Trivialising the theme, saddled with some terrible dialogue, needlessly tricked out with a lot of countdown-style dates, it founders into innocuous routine.

Like Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it both records and condemns the passage of time and the advent of progress; and there is a sombre, mournful quality which places the film very high up in the league of great Westerns.

Good, solid stuff, assembled efficiently enough to be pretty persuasive.

Modern cynicism and efficient acting hold the potential mushiness at bay, and the pair's picaresque odyssey through the Kansas dustbowl, during which they vie for control over their increasingly bizarre partnership, is admirably served by Laszlo Kovacs' marvellous monochrome camerawork.

What makes the film is essentially the character of Coffy as played by Pam Grier with increasing alienation: a nurse out to get the men who are responsible for her little sister's addiction, she makes a conscious decision to manipulate the sexual situations which the men around her force her to engage in. It is a performance that defies and subverts the genre.

Winner directs with typically crass abandon, wasting a solid performance from Lancaster and a story that a director like Jean-Pierre Melville might have made something of.

Hollywood movies have rarely spoken such tough and tender truths.

Comedy horror that really does give Vincent Price a chance to do his stuff, with deliciously absurd results.

In retrospect, it does indeed appear as a highly efficient gut-ripper, with far more suggestion than De Palma's later work of the loose-end flux of real life going on in the background. There is, however, much early evidence of his rampant misogyny, his increasingly blatant stealings from Hitchcock, and most unforgivable of all, his clear distaste for the people he creates.

Despite cries of outrage from hard-line Chandler purists, this is, along with Hawks' The Big Sleep, easily the most intelligent of all screen adaptations of the writer's work.

Innocuous animated fare (with songs) from Hanna-Barbera, based on EB White's fantasy.

It's an interesting example of how a stock Western plot can assume some fairly explicit political ramifications once it is transposed to a modern setting (not that that is any recommendation).

Sembene makes his point with a humour all the more powerful for the anger it induces at the genocidal antics of the whites. A conventional film, but it succeeds in its aim, clarifying the logic of the colonial struggle through a specific example.

The band ride after half a million's worth of stolen gold so they can turn it in for the 50,000 dollars reward; it's that sort of film. Loads of male camaraderie and big country theme music, plus Ann-Margret riding along as a box-office concession and to get the rest of the cast horny in a U Certificate sort of way.

Wittily directed by May, and neatly scripted by Neil Simon (from Bruce Jay Friedman's story A Change of Plan), though somewhere the film loses its thread and forgets how to draw things decently to a close.

Peckinpah's own control of the escalating frenzy is masterly; this is one of his coldest films, but a great thriller.

It's a terrific piece of junk: the top-notch screenwriters (Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes) never let a cliché slip through the net, and Neame's anaemic direction ensures that every absurdity is treated at face value.

Admirers of Playtime won't be too disappointed, but for the Tati heretic it's a long, slow haul between the occasional brilliant gag.

A glossy, violent, pointless movie from the team who later perpetrated Death Wish; mildly entertaining if you want to watch Bronson suggesting silent, brooding menace for the umpteenth time.

What it tells you most about is those kitschy concepts of 'stardom' and the like on a soap-opera/backstage drama level.

Impossible not to admire the total withholding of irony in Claxton's approach to this kamikaze project.

A patently absurd and funny movie, involving a series of spectacular fight routines, often filmed in slow motion, which are highly acrobatic and exciting.

This sub-$100,000 exploitation movie fused the sleazy intensity of the grindhouse with the piercing intelligence of an art film, and remains a brutal but rewarding experience.

Ritt's film must respond to the needs of an entertainment industry, and in its desire to be uplifting, leaves its characters one-dimensional without ensuring that the one dimension is heroic.

The film has the roughness you might expect in a first directorial effort, and also a perhaps unexpected leaning towards comedy. Lee makes great play on his character as the country boy without weapons confronting the denizens of the technologically-powerful West and winning hands down.

One of the most successful of the early '70s blaxploitation cycle.