While beautifully shot, admirably old-fashioned (sexual violence and explicit gore are absent), and endowed with pleasing plot twists, the film is too formulaic and offers little opportunity for Penn to display his prodigious talents.

It's a great idea for a movie, but Allen fatally opts for a Fellini: Amarcord approach of formless narrative, larger-than-life coincidence, and rambling ruminations on what times there used to be.

As a vehicle for their considerable comic talents, the enterprise is wheelclamped by type casting.

Occasional bursts of delicious tragic humour nevertheless make this a not unlikeable 'feminist' mood piece.

Writer/director Hanson has created a plausible thriller with several neat twists; but the last half-hour, while never quite losing its grip, degenerates into pure flapdoodle.

As Wisdom (the name represents the single feeble attempt at irony), Estevez demonstrates an undeniable charisma, but in the roles of writer and director he is less successful. What initiative there is in this retread gets swamped by silliness, slackness and sentiment.

A funny, elegiac, uplifting, and deliciously different movie.

Mildly diverting comedy in overexposed terrain.

Richard Pearce's thriller suffers from near-total predictability, with a script that careers headlong through clichéd situations, calculatedly coarse dialogue, and cardboard characters. That said, Pearce reveals a strong feel for lurid locations and spectacular set pieces, and makes the film look stylish, too much so in the case of the three leads. Indeed, taken straight it's all a little risible; but as fast-paced hokum pitted with plot-holes, it's polished fun - no more, no less.

In format, this is no more than the classic mission movie: first they train, then they do it for real. But the film belongs to Eastwood.

Kirk & Co return to present-day San Francisco to save the whales in the most enjoyable film of the series so far, also returning to the simplistic morality-play format that gave the original TV series its strength.

All-purpose sci-fi rip-off, set on a planet where evil Jordan lords it over a cadre of roller-skating minor brat-packers who call on ancient mystical force - 'Bodhi' - to escape his sway. A misbegotten Brooksfilm which sank without trace in the US.

Hanks' aptitude for romantic comedy can do nothing for this corny World War II love story, which has a script so sugary it goes for your fillings.

The performances are, of course, magnificent: Webb owns her largely thankless role, while Oldman snarls, spits and staggers like he means it, maaan. But we’re never given a reason to care about their characters, beyond the fact they were famous.

Beineix's determination to tell the full story results in a bum-numbing and often downright dull three hours.

Excellent performances. Best of all is the casting of Williams as Bobby Shy - as shamblingly conspicuous as the brother from another planet, golliwog hair and a too-tight raincoat that clings like a hobo's fart, this is a guy who wants a good leaving alone.

However great is Tarkovsky’s mastery of mise-en-scène, or astounding his use of sound composition, it appears dehumanised and not a little egocentric, closer to a study of madness and self-delusion than, as I believe Tarkovsky hoped, an illustration of the power of faith and self-sacrifice.

Enacted against the stunning backdrop of the Amazon jungle, the action has a rousing, epic quality. What it doesn't have, however, is passion. The climax is brutal, De Niro and Irons are impressive as the opponents who become soul mates; yet The Mission manages to be both magnificent and curiously uninvolving, a buddy movie played in soutanes.

Utter rubbish but fun, benefiting greatly from outrageous SFX à la Videodrome, and from two neat cameos by real life HM stars Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons.

Although the prevailing tone is comic, there is plenty of grue and gore; the heart stops several times. This may be Craven at his crummiest, but the resulting sick still ranks higher than anything his imitators can come up with.

Their relationship is both a genuinely touching love story and a clever gloss on the barriers and extensions of language. It also contains a truly didactic other-dimension which points out some very salutary things about our often unintentional slights towards the deaf, without being either a simple sob or an issue story.

So self-consciously elegiac that its too-good-to-be-true heroes are imprisoned in a slim storyline of implausible fantasy, the movie would have been more effective had Burt and Kirk simply been allowed to be themselves. Of course, it's fun to watch old pros, and Wallach, as a mad, myopic hit-man, is genuinely funny; but one can't help feeling that a rare gathering of Golden Age talent has been criminally wasted.

The film reeks of the authentic stuff of jazz, smoky with atmosphere and all as blue as a Gauloise packet.

Flashes of genuine intelligence and wit in the writing only render the moral nihilism of the whole high-tack enterprise all the more inexcusable.

The action is simply an implausible chain of events sensationally strung together, a Saturday morning serial formula which worked for Raiders of the Lost Ark; here, the heavy-handed manipulation of genre ingredients simply results in vulgar, often embarrassing, kitsch.

One of the most impressive American thrillers of the late '80s.

Not a patch on the original but amusing enough none the less.

Neither Dekker's sloppy direction nor the cheapo make-up and effects do justice to the hand-me-down but sporadically lively script. Not the most sophisticated or scary horror film of the year, perhaps, but enjoyable enough in a ramshackle sort of way.