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.

More subdued and much more honest that any of John Hughes' egregious forays into adolescence, the film's only drawback is an artificially upbeat ending.

The slim plot is a feeble excuse for a series of set pieces, some of which can be seen coming even before the opening credits roll, and a handful that are genuinely funny.

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.