To say this ultraviolent 1983 flick is Chuck Norris'best movie might smack of faint praise, but what's good is mostly down to David Carradine as his strutting, butt-kicking, cigar-sucking nemesis. It's a modern-day western, heavy on the spaghetti, with Norris'Texas ranger taking on Carradine's gun-runner and his army of disposable borderland Mexicans. Did Walter Hill watch this before making Extreme Prejudice?
Alex Cox's gory update of Thomas Middleton's 1607 play about anarcho-nutter royal assassins. The ghost of Derek Jarman clearly lurks behind Cox's ambitious vision of Liverpool as a post-punk, retro-futurist city state. Christopher Eccleston spits nails as the hard-bastard anti-hero, but not even Eddie Izzard, Derek Jacobi and Sophie Dahl can lift the drama above flawed curio level.
This late John Wayne movie has The Duke as a Chicago cop trailing his man to London, while a hitman seeks to fulfill a contract on Wayne's life. It's middling, fish-out-of-water fare, the kind of bawdy, roustabout stuff Wayne did far too often, but by way of compensation you get Richard Attenborough as Wayne's finicky Scotland Yard sidekick.
First sequel to The Ipcress File, with Michael Caine as blockbuster spy author Len Deighton's bespectacled kitchen-sink Bond, Harry Palmer. Made in 1966, it doesn't have that first film's grubby chic, and the convoluted double-crossing gets almost impossible to follow, but there's much to enjoy, not least Berlin in all its drab Cold War glory, and Caine's sullen, funny, unblinking cool as he travels there to unravel the story surrounding a Soviet officer wishing to defect.
Impressive British witchcraft yarn set in the 17th century. After a ploughman unearths a bizarre-looking skull, the local villagers all start growing fur and claws and conducting saucy rites out in the woods with teen temptress Linda Hayden. Murder and madness abound as the victims' body parts are used to bring an ancient demon back to life. A notch above Hammer.
Roy Boulting's 1970 sex comedy, adapted from a then long-running stage play, carries an over-inflated reputation. The set-pieces now seem clunky, as Peter Sellers, looking distinctly uncomfortable, plays a smarmy, lascivious TV star who meets his nemesis in plucky Goldie Hawn. Watching their free love will cost you. Still, the marvellous Diana Dors lifts it briefly.
The closest that Jean-Luc Godard ever got to directing a star-studded blockbuster, Le Mépris, shot in Cinemascope and featuring Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance and Fritz Lang, follows the making of a crass adaptation of Homer's Odyssey while ridiculing commercial cinema and giving Palance some cracking lines: "You cheated me Fritz! That's not what's in the script!"
In recent years John Landis' frat-boy farce has had much to answer for, its legacy spawning a glut of imitations with twice the gross-out factor but half the humour. The original, now 25 years old but still rampantly immature, has real comic gusto, and allowed the late, great John Belushi to belch out a memorably madcap performance.
Set in 1962, it asks us to root for the scruffy, skiving outsiders (the term "slackers" still hadn't been coined) on a campus ruled by the monied, suave elite.
Entertaining thriller from James Mangold, only slightly marred by a dodgy psycho-babble explanatory twist. A terrific cast of John Cusack, Ray Liotta, John C McGinley and Amanda Peet are among or around those bumped off one by one in a desolate motel in a rainstorm. Who's the killer, and why does Cusack look so ambivalent about stopping him?
There's only one real Robin Hood, and that's Errol Flynn, now buckling his swash in this lovingly restored version of the 1938 classic. "You speak treason," observes cowardly King John (Claude Rains). "Fluently," Errol proudly admits, before crossing blades with Olympic duellist Basil Rathbone, rescuing the blushing Olivia de Havilland and feeding the poor of Sherwood. Hurrah!