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.

The camera is surprisingly mobile at times, but what really impresses is the use of omission and repetition.

Marvellous, grimly downbeat study of desperate lives and the escape routes people construct for themselves, stunningly shot by Conrad Hall.

A haunting, nightmarish vision.

This is a remarkable, piercing film, and central to an understanding of Ozu's work.

Tokyo Twilight' - [Ozu's] last black-and-white movie - takes him into unusually melodramatic territory, a dark disintegrating family saga that has broken marriages, unwanted pregnancy, gambling, prostitution, vice cops and so on. What's amazing, however, is that Ozu's narrative and visual ellipses keep sensationalism, hysteria and cliche at bay, so that it all rings true in ways undreamt of by most other directors. [10 May 2006, p.86]

This is a great movie, an austere masterpiece, with Delon as a cold, enigmatic contract killer who lives by a personal code of bushido.

A fairly obvious story, perhaps, but one that is helped enormously both by Ritchie's reluctance to move away from simulated realism into melodramatic plotting, and by his customary generosity, clear-eyed and unsentimental, towards his characters.

A series of variations on themes of excess, surplus and waste from the most fastidious of directors.

Superior formula stuff, injected with a rare degree of life by enthusiastic direction that occasionally tries for virtuosity and succeeds, and by a neat performance from Hershey that avoids the yawning traps in the script (built-in sex sequences, the she-loved-her-man theme in general).

Some moments of Gothic atmosphere though, don't quite dispel the feeling that much of the plot is devoted to developing situations where its leading ladies might be disrobed for the camera.

As so often with this director's work, the film is craftsmanlike rather than brilliant, but the performances, Robert Surtees' lush camerawork, and Mulligan's solid psychological insights make for thoughtful, sometimes even chilling, entertainment.

A flawed but immensely appealing film adapted in part from Vardis Fisher's Mountain Man, a superb historical novel which explores the myth and the reality of the tough trappers who roamed the unconquered West in the 1850s.