The film actually unfolds in a reasonably engaging manner; one dramatically sophisticated sequence contrasting the goodies’ and baddies’ responses to their leaders’ respective demises stands out. The anime-inflected look is generally impressive too, although the power-rock soundtrack is unsalvageable.

It's flat, unfunny, and full of slavish borrowings.

There is always an interesting tension in Cameron's work between masculine and feminine qualities. When it finally hits the fan here, we're in for the mother of all battles.

It's fun intermittently, but a bit of a stretch at two hours, and Matthau's Cockney accent is about as convincing as the rubber sharks. Perhaps the key to understanding what it's about lies in considering Polanski's displacement: of Polish extraction, exiled in Paris, faced with arrest should he return to the US. The only flag he could comfortably wrap himself in was the Jolly Roger.

The screenwriters work many nice little observations into their occasionally over-quippish script, but this is considerably smaller than the sum of its parts: it gets the detail, but misses the big picture.

It's not unenjoyable, but it isn't half the pastiche that Psycho II was.

As usual with film noir, however, it is the villain who steals the heart and one is rooting for in the breathtaking showdown high up in the cogs and ratchets of Big Ben.

Shot in black-and-white in an attempt to evoke the sophisticated burr of '40s films, its intent is hamstrung by over-familiar gags, though the script comes more to life when Prince and Benton lapse into black street talk during their pursuit of moneyed women.

With their sloppy slapstick and wet Menudo jokes, one only wonders why more people aren't out to kill them. But Crystal and Hines do flavour the film with genuine warmth, and despite some cheap gags, work well together to produce some truly funny moments.

The plotline is classic Western morality-play stuff, with the goodies and baddies clearly delineated, but the set pieces are well constructed, and the whole thing is beautifully staged and shot.

Everything seems to revolve around an art fraud, though that's never quite clear since this plot falls into the category kindly known as 'baggy'.

A wonderful achievement, a dark film with a generous heart in the shape of an extraordinarily touching performance from Hoskins.

The effects are magnificent (the tripod drones and the supreme Martian intelligence are horrific), but whereas the original worked by building up an increasingly black mood, this version relies almost entirely on the special effects; and such limited brooding tension as it has is gratuitously undermined by a string of sequences played purely for laughs...Fun, but very silly.

Crawford plays Speed with his foot in his mouth rather than tongue-in-cheek, and instead of glorying in the experiences of the pulp novel dialogue, dissipates all the comic potential by his evident bewilderment.

Never hysterically funny but scattered with pleasingly OTT moments and throwaway lines, it looks as if Cassavetes merely wanted a) to prove he could make a blandly stylish commercial piece, and b) the cash.

Regrettably, it's a mediocre slasher with a terrific gimmick.

This sequel, sans Spielberg but obedient to his spirit, simply fails to regenerate the original's gut-grinding fears that make you dread ever scratching a spot again. And the contribution of Giger's design work has only added one near-unwatchable sequence.

No Retreat, No Surrender borrows heavily from the likes of The Last Dragon, Karate Kid and even Rocky IV, but makes them look like masterpieces by comparison.

Fast, stylish, but the formula palled ages back and it hardly does justice to the Ross Macdonald novel on which it is based.

In this comedy, three Parisian swingers find their bachelor pad invaded by the fruit of a night of forgotten passion. Noisy, and not short of unison waddling walks.

What happened? With Ashby, Bridges, Arquette and a script co-written by Oliver Stone, you expect the result to be better than a long drawn-out episode of The Equalizer.

The polemic may seem obvious and at times laboured, but the action sequences are brilliant, and the film does achieve a brutal, often very moving, power.

Foley has opted for a mixture of documentary realism and set pieces which have clearly escaped from over-lit pop promos. Mingle this with Penn and Walken going heavily over the top in usual Method fashion, and the brew is less than intoxicating.

Camp is everywhere, humour thin; and the soundtrack is very contemporary for a movie which in the pre-publicity boasted of its jazz origins. The whole film is an example of the strange influence of pop promo mentality on cinema. All that noise, all that energy, so little governing thought.

Some great laughs, but it isn't hard to see why the film was never released theatrically in Britain: at times it just gets bogged down with over-the-top performances. The ending is great, though.

Despite borrowing from sources as diverse as Frankenstein and The Producer, it all falls apart after an hour.

Judging from the title, Spielberg's Gremlins would be the immediate target, and indeed Critters does share a sardonic similarity. In fact, Critters looks like several dozen films without looking like any one of them, the action and characters lifted whole from a dissimilar plethora of cinematic sources and underscored with a sizzling sarcasm which elevates it from its source material.

The strength of the film is its vision - cutting, compassionate and sometimes hilarious - of what it means to be Asian, and British, in Thatcher's Britain.