Old-fashioned, overlong costume epic, comfortably reactionary in its view of the Tsar Nicholas as a saint who knew not what he was doing to the Russian people, and of the revolutionaries as potential tyrants reaching hungrily for power.

Simply a rivetingly murderous game of cat and mouse that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Very hard to take with the film sitting up and practically slobbering in its eagerness to prove how loveable it is. A pity, because the score isn't half bad (the show-stopping 'If I Were a Rich Man' almost gets lost), the choreography has possibilities, and Topol is distinctly personable.

It's meant to make you feel sad for what's lost, but a vitality throbs through it.

The casting of Seyrig, trailing memories of Marienbad, is inspired, and her swooning performance bewitches the entire cast. Kümel casts his own spells with alternating blue washes and red dissolves, and skilful location work that doesn't allow you to see the join between hotel exteriors and interiors - in Ostend and Brussels respectively.

The real problems, however, are that Friedkin's nervy, noisy, undisciplined pseudo-realism sits uneasily with his suspense-motivated shock editing; and that compared to (say) Siegel's Dirty Harry, the film maintains no critical distance from (indeed, rather relishes) its 'loveable' hero's brutal vigilante psychology.

The film is often sentimental, sometimes brilliant as well as horrifying, and it is intriguing to speculate on what Buñuel, whom Trumbo originally wanted to direct, would have made of it.

Would-be thoughtful Western which ultimately resorts to killing and ketchup to make up for its lack of style and originality.

It abounds with intelligently applied stop-frame, slow motion and colour treatment knick-knacks which heighten the excitement and visual impact.

No matter how thickly Russell piles on the masturbating nuns, tortured priests and dissolute dauphins, there's no getting round the fact that it's all more redolent of a camp revue than a cathartic vision. Derek Jarman's sets, however, still look terrific.

Pacino, as the boy, proves that he didn't need Coppola to make him act, but Kitty Winn is less satisfactory, and the film is finally subject to an iron law of diminishing returns after its plot plumbs the depths and can find nothing to do except batter us some more.

It's absolutely riveting.

A hip, cool, entertaining thriller.

The shimmering light and colour, the conflict of cultures, and the emergence of semi-mystic sexual forces in the desert landscape make this as Roeg-ian a film as The Man Who Fell to Earth or Bad Timing.

Great fun, with Wilder for once giving an impeccably controlled performance as the factory's bizarre owner.

Typically mild-mannered Disney live-action frolic. [04 Aug 2004]

As a slice of familiar Feiffer cynicism, tracing the arid sex life of two contrasting males from eager college days to drained middle age, this was never quite the major assault on sexism and male chauvinism it set itself up to be.

For once, a genuinely psychological thriller.

One of the best of Altman's early movies, using classic themes - the ill-fated love of gambler and whore, the gunman who dies by the gun, the contest between little man and big business - to produce a non-heroic Western.

Bizarre and vulgar, certainly, but also very hard to follow.

A delightfully quirky movie about a New York lawyer (Scott) who imagines he is Sherlock Holmes, adopting the deerstalking garb and savouring four-pipe problems.

A late Wayne Western, depending heavily on recycling better (and no better) earlier pictures.

Typically over-the-top murder mystery from Argento, neglecting its rather straightforward plot about a series of killings connected with a genetics research institute in favour of gruesome set pieces, bravura camera-work and set design (one character has some truly amazing wallpaper, seemingly spattered with blood), heavy symbolism, and a strong sound-track by Ennio Morricone. Reason doesn't come into it; gorgeous, grisly style is all.

Harmless piece of Neil Simon fluff, rather flattened by Hiller's steamroller direction.

A down market youth pic with Laughlin as the half-breed Vietnam veteran who stands up for America's misunderstood youth and operates a sort of one-man Countryside Commission.

Totally uncompromising and grindingly repetitive, the film nevertheless accumulates a kind of hallucinatory groove, with unexpected shafts of bizarre humour and vigorous, experimental new wave direction.

Zeroing in (with much of Mulligan's usual quiet sympathy) on adolescence and the moment of sexual awakening with the added weight of The Way We Were type of nostalgia, this is a mess of contradictions.

Three of the episodes are rough-and-ready but vigorous Grand Guignol fun. The fourth is something else again, a marvellous mood piece of chilling intensity.