While the cinematography has dated rather badly, the story and the performances of both Tyson and her supporting cast are more than powerful enough to make it worthwhile viewing. [04 Sep 2008, p.72]

William Friedkin’s full-throttle adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel works because it fuses the extreme and the everyday.

While never as disturbing as the first film, it fails to convince because of the turnaround in Harry's character, and because it posits in facile fashion degrees of taking the law into one's own hands: Harry's acceptable, the gun crazy kids aren't. That said, it has some fine action sequences, and is far less objectionable than the later Sudden Impact.

All a bit soulless, but at least there's no equivalent of the 'Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head' sequence. All those who liked the earlier film should enjoy this as much.

In its desire to make no concessions to Dirty Harry and its ilk, it destroys any potential interest with almost wilful perversity.

With Schaffner unable to find the necessary perspective to prevent the film from becoming unevenly episodic, it ends up looking as if it were tacked together by at least three different directors.

Despite Robert Towne's often sharp script - about two veteran sailors detailed to escort a young and naïve rating to prison, and showing him a sordidly 'good time' en route - and despite strong performances all round, one can't help feeling that the criticism of modern America hits out at all too easy targets in a vague and muffled manner.

A superbly chilling essay in the supernatural.

Whereas the later film built up an impressively complex series of narrative strands and psychological motivations, this is far more one-dimensional, and is so laxly structured that its rambling story seems to last longer than the (almost) three-hour Prince of the City.

An inferior reworking of The Thing from Another World, which still manages to keep interest alive despite some poor special effects, a flat jokiness and stereotype characters.

With Jodorowsky's meaning somewhat opaque, it's slightly tedious going, but you certainly get plenty to look at.

It's performed beautifully, laced with a quietly ironic wit, and quite lovely to look at.

Good baddies, good poignant bits, and an archery contest that degenerates into all-action American football make up for the familiar, repetitive plot and the several lapses of taste and intelligence inevitable in medieval Nashville.

With the script glossing whole areas of confrontation (from the communist '30s to the McCarthy witch-hunts), it often passes into the haze of a nostalgic fashion parade.

Marvellous, toughly eccentric thriller which confirmed that Siegel had more responses to '70s paranoia than a mere Magnum blast, and decisively removed Matthau from the wasteland of Neil Simon wit.

A muddled and slick youth film. Excellent sequences of his quarrelsome study group tearing one another apart under fierce competitive strain - and a fine performance by Houseman as their olympian, sadistic professor - make the film watchable.

Badlands is as psychologically precise as it is splendidly visually observant. But it also exudes a timeless, mythical and tragic quality which is all the more remarkable for the languorous ease with which its story unfolds.

Scorsese directs with a breathless, head-on energy which infuses the performances, the sharp fast talk, the noise, neon and violence with a charge of adrenalin. One of the best American films of the decade.

Coldly described, the set and costume design and the hothouse atmosphere represent so much high-camp gloss; but once again this careful stylisation enables Fassbinder to balance between parody of an emotional stance and intense commitment to it. He films in long, elegant takes, completely at the service of his all-female cast, who are uniformly sensational.

The Mother and the Whore is an icy comment on the New Wave, informed throughout by Eustache's striking visual intelligence.

Though the baseball scenes themselves are secondary and none too convincing, De Niro nails the sentimental tearjerker stuff.

There's a boldness, confident stylisation, and genuine weirdness to the movie that totally escaped other post-spaghetti American Westerns, with a real sense of exorcism running both through and beyond it.

Worth seeing for Lee, but still unforgivably wasteful of his talents.

Despite the impressive desert locations and an array of tanks (to represent the ills of modern militarism), it's still staged like a student revue. Most notable moments are the garden of Gethsemane scene, where Jewison cuts in leering Pharisees and crucifixion details from Flemish masters to supremely kitschy effect, and the scene of Christ being flogged, shot in sadistic slow motion.

Everything becomes one long car chase, and in the end it's just a matter of the fat bald bully getting his comeuppance at the hands of the not-so-fat toupeed hero.

Like a Thunder Road filtered through the perceptions of the '70s, it's an invigorating and touching movie.

A complete mess, with biblical references (for some reason the central love story parallels the Fall), hallucinatory sequences, laboured borrowings, and moronic direction, yet quite enjoyable in its rubbishy way.

The cast lend the film an authority that Yates' curiously pedestrian approach fails to provide, and Mitchum's agonies over codes of underworld honour segue perfectly into his subsequent explorations of loyalty and obligation in The Yakuza.