotional resonance of Barton Fink or Fargo, but it's still a prime example of the Coens' effortless brand of stylistic and storytelling brilliance.

There are few traces of irony, intended fun, or Casanova-style exoticism here: the director may intened a feminist Visconti, but he ends up with a Zalman King Red Shoe Diary crossed with a Dick Lester Dumas adaptation.

This isn't a sequel, it's a remake. Some ingredients have been substituted, but it's the same recipe of R & B and comic overkill. As before, the best thing is the music: Aretha Franklin, Sam Moore, James Brown. The rest is stale, cynical and hamfisted.

Excellent support from Davidtz, Goodman, and Joy, as Hobbes' brother, though as the plot twists take precedence over character, much of the film's nuance trickles away and, along with it, the tension.

Sadly, it collapses dizzily amid a baroque shower of bejewelled costumes, Kenneth Anger style colour overload, mock fairytale purple prose, and pixillated anti-naturalistic performances. Finally pretty tedious.

Bluth has rediscovered the ingredients of quality mainstream animation: depth and movement are more in evidence, and the action sequences are expertly staged, notably a harrowing train crash.

This documentary, shocking and enlightening, succeeds in contextualising, and thus humanising, misunderstood sexual deviancy.

Despite a vaguely interesting premise - something like a chaos theory of police karma, the two partners precipitating their own downfall via a series of triggered repercussions - this never rises above the functional.

The movie's on stronger ground with the rudiments of survivalism, in particular the long central battle with the bear, so exciting it makes everything afterwards seem anti-climactic. Hopkins keeps his hamminess in check, and Baldwin finds layers of insidious charm, frailty and menace.

There are odd, rather contrived fantasy scenes here which sit uneasily with the generally downbeat naturalism of the rest of the film; and since the script seems determined to tease rather than inform, it's a little hard in the end to fathom exactly what director and co-writer Denis is really getting at. The performances, however, are good, and the music appealing.

Part satire and part confessional memoir, the film is stronger on period flavour and Sonny's inner demons than on the humanity of some of the other characters.

Harry Dean Stanton provides some much needed humour, but the film's celebratory attitude towards a dangerously wild love that defies logic and convention lacks depth and genuine insights.