Misanthropic, indeed, but the black humour and general inventiveness place it high above most contemporary horror pictures.

Everything except the dubbing of the French supporting cast is a model of craftsmanship, but as the plot escalates into increasingly arbitrary excesses of fantasy and heads for the predictable pay-off, the movie looks more and more like a potboiler.

Some of it comes off well, and Newman is superb. But the film shows tiresome signs of its origins as a stage play (by Arthur Kopit), and the good moments aren't quite enough to make up for its overall predictability.

The lavish production has some good effects sequences, but its plot is as corny as the dreadful lurex drape costumes and Jerry Goldsmith's slushy score. Fundamentally, this is just further proof of Hollywood's untiring ability to reduce all science fiction to its most feeble stereotypes.

Murder by Death is entertaining enough, even though the joke wears a little thin.

Noisy, incomprehensible and lumberingly irrelevant, complete with shell-schlock Sensurround.

It's a piece of low-budget rubbish (based on a portion of HG Wells' 1904 fantasy) featuring all the genre's well-loved ingredients: a frightful script, variable special effects, and a weird bunch of actors who manage to look just a little less ludicrous than the giant rats.

It's the kind of silliness that's too strained and self-indulgent to be enjoyable.

The occasional elegiac tone lamenting the passing of the West seems entirely out of place. Only Michael Parks, still aping James Dean at nearly 40, provides some welcome distraction.

It may be time to stop calling Nicolas Roeg's sexed-up sci-fi film that vaguely demeaning term - a cult classic - and start addressing it as what it is: the most intellectually provocative genre film of the 1970s.

It's one of the few truly major Westerns of the '70s, with a very clear vision of the historical role played by fear and violence in the taming of the wilderness.

'No way!' twice in the first five lines of dialogue let you know what to expect from this attempt to ape Jaws, so to speak.

The juxtaposition of clips is mindless; and between the indigestible chunks come newly-filmed scenes with Kelly and Astaire, which manage to be even worse than some of the clips. And their asinine commentary damagingly intrudes into the numbers.

Based on a Charles Gaines novel about the rootlessness of the so-called 'New South', it has its slack spells, but Rafelson's sure feel for the inexpressible subtleties of emotional relationships is evident throughout.

Inevitably softened by hints of self-congratulation concerning the success of Woodward and Bernstein's uncovering of the Watergate affair, Pakula's film is nevertheless remarkably intelligent, working both as an effective thriller (even though we know the outcome of their investigations) and as a virtually abstract charting of the dark corridors of corruption and power.

Beneath all the fun, there's a vision of humans as essentially greedy and dishonest, presented with a gorgeously amoral wink from Hitchcock, and performed to perfection by an excellent cast.

Griffith's directorial debut - after 20 years of scripting for Corman - does deliver the expected race/chase/demolition derby mayhem, but every time the focus switches to Ron Howard's adolescent romantic worries, it stalls.

The acting is intense, as you would expect from Ullmann and Josephson, working under a director who was coming to terms with his own breakdown in this film; and the nightmare imagery (washed-out backgrounds clashing vividly with stark colours) delivers a strong jolt to the subconscious.

In failing to reveal the model's persona as the materialisation (maintained at some cost to herself) of collective male fantasy, the script underlines its teleplay blandness.

A film which never really manages to confront us with the enormity of its subject, nor with any kind of analysis as to why rape occurs.

It's one of those rare movies, like King Hu's Touch of Zen, that handles its historical imagery so cleanly, and contains its pretensions so solidly within sure characterisation and plotting, that it is often sublimely expressive.

Like a shaggy dog story operating inside a chase movie. Chinese Bookie is the more insouciant, involuted and unfathomable of the two; the curdled charm of Gazzara's lopsided grin has never been more to the point.

Forty years on, Taxi Driver remains almost impossibly perfect: it’s hard to think of another film that creates and sustains such a unique, evocative tone, of dread blended with pity, loathing, savage humour and a scuzzy edge of New York cool.

The film's strength lies in its depiction of surfaces, lacking the visual or intellectual imagination to go beyond its shrewd social and psychological observations and its moments of absurdist humour.

Remarkable contemporary film noir that cuts the dirt and corruption of Los Angeles with a strain of allusions to (and, in the case of Reynolds' cop, illusions of) European romance.

Unmistakable Peckinpah - not a masterpiece, but enough to be going on with.

Barry Lyndon is best known for its photography – Kubrick borrowed a low-light camera from Nasa so he could shoot in candlelight – and it is uniquely, heart-stoppingly gorgeous. But there’s much more to it: this is a story of identity, and the lack of it. And it’s fascinating.

Connery and Caine (both excellent) become classic Huston overreachers, and echoes of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Moby Dick permeate the mythic yarn.