It is shamelessly sentimental, and could well send the hardboiled home to kick the cat.

Incestuous desires run rampant in the original novel by VC Andrews, but all the movie has to offer is soft-focus innuendo. As fantasy stripped of all its metaphorical trimmings, the sublimely ridiculous plot is more likely to reduce an audience to laughter than to tears.

Musically, it's a matter of opinion, but from the sparse funk of the title tune to the bebop blow-out around Charlie Parker's Now's the Time, this guiltless grooving in Eden fizzes with brilliantly choreographed wit and invention.

Gail Morgan Hickman's complicated script manages a couple of nice twists, but it's too formulary to pursue the ambiguities it reveals. Most enjoyable is the clear thread of self-parody, which keeps the laughs and bullets coming thick and fast.

Tossed together from a Hanif Kureishi screenplay which labours so many right-on themes that none leave their mark

Powered by a driving rock score, this is by turns sleek, reckless, and smoothly effective, like a Ferrari with a psycho killer at the wheel.

Surface stuff, with neither actor up to the ambiguities, but entertaining enough around the car chases.

Suspect remains a routine Jagged Edge follow-up.

Schroeder's direction of Charles Bukowski's script is consistent with the film's throwaway mood, stresses the upbeat, and mercifully eschews seriousness, cleverly relying on Robby Müller's efficient colour photography to create atmosphere.

Joanou, later to find greater exposure with the concert picture U2 Rattle and Hum and the Oldman/Penn crime movie State of Grace, directs with a lot of energy, but the material just isn't there.

There are splendid economies, too: Rogers' mirrored dressing-room registers first as a social humiliation for the cop, who can't find the exit, but later his intimacy with her surroundings gives him an edge over a killer. There's little waste, though the thriller element could have been tuned up a bit.

Western iconography, noir-ish lighting, and visceral horror are fused with an affecting love story in this stylish 'Vampire Western', which (unlike Bigelow's rather static debut feature The Loveless) is driven forward at a scorching pace, a subtle study in the seductiveness of evil and a terrifying ride to the edge of darkness.

Combining state-of-the-art stylishness with comedy and suspense, Wang turns an otherwise straightforward conspiracy thriller into a pacy, racy fable with distinctly oddball dimensions.

The exquisitely framed images, the allusive script, the droll witticisms are counterbalanced by Dennehy's literally enormous performance, which threatens to tear the film's formal symmetries to vividly memorable shreds.

The overall result, unsurprisingly, is patchy in the extreme. Weiss' title piece - fragments guying the portentous scripts, wooden acting and non-existent budgets of Z-grade '50s sci-fi movies - is obvious but occasionally spot-on with its appalling sets and repetitive use of the same bit of landscape.

What is missing is any real tension or psychological detail that might lend plausibility to all the hocus-pocus about East-West political and military intrigue.

There are a couple of rocky moments, but the large cast of unknowns go through hell convincingly, and illustrate the randomness of mortality.

It possesses a mythic clarity, yet there's also a welcome complexity at work, in the vivid characterisations and the unsentimental celebration of community and collective action. The result is witty, astute, and finally very moving.

This sequel to House offers another blend of humour and horror, but the gags aren't particularly sweet, the chills aren't particularly spicy. On the whole an indigestible affair, which fortunately passes quickly through the system.

It is Depardieu who supplies the heart and soul of the film with a performance of towering strength and heartbreaking pathos.

The result is a well-meaning bore, which isn't sure whether to play it for laughs or to make a serious point, and ends up missing out on both fronts.

More of a clever comic parody than a jokey pastiche, this lively kiddies' horror pic delivers frights and laughs which are rooted in a sure and sympathetic grasp of Monster Movie mythology.

Back to the Beach is fun for a while, but its six-person writing team can't figure out a logical way to wind it all up.

Tiring stuff.

Between Lecce's illicit courtship and Reimers' consternation, there are some hearty laughs of a juvenile nature.

About as dreary as a summit conference in Belgium.

Abysmally uninteresting scenes of rival youth gangs hanging around on a pseudo-post-apocalyptic beach, intercut with apparently unconnected (and uninteresting) surfing footage, and occasional soft-core fumblings. Neither the 'female vengeance' nor the racial tension motifs succeed in raising even a glimmer of interest. Utter horse-shit.

Entertaining enough, but a pity they didn't draft in more of the Eisenhower context.