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.

It is extremely long, inconsequential and low-budget, but if you surrender to it, it is not devoid of delights and resources.

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.

Director Castle gets lost in fantasy, spoiling a promising portrait with some heavy-handed emotional manipulation and an escapist conclusion.

The biggest disappointment is Danson, who created an exquisite satire on the American superstud in TV's Cheers; his extension of the role here, as Sex Machine Spence, is a downright embarrassment.

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.