From a character conceived by Mel Brooks', reads the blurb, and there are various nods to his style of humour throughout this bitty spoof. But the rest relies more on technology than style, and on mediocre effects that can't carry the plot.

With more imagination, more of Faith Brook's send-up of a well-known lady PM, and less of Moore's excruciatingly smug misogyny, this might just have made it to comic levels.

Whether this talent symbolizes racist aggression or mournful shock is left unsettlingly unclear, however, and while Oskar is a sphinxlike contradiction, Schlöndorff has a tendency to sketch the rest of the cast as simple grotesques or symbols of decadence that are unconvincingly humanized in the final third.

A much more conventional and unexciting piece of work.

The leaps made by Scott's agile mind in identifying both victim and usurper leave logic and credence on the starting block.

Amid all the tension, the volcano blows its stack. 'Is anything wrong?' someone asks. 'No, nothing's wrong' says someone else. Something is very wrong.

If you can get over the moralising, there's a treat from Kristy McNichol as the rough talking, Marlboro-smoking kid who can deliver a kick to the cobblers to rival Paul Newman, while Matt Dillon as her 'gentle giant' initiator and the soundtrack (Blondie, Bonnie Raitt) also provide welcome relief.

A nasty and simplistic urban-Western parable for Reagan's America. Stranger-in-town Vincent takes it from a marauding Puerto Rican street gang 'til he can't take no more, then comes on like a righteous Cruise missile to trash the bad guys on a wave of populist reaction. Objectionable.

A crewless Nazi torture-ship malevolently hunts down and sinks Caribbean pleasure cruisers. Good enough. But a Ten Little Indians plot soon takes over which is as rusty as the evil vessel.

Comparisons are odious, but this remake of Hitchcock's thriller continually begs them by trampling heavily over its predecessor. The original anticipated, with some poignancy, a Europe at war. This version uses hindsight entirely to disadvantage.

The first half, unfortunately, is poor: the producers (Casablanca Record) have lumbered it with undigested lumps from the company rock catalogue; there is some pretty variable comedy, dreary travelogue footage, and a very ugly use of filters and soft focus. But gradually a much more interesting film takes over.

A kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Catch-22, or maybe Fuller's Shock Corridor set as an episode from The Twilight Zone. Sounds interesting enough, but isn't.

Tragically, desperately funny: this adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel is John Huston's best film for many years.

Just another miserable muddle from the Lew Grade empire; there's more fun to be had cleaning out your cat litter tray.

The tone sometimes wavers into self-parody, and there are occasional crude patches, but overall this edge-of-seat revenge movie marks the most exciting debut from an Australian director since Peter Weir.

The structure continues to loosen, and although Friedkin - like Coppola - has always had difficulty with endings, this one is so arbitrary it's as if he just gave up.

Despite poor dubbing, this is a more interesting and unusual film than its schlock-horror title and subject matter might suggest. Its pointed attack on exploitative film-making seems somewhat rich in the circumstances, but this is well made, uniquely unpleasant and almost deserving of its huge cult status.

A trio of contrasting personalities, the veterans bring both a mischievous wit and a sense of subdued anger to a familiar comic plotline, and the film achieves a rare balance of laughter and compassion.

Beguilingly sharp at first, but the later stages, with Fonda's toughie reporter tagging along for a story but going all mushy inside, wallow in sentimentality about integrity, ecology and all that jazz.

The company's effects team have excelled themselves in the creation of spectacular settings and holograms, but the script reads as though they simply ordered up a melange of Forbidden Planet and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (with a little bit of R2D2 on the side). Next time around they ought to pension off a few designers to pay for a decent screenplay.

Havana, Cuba, 1959. Lucky they print this on the screen, as it's the first and last coherent piece of information you can glean from Lester's political love story, which mentions neither politics nor love but plays out its actions against a background of both.

The jokes are relentlessly crass and objectionable; the song'n'dance routines have been created in the cutting-room and have lost any sense of fun; Fellini-esque moments add little but pretension; and scenes of a real open-heart operation, alternating with footage of a symbolic Angel of Death in veil and white gloves, fail even in terms of the surreal.

Sellers's performance—as the innocent neuter figure who rises accidentally to political power on the strength of vacant homilies—is remarkable. But Ashby's direction is marred by the same softness that made The Last Detail and Coming Home so morally bland.

The whole thing badly lacks any sort of central thematic focus, and the strangely obsessive Englishness of Greene's world is altogether missing. Craftsmanlike rather than inspired, it's watchable thanks largely to its solid performances.

The comedy runs out of steam when the jerk makes good, but laugh for laugh it's probably a better investment than "10".

This stab at the soft underbelly of American middle class paranoia looks increasingly contrived once the film loses direction in the daylight outside, and a realism intrudes that the film-makers just don't know how to handle.

Carlino's direction doesn't help: he was responsible for the atrocious Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and The Great Santini suffers from the same triteness, with its Deep South setting and a 'progressive' racial subplot that plunges deep into tear-jerk territory. See it for the acting; wallow in the sentiment.

Almost as if he were scared of becoming too serious, Jewison alternates some incredibly powerful moments with breezy farce, and also proceeds to drown the whole thing under a sub-disco score. The result is a bit like finding lumps of condensed milk in your gravy.