Flawed, but often brilliant, provocative film-making.

The role strips Fiorentino of charisma and grace. Caruso, too, has little to do and does it poorly. Thrown in are a few hackneyed Friedkin 'show-stoppers': an extended car chase, and a variation on the car-with-cut-brake-cables number. Camerman Andrzej Bartkowiak does little more than provide a sheeny gloss on standard ritzy SF locations. Bad.

A series of competently engineered shock moments jollied along by a jazzed-up version of John Carpenter's original electronic score: slicker than crude oil and just as unattractive.

It's low camp for narrow-minded Middle Americans who can't cope with the idea of a co*k in a frock.

The tone is relentlessly sordid, the view of these pubescent hedonists so hermetic, that the film-makers' 'honesty' seems exploitative and sensational. The film may not say anything new, but the way it says it does, in the end, make it some sort of landmark. Depressing.

As it is, the movie never quite delivers on the Big Idea, but at least Walken comes through in spades: he's out of this world.

This is shameless stuff: happy, barefoot peasants sing that traditional Latin cancion, 'Crush the grapes, crush the grapes,' the moonlight is so strong you could get burned, and the metaphors are writ large as tabloid headlines.

For the most part this is a pleasing, polished affair, honest enough to steer a compassionate middle course without succumbing to caricature or conservative sentimentality.

The ingenious narrative, told from differing perspectives and incorporating tales within tales and teasing elisions between film and reality, is actually informative about the nuts and bolts of shooting a movie, and not only as a catalogue of technical disasters - through the shamefully under-rated Keener, we get a real insight into screen acting and the way fatigue, memory, stress and surroundings can take their toll. Hers, however, is merely the finest of a whole host of spot-on performances. A treat.

Fine enlarged production design and effects, and appealing acting from the little and the large.

This is Seagal's best movie since Out for Justice.

Like some state-of-the-art remake of Lifeforce, this is every bit as bad as Tobe Hooper's film, but nothing like as enjoyable. Worst is the transition in the final scenes from snatched glimpses of a woman in a rubber suit to some oddly alienating motion-control effects. Floating like the ghosting on a poorly tuned TV, these are far too clean and artificial to be believable or remotely scary. Deserves extinction.

This expensive, star-heavy retake on the Arthurian legend works well enough as Hollywood Gothic hokum: Connery is his usual reliable self as the renowned first among equals; Ormond is quite excellent as a thoroughly modern maiden torn between love and duty; and Gere's fearless Lancelot may be about as medieval as a roller disco but still has charm and athleticism (less Lancelot du Lac than Lancelot du Lacquer).

The comic-book fight sequences, too, are a little more imaginative. But, like the series, the film is also corny as hell, with glaring continuity lapses, cringeworthy performances, silly monsters and laughable set-pieces.

Directing his first feature, artist Longo seems dazzled, like a rabbit, by sheer visual overload.

The film has a thesis: hitmen must have psychopathy on their CVs; but even bad guys have souls. It's Roth's tough job to illustrate this, which, in his finest performance to date, he does magnificently.

The film impresses for its authenticity, careful delineation of mood, and subtle balancing of the personal and political. Téchiné wins sterling support from his young cast, who give the kind of quiet, naturalistic performances the French are so good at. A delicacy to savour.

Insipid songs and not much story.

Generous souls may try to blame this travesty of the Deadline comic-strip on the studio execs who forced director Talalay to tone down and re-edit her cut. But what remains of Petty's anodyne sexless heroine and the dull, episodic live-action sequences suggests we may have been spared something worse even than this movie.

Fascinating, and without the pretensions that have marred some of Egoyan's earlier work.

Candyman was the best Clive Barker adaptation to date. This follow-up is a travesty of both its literary source and the original film.

A gritty human drama evoking the residual vibrancy of a threatened culture.

Director Thomas (once Sgt Lucy Bates of Hill Street Blues) has recreated '70s sitcom-land with the kind of unerring attention to detail Merchant-Ivory lavish on a society ball, and she's drawn hilariously synthetic performances from a shrewdly cloned cast.

Connery and Fishburne are adversarial along Heat of the Night lines, but director Glimcher makes little of the small-town Deep South locations. Pity.

Lambert is as uncharismatic as ever, while Van Peebles is as frightening as a wrestler in mock angry mood, and just as ridiculous. To Morahan's credit, however, he smoothly continues the series' tradition of flashy images, showy sfx, aerial landscape shots and driving rock tunes.