Hard to dismiss completely a film in which Broderick Crawford turns up as 'Brod', but with Olivier overdoing it dreadfully as the crinkly old ne'er-do-well who persuades misfit American teen Lane and French youth Bernard to run off to Venice and consolidate their love by the Bridge of Sighs, it's not one that'll win over hardened cynics either.

Atrociously directed and full of groan-making jokes, but the cast are having such a good time that it's difficult not to respond in a similar way.

The director's smugness effortlessly trumps Robby Müller's camera-work and the good performances (notably from Denholm Elliott). Hard to imagine how anyone could make less of such a promising subject.

Syrupy schlock from perhaps the most sentimental of all Italian directors, a pointless update of King Vidor's '30s weepie about a former champion boxer's attempts to hang on to his doting son when his estranged wife reappears on the scene.

Less subversive than his earlier work; still hilarious, though. [03 Nov 2004]

'Mysterious' events are so heavily laden with symbolism that any possibility of suspense or credibility is sunk even before Nature can start to get really raw. Walkabout and The Last Wave did it much better.

All a bit too earnest, despite the seriousness of the subject, with Fonda setting her jaw and stepping into father's footsteps as Tinseltown's very own protector of humanity; but it's tightly scripted and directed, and genuinely tense in places.

If it weren't for the gimmicks (and the sadism is so gratuitous it could be nothing else), then the film could easily pass for a minor caper thriller of the '60s, all convoluted plot and calculated kookiness. But cyphers (both female leads) and question-marks (who'll get the money, who'll survive - who cares?) dominate the script as every labyrinthine twist becomes more plodding.

McDowell's comically histrionic performance is, in fact, the single redeeming feature in this lamentably simplistic and unpleasant piffle.

Not entirely successful, but still an imaginative and ambitious attempt to combine historical speculation, conspiracy thriller, and the world of Conan Doyle.

In the final count, nothing is satisfactorily resolved because tensions remain unexplored, while the atmospherically beautiful images merely entice and divert. The result is little more than a discreetly artistic horror film.

The action meanders around to a hackneyed end, and because Hardcore is softcore, it doesn't convincingly convey that climate of self-hatred which pervades the sexual ghetto.

You'd have to be blind to miss the moral.

A huge disappointment after The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Gauntlet, this rambling comedy forsakes the subtle, self-deprecating humour of those films and opts for a far rowdier and broader comedy that never really goes anywhere or says anything.

Endless and doggedly in earnest.

The film allows naiveté and knowingness to coexist. Only when it goes all out for cold Batmanesque villainy in the second half does it narrow its focus and lose its way.

Ideally, though, it should prove as gruelling a test of its audience's moral and political conscience as it seems to have been for its makers.

Mercifully, the book has escaped the typical Disney demolition; Bakshi's version, using animation and live-action tracings, is uniformly excellent, sticking closely to the original text and visually echoing many of Tolkien's own drawings.

A hammed-up version of the old chestnut about the ventriloquist who is 'taken over' by his dummy, clumsily adapted by William Goldman from his own novel and infinitely better done in The Great Gabbo and Dead of Night.

The 'camera' takes a conventionally objective viewpoint, perpetually rolling over rolling countryside, which effectively robs the plot of all its terror and tension. And the bunnies are a crudely drawn, charmless bunch, with the final nail provided by the soundtrack's famous voices, who help turn the film into a radio play.

Visually superb, though: a doomed attempt to make Fordian metaphors speak a language of corrupting, intimate anxiety.

It’s Carpenter’s direction that makes Halloween tick, and resulted in it becoming (still, possibly) the most successful indie film ever made.

On the plus side are vast, brilliant sets by Tony Walton, a couple of well-staged show-stoppers ('Everybody Rejoice' in the Wicked Witch's sweat-shop, and 'Emerald City Ballet'), Michael Jackson (the Scarecrow), Richard Pryor (The Wiz), and Diana Ross who, as Dorothy, is just gorgeous.

One-joke spoof on that B movie staple of the '50s, monstrously enlarged scientific mutations. The big red ones have their way with corrupt politicians and (via bloody Bloody Marys) housewife tipplers, while the pastiche '50s soundtrack croons 'I know I'm gonna miss her, a tomato ate my sister'.

Chantal Akerman's feature is one of the few 'feminist' movies that's as interesting aesthetically as politically.

A lot of weak action scenes and weaker lines, but still a vast improvement on Dracula A.D. 1972.

Over-extended and sloppily characterised Agatha Christie whodunit, with Ustinov's Poirot investigating the murder of an heiress aboard a steamer in the 30s.

A ludicrously overblown soap opera set in Italian Brooklyn which races from childhood anorexia to adolescent sexual trauma via wife-battering.