Strong supporting performances, good locations, and well-staged fights contribute to what is an impressive example of how to assemble this kind of material.

The jokes and details are delightful, yet there's real anger behind them, and it bursts spectacularly into view in the concluding frames.

A film that is voyeuristic in the extreme, extending no warmth to the bizarre mother and daughter as they battle out their lives together, but choosing instead to film them in the most offensive of ways.

For all its nods, winks and witty asides, it’s a richly personal work, picking over the questions every creative artist must eventually ask: Am I ‘for real’? Does it matter? And what is all this work worth, anyway?

Thanks to an intelligent script, partly by Lorenzo Semple Jr (Pretty Poison, The Parallax View), the action rarely falters, and at its best the film offers an intriguing slice of neo-Hitchcock.

Though seemingly a prettily made, pretty erotic exploitation movie, one suspects that there is value in Wertmüller's observation of the potency of sexual chauvinism. The film fails, however, through the absence of credibility and objectivity, and its refusal to move into the realms of fantasy, allegory, or even irony.

It starts off promisingly with some stylised and ridiculous heroics involving a German sub, but once the island has been occupied and a few excellent monsters vanquished, the plot settles down to some very ordinary machinations.

The film's triumph is Mitchum's definitive Marlowe, which captures perfectly the character's down-at-heel integrity and erratic emotional involvement with his cases.

What matters in this type of film is not so much the plot as the way in which an atmosphere is created. Unfortunately, Rosenberg directs flatly, hopping from one set piece to the next, disjointedly throwing characters of varying interest across Newman's path, while the latter - in his coarsest performance yet - remains content to wisecrack and ham outrageously.

The traditional ingredients of homely moralising, sentimentality and raucous slapstick are used sparingly, the dialogue is fairly bright, some visual gags are neatly executed, even Knotts is bearable, and Susan Clark makes an auspicious Disney debut as the Calamity Jane-type heroine.

When the explanations begin (mainly a flashback to 17th century ancestors), things become heavy-handed, revealing the ragged direction, a dire script, and performances which range from the bemused (Albert) to the awful (Borgnine).

A wittily efficient quickie, the film is a winner all the way - a surprise, since Starrett's career thus far had been the movie director's equivalent of a criminal record.

Streets ahead of the average blaxploitation effort, yet is still something of a disappointment. Partly the fault lies with the script, and partly with a certain commercial gloss; one or two of the characters nevertheless do come over with some distinctiveness, thanks to OK performances.

Ultimately, Rollerball gets by on its sheer monolithic quality - an abundance of quantity. Despite indifferent direction and dire humour, it is well mounted and photographed.

A masterpiece.

Occasionally lacking in plot logic, it's nevertheless an imaginative little B thriller that manages to be genuinely suspenseful.

It's a film of unrelieved blackness, from the seedy photographer who snaps his junkie wife cowering in the bath to homicidal babies, from mongol child at a petrol station to Kennedy's brutal sergeant. It's all the more absurdly fatalistic for refusing to draw political, moral or social conclusions.

Milius once more reveals that his overriding concern is with the formation of myth rather than realism, as he balances the fates of his two legendary figures - Brian Keith's Roosevelt and Sean Connery's kidnapper Raisuli - to dynamic effect.

Fourth in the series, promisingly reuniting Edwards and Sellers with their respective careers not exactly buoyant since A Shot in the Dark ten years earlier, The Return of the Pink Panther delivers a good deal of that promise, from Richard Williams' ultra-ritzy animated credits to the four or five brilliantly timed set pieces of Clouseau-engineered mayhem.

Hackman takes the enlarged role by the scruff of the neck and delivers yet another fine performance of doubt and the dawning awareness of his own weakness. Frankenheimer directs in taut, pacy fashion to keep the suspense high.

Events degenerate into miscalculated farce and underline Nichols' continuing slick superficiality. Adrien Joyce's much hacked-about script sounds as though it was once excellent: a pity everyone treats it so off-handedly.

Perhaps a more caustic picture was intended, but the film grows to like its characters, and the final result is amusingly indulgent and generous in a way few current American films are: one has to look to East Europe (especially the work of Milos Forman) for a similar quality of ironic compassion.

Admittedly the book, an elusive, mesmeric work of associated images and ideas, surreal and analytical, would present problems for the most talented of film-makers. But Schlesinger really blows it.

Overall the movie isn't as synchromeshed as it might be; the rivalry between champions Carradine and Stallone isn't very interesting, and some of the gags aren't sick or funny enough. But it's a great audience film.

Not Chapter 2 of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but it does find that old sexist reprobate Russ Meyer in agreeably rumbustious form.

The Who's ludicrous rock opera was in fact tailor-made for the baroque, overblown images and simplistic symbolism of Russell's style, which only means that this is both the movie in which he is most faithful to the ideas and tone of his material, and one of his very worst films.

A truly enigmatic thriller and a key film of the '70s, brilliantly scripted by Alan Sharp.

Made with all the awareness of hindsight, Shampoo offers a sharp sexual satire and a mature statement on both America and Hollywood in 1968.