The movie's success lies in Huston's very sure manipulation of mood and tone, somehow connecting black comedy, tongue-in-cheek acting, heavy irony, and even high camp into a coherent story.

Here is the stuff of classic French farce - Marivaux rewritten Neil Simon-style - were it not that this game of love and chance offers no notable insights into the lust, gluttony, and other deadly boring sins of Middle America. Howell, the young star of The Outsiders and Red Dawn, evinces a certain ingenuous comedic flair. For the rest, the characters are rather less memorable than the Pepsi cans, Fruit Loops and other brand name junk foods looming large in the foreground of almost every frame.

Stellar stuff.

This demonstration of journalistic integrity sits uneasily beside the unscrupulous methods Travolta deploys in his health club story, and if that's the point, the movie certainly meanders towards it.

The body count is rising, Sly's pecs are blowing up, and Rambo himself is becoming more of a brand-name than a character, a mascot for masochism and murderous self-assertion.

The ideas here aren't nearly up to the scratch that writers Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris established in Trading Places.

This fizzing cheapo sci-fi actioner from no-frills genre specialist Band is a shameless amalgam of Blade Runner and The Terminator. So shameless, unpretentious and fast-paced, in fact, it's actually a lot of fun.

Mediocre action pulp.

It's deeply flawed by Reynolds' less than lustruous but screen-hogging performance, by a tortuous but dull plot, and by leaden direction. One for completists only.

Like all the best fairy-tales, the film is purely sensual, irrational, fuelled by an immense joy in story-telling, and totally lucid. It's also a true original, with the most beautiful visual effects to emerge from Britain in years.

All rather facile sword-and-sorcery stuff, of course, but at times very funny (special mention to McKern as a bumbling priest) and always beautifully photographed in the Italian Dolomites.

Adults forced to accompany three-year-olds to the movie would have had a little moment of satisfaction when the time came to shovel the Care Bear toys out of the house into landfill sites.

The look of the film certainly achieves the right rubble-strewn, monochrome period feel with precision and genuinely cinematic scope. Perhaps the greatest hurdle cleared, however, is the problem of incident. Radford's achievement is to have incorporated the impossible preaching and crazed ideas into the fabric with hardly any loose threads. The locations look very like modern Britain; and Burton at last found the one serious role for which he searched all his life.

Bogdanovich invests the story with warmth, generosity and considerable power.

The juxtaposition of head-spinning break dancing and mild martial arts (in which the fighters glow to show their level of mental attainment and nobody gets badly hurt) provides lots of whirling limbs, but the working into the storyline of a crook who wants to take over the nightclub to provide valuable exposure for his aspirant rock-goddess girlfriend seems lame indeed.

There is the usual gamut of silly voices and gang of goody-goody creatures, including a gluttonous green tiger, but the cuteness is kept to a minimum. The amalgam of fairytale, sci-fi and Greek mythology is exciting, the backgrounds dynamic, the music catchy, the pace furious: kids will love it.

Hurt is in good vicious form as the shaded hit man; Stamp once more wears a smile like a halo; and the prospect of approaching death is handled without too much metaphysical puffing and blowing. All in all, a very palpable hit.

The plot is minimal, but the film scores partly because of a high sense of fun, and partly because of the way Landis uses his LA locations.

The imposing Fiorentino helps adjust the gender balance, Modine gives his customary un-showy performance and Ponicsan tries to find a few fresh-seeming angles in his coming-of-age scenario. Still, it does cover awfully familiar ground.

Adamantly sincere but utterly redundant populism from Bob "Porky's" Clark, a boy scout's stab at Bonfire of the Vanities starring Timothy Hutton's noble adam's apple (gulp!), which he thrusts this way and that for all the world like an ostrich with a social conscience.

The film lacks nothing in verisimilitude. Only, perhaps, something in meaning: all the ingredients are assembled, but one leaves the cinema still waiting for someone to hand over the recipe.

Which would be fine, were the characters not a punchable quintet of overdrawn saps, the acting (Ringwald and Hall excepted) overplayed and unsympathetic, and the script the wrong side of the line that separates smart from smart-arse. Its continuing cult popularity is mystifying; as teen movies go, this is a long way off, say, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Pretty in Pink. Hughes: stay behind for detention afterwards. And write me four sides on why this, uh, sucks.

Hutton succumbs firstly to a thin role, and secondly to the film's lack of any strong viewpoint about its leading men. As usual Schlesinger is more than half in love with what he might be satirising.

A sharply observed rites-of-passage comedy set in Brooklyn in 1965.

The first hour, sprawling, chaotic and violently messy, is very good indeed, conveying both the complexity and the essential absurdity of war, while the photography by Chris Menges is stunningly convincing in detailing the scale of the carnage.

Not for literary purists, but if you like your entertainment well tailored, then feel the quality and the width.

There is a sense of déjà vu all right, but this is an extremely attractive valediction to youth, with farcical underpinnings ably handled by Reynolds.

Black arts movies tend to come cheap: a dark cellar, a few candles and a robe. Deep shadow is a blessing here too because the titular trolls are absurd puppets that merely wobble about and snarl a bit.