Through crass over-emphasis and sloppy continuity errors, Hiller fumbles most of the jokes away. The roles fit Belushi/Grodin like rubber, but the rest is second-rate.

A messy, meandering script ensures that, despite stylish camerawork and sturdy acting, this lengthy indulgence succeeds neither as jazz movie nor as cautionary tale.

The plot is all pot-shots and posses, with a bit of Indian hocus-pocus thrown in for comic relief. In other words, more of the same.

The casting, needless to say, is perfect, and Bergman keeps the various escalating intrigues clipping along at a brisk pace.

Teague, meanwhile, is far too busy orchestrating the large-scale action sequences to make anything of the cardboard characters, episodic plotting, or clunking dialogue.

Frank Marshall has crammed the screen with plenty of knee-jerk thrills interlaced with black humour. Designed to reduce the audience to a squirming mass, the film yields plenty of grisly pleasures.

Top-notch computer graphics, star voices and a gaggle of gadgets cannot disguise the fact that this family of the future is stuck firmly in 1962.

Kershner's direction is never more than adequate, and the story seems full of unfulfilled promise and tangled threads. It's also deeply, disturbingly violent in a way which is more manipulative than gory; unlike the original, with its prophetic vision of the future, this sequel seems to spend too much time glorying in the very horrors it has outlined.

Alda's skill is with witty, fast-talking patter and in coaxing fine performances from his actors (playing an extended family of gently caricatured New York types). The values are bollocks, but the film is fun.

A spectacular movie whose technical achievements - notably the sharp editing - will surely provide a gauge by which subsequent comic strip films are judged.

There's almost enough in-joke ingenuity to justify the total absence of plot.

With a gung ho script, sometimes rudimentary editing and uninvolving relationships, the whole effect is rather flat. None of the aerial sequences boast the visual thrills of Top Gun, while even the attempt to inject controversy in the shape of Hollywood's first female combatant is half-realised.

While he's lying through his teeth or improvising a sales pitch that might save his skin, Williams is funny and convincing; but once he starts getting dewy-eyed and sincere, flesh-crawling embarrassment takes over.

Within the first half-hour, we've met the baddies (led by a taciturn Carradine), heard Rick and Marianne's teasing banter, and experienced the thrills of a shootout and car chase. As for what follows, this drearily repetitious film offers more of the same with variations in backdrop, all directed in perfunctory fashion by Badham. It does have a nice '60s soundtrack; shame about the rest.

Not a comfortable film, but humane and savagely beautiful.

Three acts: set-up, foreplay, bonk...Even within its own terms the film is a disaster: all the acting is pathetic, the pacing poor, and the pay-off copulation scene merely mechanical.

A severely flawed but not unamusing venture from a director who should know better.

Although the performances are mostly solid (Assante particularly fine throughout), it never quite achieves the harsh, convincing tone it aims for.

Despite the neat comic inversion of its central premise (this time it's the spacemen who are taken in by Welles' classic hoax), the film soon comes a cropper as the chaotic script descends into a mêlée of limp and disjointed knockabout gags.

Ward is physically fine for Hoke, Baldwin a wired Junior, and best of all is Leigh's hooker, but it doesn't quite translate to the screen. Willeford didn't write genre, and the film washes about a bit finding a tone.

This is a lazy, obvious film, functionally directed and crudely characterised, which testifies to, rather than criticises, the power and influence of advertising. John Malkovich, originally cast, walked out on the project. Now there's an actor who knows when to make an exit.

Mindless, immature, slapstick twaddle.

For a Jacobean-style drama about deadly emotions, the film lacks passion; only in the final half-hour, with Michael Nyman's funereal music supplying a welcome gravity, does it at last exert a stately power.

Resnikoff fails to sustain the tension established in the opening sequences, and the plot quickly degenerates into a repetitive pattern of possession and exorcism for the victims requisitioned by Channing's soul to do its bidding. With the exception of Phillips, the performances are remarkably unconvincing.

Replete with a thumpingly good soundtrack mixing old standards with modern pastiches, this is Waters' finest film to date, a worthy successor to Hairspray which exudes teen angst and young lust from every pore...Seriously sexy stuff.

Jim Henson's Creature Shop has created splendid animatronic characters (including a four-foot talking rat), though extra distinguishing marks between the turtles would be appreciated. Between the dubbed dialogue and the dark visuals, the cumulative effect is curiously dislocating.

The Fourth War may have been conceived as the thinking person's Rambo, but in the event it isn't a patch on First Blood; for a simple story, it's quite a mess, the very dubious voice-over hardly clarifying a clumsy sense of chronology.

Seldom have Caine's cobra eyes been used to better effect; it's a chilling tale, cleanly directed.