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.

Short on plausibility but preserving the psycho-sexual ambiguities throughout, Bigelow's seductively stylish, wildy fetishistic thriller is proof that a woman can enter a traditionally male world and, like Megan, beat men at their own game.

The film, simplistically assuming the book's central metaphor to be imperialism - hence the military slant - retains the bare bones of Gollding's narrative, but that's all. There's little attempt to hint at the deeper issues.

Hauer's Parker, shambling, shrewd and powerful, is humorous and appealing, and Noyce skilfully orchestrates a hilarious army of gurning baddies. It thunders along admirably, if rather unbelievably, and to counter the sickly moments with the cute kid (Call), there's plenty of pleasurable ass-kicking.

Sadly, the faults in the film lie in Harold Pinter's uncharacteristically bland script, and often woefully inadequate design and direction: the latter often missing opportunities in key scenes, the former full of rather tacky and silly uniforms, symbols, vehicles, and particularly crass watchtowers.

Barker calls his shambolic, uninvolving narrative 'scattershot'; put less kindly, it's as explosive and directionless as a blunderbuss.

Voice-over narration makes effective use of the real-life Shaw's correspondence, but in terms of authenticity the battle sequences are truly impressive. Marching across open fields amid cannon-shot, or plunging into hand-to-hand combat, the stark clarity of Freddie Francis' cinematography combined with Zwick's intimate style evokes immediacy and fear.

Scott manages the shift from tremulous romance to violent retribution very well, but his efficient handling of some surprisingly tough action scenes is compromised by a surfeit of pop promo clichés: billowing net curtains, clouds of fluttering doves, an excessive use of coloured filters.

A standard extremist farce, lazily written and fumblingly directed.

While Seagal is spraying bullets, breaking bones and throwing interchangeable bad guys through windows, this has a certain mindless appeal. But Malmuth's flaccid direction lacks the vicious muscularity and authentic edge of Seagal's previous feature.

Robert Getchell's script milks the story for maximum tears, but wrestles unsuccessfully with the inherent absurdity of Stella's predicament, delivering clichéd situations and dialogue. And Midler's larger-than-life performance is daunting against the subtler approaches of Alvarado and Mason.

A relentlessly sadistic and worryingly amusing movie, which will entertain and offend in equal measure.

Figgis (in his first American feature) handles the explosive action and the psychological undercurrents with equal assurance. Dark, dangerous and disturbing.

Why do these 'zany' comedies fall back on the corniest situations and the most predictable stereotypes?