Engaging tongue-in-cheek exploitation pic.

A shallow, chic confusion of eyes, camera lenses, and saleable images of violence of the sort it now purports to question as an 'issue'.

Reisz nimbly avoids the Big Theme style, finds the pace of his material early, and sustains it brilliantly, emerging with a contemporary classic of hard-edged adventure and three superb character studies.

An unashamed sense of its own fantasy is coupled with classically mounted slapstick; nostalgia mixes with cynicism in seductive proportions; and John Belushi's central performance as brain-damaged slob-cum-Thief of Baghdad is wonderful.

The rich vein of 'innocent' anarchy running through Burt Reynolds comedy showcases around this time is mined again to good effect as his Smokey and the Bandit persona transmutes seamlessly into the ace Hollywood stuntman of the title, and director Needham (an ex-stuntman himself) slips effortlessly into a lightweight satire of the movie biz and an almost Hawksian action-comedy of male-group professionalism.

A combination of brilliantly edited car chases and existential thriller which recalls the sombreness of Melville and the spareness of Leone in a context which is the 'classical' economy of directors like Hawks and Walsh.

This crass moral pantomime is plain embarrassing.

Unsatisfactory as a whole, the film is hilarious and tense in bits.

A risibly inadequate disaster movie.

Third and last in the Bad News series, with Curtis as a Hollywood hustler trying to make a buck exploiting the sad sack little league baseballers, but suffering the obligatory change of heart. Dire.

Beatty ambles nicely enough through the hero's part (remodeled as a quarterback), and Charles Grodin turns up trumps playing another of his chinless, spineless wonders. But Christie's comedy gifts are as minuscule as ever, and the film drags its feet uncertainly from beginning to end.

The narrative goes a bit over the top in the second half, but it's after a large dose of the best kind of escapist good humour.

This sequel lacks the bravura pacing of the original, and though it tries to maintain the biblical tone in following the adolescence of its antichrist anti-hero, immense problems emerge.

Routine hi-jinks ensue, mixing strangely with ecology consciousness-raising, pseudo-scientific jargon, and everyday telekinesis.

One of Hollywood's better 'growing up' movies, this steers well clear of tear-jerker material by tracking the on-off juvenile romance of car-mad (post-Star Wars) Hamill and apprentice hooker Annie Potts through the neon glare of Las Vegas.

The premise of Capricorn One is so intrinsically arresting that it almost saves the film from the sheer incompetence of its script...Pretty soon the project gets bogged down in innumerable difficulties, not helped by the awfulness of most of the dialogue. The climactic introduction of Telly Savalas in a crop-dusting plane must rank as one of the most desperate measures to save a thriller since William Castle hung luminous skeletons from the cinema roof.

All this, along with the tremulous romanticism, might seem unbearably portentous were it not for some lovely comic moments - notably, Busey in the draft-dodging scenes - and the sheer exhilaration of the surfing footage.

Fine biopic which showcases a brilliant performance by Busey as Holly, and conveys a real, raw feeling for the music.

An engaging attempt to take the piss out of the crocodile tears that have been gleefully exploited since Love Story.

Stallone's performance is a superb blend of stubborn-jawed gravity and ironic hamming as he heads, Godfather-like, for a confrontation with the Senate.

The special effects are superb, easy winners in an engaging inter-denominational free-for-all that blends Marvel Comics' Doctor Strange with Corman's The Raven. A successful excursion, spoiled only by the director's habit of plopping in postcard views of the Golden Gate Bridge instead of exteriors.

A skilful blend of the familiar (casting, English locations) and the outrageous (the script's mix of whodunit, disaster movie and telekinetic thriller) produces a beguiling entertainment in which half the fun's to be had from constructing a coherent synopsis out of the loony mess of flashback, foresight, eccentricity and even ecology.

Despite the scandalised yelps about child pornography, a film of disarmingly subversive innocence.

If it never quite rises to the kind of parable one half expects from the Corman factory, it's still OK.

One yearns for a routine cops and robbers story, but Grosbard lingers with illusory impartiality over the technical details of the parole system, the problems of finding accommodation and work, and the nastiness of the backyard pool-and-barbecue life-style of riche America.

Background details of hospital life are handled much more astutely than the main plot. It's a big mystery how Zieff (of Slither and Hearts of the West) allowed it to go off at half-cock.

This attempted follow-up to Carrie almost entirely lacks its predecessor's narrative thrust and suspense.

The gory, censor-hacked murders (all of women) and the revelation of the nut's identity (he's gone on to kidnap a virgin as substitute for his dead daughter) are all out of the way inside half-an-hour, leaving a lot of dead time to establish this awful movie's single original gimmick: the novelty encounter of two psychos, who end up at each other's throats.