Save your pennies and watch the GoBots on TV instead.

Seneca is worth watching, Ry Cooder's score is among his best work, and this certainly isn't sequel fodder.

Deitch is well served by Shaver as the teacher and Charbonneau as the young seducer. Best of all, however, is the way the movie dignifies all its characters.

Rudolph's script is both playful and precise, his images fantastic yet real, the music elegiac but ecstatically sung by an impassioned Marianne Faithfull. Part thriller, part comic fantasy, part love story, Trouble in Mind even offers an ambiguous, high-flown ending that suggests this really is the stuff that dreams are made of.

To be able to give this kind of stuff new and sympathetic twists is a tribute to Hughes' skill with narrative, and to Ringwald's magnetism as a performer.

There's a little toying with the old doppelgänger idea of the hero and villain coming to resemble one another, and the ending is rather straightforward; but it's a highly competent sick-fright version of the evergreen chase formula.

Students of minimal acting techniques can compare Marvin and Norris: impassivity versus vacancy. Students of the disaster film should write a short thesis on why George Kennedy is ubiquitous. Everyone else might wonder why the film is so virulently anti-Arab.

Goldie's inspirational shot at playing Sly Stallone and Burgess Meredith is undone by the trite, inner-city Hollywood context she always favours. Instead of 'believe in yourself', the message becomes simply 'make believe'.

Despite its radical gloss, this over-long, lifeless epic of doomed true love falls into all the predictable traps: excessive pageantry, Monty Python-like peasants, dialogue that drips with sentiment, and even the sight of young lovers running through rural England.

Everything is predictable, except perhaps for the searching close-ups of the star's behind. In other respects, Lowe's performance is quite decent, and he cannot be blamed for the puerile humour of a director who considers putting false teeth into someone's beer to be a good joke.

Though it does have its moments, the result is never as funny as it should be. Williams and Russell, although fine individually, don't spark off each other as a comic duo should, and the ending is so predictable it's almost unexpected.

Despite making use of Hackman, Christie and Marshall in supporting roles, and actual US newscasters to cover the election results, the film is still a complete mess. Barely held together by Cy Coleman's powerful score, it finally falls apart thanks to the embarrassing amateurism of the party political broadcasts the characters produce, and the Vidal Sassoon world they inhabit.

It betokens some kind of desperation (or perhaps the fact that this was produced by Disney's adult offshoot) that the comedy rests increasingly on the cute antics of the family dog.

Masterson's images of small-town America are imbued with a luminous and melancholy nostalgia, but otherwise the film is not mounted with any special imagination, and its fusty, old-fashioned (not to say reactionary) lauding of homespun values sticks in the craw.

It is regrettable that the highest of production values have been invested in this, the cheapest of stories.

Somehow one leaves aside the blatant implausibilities, the coincidences, even Eric Roberts, and takes great pleasure in a breakneck ride to the end of the line. And Voight has finally found his niche, abandoning all those wet-eyed liberal roles and playing to the hilt a hideous, raving beast, with scars. Great ending, too.

An amiable and humorous fantasy-cum-Faery tale in the Gremlins mould... The whole thing is jogged along nicely by the cast (especially the excellent Moriarty, jigging around manically to his '60s records), and has exactly the right balance between child-like wonder and gentle self-parody.

Devotees of John Sayles' witty, literate screenplays will be disappointed by the repartee of subtitled grunts, while beneath the film's apparent plea for tolerance lies the offensive (if quite possibly true) assumption that tall, tanned Californian blondes represent the highest form of human life.

It all gets off to a cracking start, only to dwindle very rapidly into thin and predictable variations on the formulaic ploys. And Vaughn gives his usual performance of perfect menace, which suggests that he should be about to engage in world domination, not just nicking motors.

An almost inconceivable disaster.

What the film lacks, however, is the epic vision to match its epic pretensions, something to bind together the action and the ideas.

For all that it may come out of Africa, the film's final destination is not many miles from Disneyland.

Fortunately the story of an alternative future is realised with such visual imagination and sparky humour that it's only half way through that the plot's weaknesses become apparent

The characters are less credible than their plastic counterparts, the puerile humour is dispiriting, and the plotting pulled this way and that by the conceit of releasing the film in the US with a trio of alternate endings.

Shepard is perfect as the dumb hick in cowboy gear who likes lassoing the bedpost; and Basinger, as the faded girl in a red dress, brings a curious, tatty dignity to the role, and proves at last that she can act when not required to pout in her underwear. It's the best of Altman's series of theatre adaptations, capturing the original's dreamlike musings on the nature of inherited guilt; what one misses is the sexual ferocity.

While lacking the clarity and breathtaking speed which Spielberg brings to this type of material, it's agreeable enough entertainment.

This, as Fuller said, is film as battleground, love, hate, violence, action, death - in a word: emotion. Pity it's about Rocky.

It's stone cold dead on the slab.