Reviews

The legendary director Sam Peckinpah's life and career defined the concept of the maverick film-maker. He is best known for his westerns, which make up seven of his fourteen features along with another two which are as close as makes no difference. "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" is notable for (among other things) being the last western he ever directed. It's a fitting final word from the man who was so influential in the genre, a prime example of the style and themes he brought to his films as well as of the way his films were often compromised by studio conflicts and interference.

Aside from the violence and much-imitated Peckinpah style, the two most common adjectives for his westerns are "revisionist" and "elegiac," which explains why they were so influential to the 60s and 70s but also why they don't entirely belong in that era. Peckinpah's idea of a revisionist western has a lot in common with his contemporaries, replacing the John Wayne/Gary Cooper ideal of the Old West with something darker and more morally complex. But his films more than those of any other director mourn the passing of that era, and the people and values that have been lost. His parents and grandparents had to varying extents first-hand experience of that old world, and despite how bleak it is painted, you get the impression Peckinpah wished he lived in that time. They were in many ways more elegiac than revisionist.

Peckinpah's films also tend to be very personal, sometimes painfully so. In the Wild Bunch lead actor William Holden realised this and based a lot of his character on the director. "Pat Garrett..." takes this a step further, with Peckinpah appearing in the film himself, and depicting characters living a wild, destructive life on the fringes of the civilised world that cannot possibly last. This reflects his own life and inevitable demise with brutal honesty.

The story of Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid was the director's opportunity to make what he hoped would be his ultimate statement in western films. Although he filled his cast as always with actors he had used before, key roles are played by singers Kris Kristofferson (as Billy) and Bob Dylan, which along with the presence of Dylan on the soundtrack gave the film some modern trappings similar to contemporary work by Robert Altman and Arthur Penn. Mainly though, this film stays close to the themes close to Peckinpah's heart: men, the codes they live by, and their struggles to survive in the disappearing west.

The central plot is simple, although there are twists and turns in Pat Garrett's pursuit of the outlaw Billy the Kid whom he once called a friend. Mainly this film contrasts the lives and choices of the two titular outlaws. Billy the Kid here is played by Kristofferson as a man whose fame and legend has already overtaken the day to day reality of his life. He chooses to stay in Lincoln County long after the cattle wars are over and the powerful ranchers have won leaving him nowhere to go, because he'd rather be a fugitive outlaw with a great reputation than just another drunk hiding out in Mexico. Pat Garrett (the brilliant James Coburn) is the man who has left behind his outlaw life, taking money and a sheriff's badge from those he once fought, along with the job of bringing his old friend to justice, dead or alive. He has made the smart choice, because he is a survivor, but he hates himself for his decision and envies his old friend Billy.

Garrett's struggle is the heart of the film. We still see the gunfights, the destruction of the old West and the grimy, fading men who no longer see a place for them and their rambunctious way of life, all depicted in classic Peckinpah style. But really it's the story of a man wrestling with the fact that he has been commissioned to do something he doesn't believe in, to kill someone he loves and destroy things he once stood for. He sees his raising of a posse to go after Billy as one last adventure for both of them. This is of course full of fiction and myth as most Westerns are, but here the characters themselves choose the myth rather than the reality. Garrett even more than Billy seems to believe in the romantic ideal of being an outlaw gunfighter; even as he pursues and tries to kill his old friend he seems to be building him up in his mind as a glorious hero.

Sadly, while the film is classic Peckinpah in the sense of the story it tells, it's also a classic example of one of his films being compromised by his often troubled relationships with the studios. Here he had the misfortune of working for MGM when they were more interested in turning a quick profit to fund their expansion in Las Vegas than indulging a director who was hard work at the best of times. He was given less time, money and resources than he needed to make the film, leading to production problems above and beyond the usual barely-contained chaos that frequently attended Peckinpah. Resorting to desperate methods to get it made, such as secretly reshooting scenes at the weekend against the orders or producers, he was able to complete the film to his satisfaction. But he was let down once again when when the studio took the film off him and cut it to pieces in the editing room, and the truncated version released in 1973 showed only glimpses of his intended vision. The deliberate pace seemed too slow and build up of tension was lost thanks to the studio's hatchet job, and the theatrical release was not well-received. Once again the executives failed to learn the lesson of Peckinpah's career that they should either do it his way or not bother at all.

Fortunately, something close to the director's cut was later found and restored - partly thanks to members of the production stealing copies of the film and keeping them hidden for another time. There are now two versions, the Turner Cut (so-called because Ted Turner's TCM channel put together a cut of the film which people close to Peckinpah endorsed) and the 2005 Special Edition supervised by Peckinpah historians. These versions restore almost 20 minutes of footage which are crucial to the film making sense and giving the story back its power. In these versions it is a brilliant parting shot by the man who lived his life like the stories he told, even to the brink of self-destruction. By turns brutal, cynical, touching and eventually tragic, it evokes the fading away of this most mythical of American eras, and the raging last gasps of characters who find themselves out of time and options.

This is one of Peckinpah's best films, made when his creative powers were at their height and he was just about keeping his personal excesses in check. Whether it's his definitive western statement compared to the Wild Bunch is less certain, but in the restored versions it deserves a viewing for fans of the genre to make up their own minds.

"Dillinger" belongs to a sub-genre of films about the colourful criminal outlaws of the 1930s. It is not the most well known of these but in my view it is the best, better even than 1967's Bonnie and Clyde. As well as capturing that era beautifully, it is notable for being the directorial debut of John Milius, a unique cult figure in 70s cinema who displays a great talent for film-making that he only occasionally fulfilled.

The profusion of criminal gangs who raised hell across the Midwest during the Great Depression have their own special place within American popular culture and especially film. Cinematic treatments of these figures have often been more like Westerns than crime dramas, appropriately enough because of the myth-making that has surrounded them, both at the time and for decades afterwards. As the most famous of these films, Bonnie and Clyde was part of a new era of anti-establishment film-making that elevated its central characters to the status of style icons that bore no resemblance to what they were like in real life.

Ironically, given that films of his life are mostly less well known, Dillinger was a bigger name than Parker and Barrow, and indeed any of his criminal contemporaries. This was so much so that his face made it onto the targets on the FBI's shooting range. The hype around him and his gang was just as overblown as it was for Bonnie and Clyde, and John Milius also embraces the myth in "Dillinger". His treatment is much more gritty though, and owes a lot to the squalid revisionism of Sam Peckinpah, never downplaying the violence and brutality but managing to make you sympathise with unsympathetic characters.

More than any other film about the subject, Milius's film plays out like a western, emphasising the similarity between these Depression-era bandits and the cowboy gunfighters of the previous century, who were built up into legends and their exploits wildly embellished for public consumption. Just as Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven shows the fictional legend being written by English Bob's sidekick even as events play out in front of the dusty saloon, this film shows the Dillinger gang as very aware of and interested in how they are portrayed by the press, and whether they have made it to Public Enemy Number 1. And for every Billy the Kid and Butch and Sundance, there's a Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly and Baby Face Nelson. These latter three all feature in the film, although a lot of liberties have been taken about the events of their lives, and their relationship to Dillinger and his FBI nemesis Melvin Purvis. In the same vein the battle between Dillinger and Purvis becomes a personal rivalry, with conversations and even meetings invented to fuel this and create a relationship between them on screen. This is all in the service of the story at the expense of hard fact. While that can be grating in films supposedly based on true stories, the film gets away with it the way all classic westerns do, as if there's something about these stories that makes them more important than the truth.

The other reason the film works despite taking liberties with the facts and the antiheroic treatment of violent criminals, is the realism and authenticity of the setting. The grimy Dust Bowl towns where the Dillinger gang robs banks and fights the law are truly believable, despite being filmed on a low budget. The characters have dirt under their fingernails, threadbare clothes and live in rundown rooms. They are brutish and violent, to their victims and each other. They seem much more grounded in reality than Beatty and Dunaway as Bonnie and Clyde, whose stylish clothes and perfect looks are a world away from real life (although that was the intention of that film). This Dillinger is certainly more realistic than Johnny Depp in Michael Mann's "Public Enemies," who has been turned into another of Mann's classic lone hero types. That version bathes the setting and its characters in a kind of soft-focus sheen that completely misses the point of these characters, because it is the impoverished and broken-down world in which they lived that explains why there were so strangely popular.

The desperation and poverty all around them fuelled the public's fascination with criminals like Dillinger, because they needed an escape from their own lives and had a sneaking respect for those who had thrown off their shackles and lived life outside the law, even though they were violent criminals. It was also easier to sympathise with the robbers than the banks that had foreclosed on millions of ordinary Americans since the Crash. Milius beautifully captures this phenomenon thanks to smart direction and a sharp script. He is aided and abetted by a terrific cast who embody his characters better than any other similar film treatments: Warren Oates as Dillinger is ten years too old, but so greatly resembles and embodies the real man that you believe in him completely. Fellow Peckinpah regular Ben Johnson is superb as the mean and implacable Purvis, exacting a terrible vengeance for the deaths of cops and federal agents at the hands of gangsters. The supporting actors include a young Richard Dreyfuss, Harry Dean Stanton and various character actors who all add to the realism and texture of the film, and make it matter to the viewer when the bullets and blood are flying across the screen.

Dillinger is a great film that rewards repeat viewings, but sadly isn't as well known or celebrated as it deserves to be. It's not easy to find on a good print on DVD and Blu Ray, but is worth seeking out.

Maybe it's unfair on the makers of the film to criticise it for not being what I was expecting, but In Fabric does set some expectations with how it is marketed and how the film starts. What I was expecting was some sort of Giallo-style headtrip of a film with supernatural elements, but with a backdrop of quirky 80s suburban England. A sort of Dario Argento meets Mike Leigh.

That's what I thought I was getting for the first 30 to 40 minutes of the film but then it seemed to lose its way. The atmosphere, the sympathetic but troubled protagonist played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the strange and perverted department store in an eccentric Thames Valley Town - I was loving it and couldn't wait to see what happened next. Then it just failed to pay off, carried on going, carried on failing to pay off, then half-heartedly tried to become a compendium story and meandered off into nowhere. There was a belated attempt to give it a kind of shocking climax but by then all atmosphere and interest had gone out of the film.

I find that when I try to describe the film, it sounds a lot better than it actually turned out on screen. The idea of this film is something I really wanted to see but it didn't deliver on its promise. A lot of interesting and unsettling ideas are just thrown together without tying it together into something that maintains the viewer's interest. It didn't have to make sense, it didn't have to explain, it didn't have to do what I was expecting. But it should have been better and it ended up being very disappointing.

Kong: Skull Island is an updated version of the King Kong story, set in the 70s as the Vietnam War is coming to a close. It makes no reference to any other Kong incidents or story lines, with no continuity from the original King Kong or either of the remakes. The premise is that advances in satellite photography have revealed something interesting on a previously uncharted island in the Pacific, and a scientific expedition with military support sets off to discover its secrets. The era and location in which the film is set draw inspiration from Vietnam films, especially Apocalypse now, alongside Western and Asian monster movies. These inspirations and the look and sound of the film suggest it wants to evoke the atmosphere and mood of the 70s, and of the power of the modern world facing up to the awesome power of the natural world. None of these promises are delivered in the finished film, which only manages to be an average-quality blockbuster with impressive effects and nothing else to commend it.

Part of the problem is that every theme and visual image has been done before, fairly extensively, as has every character and plot trope. This is at minimum the tenth Kong-related film unleashed on the public, along with countless pop-culture references to giant apes swiping at aircraft. Effects movies featuring giant creatures are standard fare for modern audiences, from Jurassic Park onward - and various plot lines from the Jurassic Park sequels show up here. That's not necessarily a problem, as most films these days do their fair share of recycling, but to stand out from the rest a film with such familiar content needs some sort of new element or fresh perspective. Kong: Skull Island simply doesn't have that.

The mediocre end result is all the more noticeable because it makes reference to a number of ideas that could have been interesting if they'd been explored more fully or given any kind of new twist. There are two different groups of scientists with different reasons for being there, and a sceptical government not sure of the value of being there. The military contingent on the expedition has different motivations and responds differently to events on the Island. There are references to the Cold War and Vietnam, and a couple of points about human impact on the environment and the need to look harder at what is the real danger they are facing. But none of it goes any further than a couple of quick references to establish the plot, in the same way that it gives you short bursts of various songs of the era before cutting them off.

The film also fails to do anything with its characters and the potential for conflict or drama between tired veterans of the Vietnam War, an anti- war photographer who might be seen as unpopular with the soldiers, and scientists with various agendas. Tom Hiddleston's character is a great example of how the cast is pretty much left hanging once they've been introduced. He is used pretty much as the theme park guide to shepherd the characters from Act 1 through to Act 3, and otherwise has nothing to do except look buff and stern while all hell breaks loose. It couldn't be more obvious that it's all an excuse for various large computer-generated images to bash seven shades out of other computer-generated images. The rest is just window dressing, an attempt to resonate with other, better films which makes it suffer by comparison. That makes the film a perfectly acceptable way to spend two hours, but no more than that. It will be forgotten long before the films it imitates because it doesn't give you anything or anyone to care about.

There are good things in the film, to be fair. The various action scenes are well-staged, with some lively creature battles and shocks and thrills. The third act is genuinely gripping, and Kong himself is very well- realised. The director makes good use of the locations and produces some striking visuals, albeit mostly referencing other films. Although they are mostly poorly-served by the finished script (Samuel L Jackson and John Goodman have particularly thankless tasks), the actors are all very watchable and make the most of any opportunity they get to shine. Brie Larson does a good job, and it can at least be said that the female characters are no more lacking in depth than their male counterparts. (The film does however conspicuously fail the Bechdel test). Perhaps the best thing in the film is John C. Reilly, who has the job of Basil Exposition filling in the gaps in the story while also providing a quirky charm and emotional core to the film. For all the film's weaknesses, it's reasonably entertaining overall and chugs along at a decent pace; it's certainly not a *bad* film, in the way that Batman vs Superman or the sequels to Transformers were bad. None of which gets past the fact this has all been done before, and better.

With the people involved, behind and in front of the camera, it had the potential to be a lot better than this. In the end the studio seems to have made sure no real individuality or originality was allowed to get in the way of their desire to sell popcorn and put some hollow spectacle on screen for a few weeks. They apparently hope to use this as a launch pad for more creature movies; they are presumably counting on box office returns rather than any real audience enthusiasm to support their plan.

First things first, let's establish which genre this film falls into. Don't be fooled by the fact that the plot has an underlying science fiction/fantasy element, or tries at times to be a costume drama, or borrows a bit of its style and approach from Benjamin Button. What we have here is a chick flick.

And not a very good one. The central story concerns a woman who for reasons unknown has become immortal and lives through the ages while all around her age and die. This brings with it complications and makes her unsure of how to live her life. This idea has been done before and more compellingly. It seems as though a man in this situation would put his time to good use chopping people's heads off in massive sword fights, with Queen blasting away on the soundtrack. Unfortunately Hollywood has decided that a woman in the same boat doesn't get very much to do, and none of it interesting.

The main character's immortal existence is spent staring sadly out of windows, and occasionally having boring sappy relationships with boring sappy men. And what plays over the soundtrack is most definitely not a kind of magic; instead it's dull, slow piano to make sure you're as depressed as the main character, with the occasional burst of Kenny G playing on dinner dates.

I'm conscious that I'm not really the target audience for this kind of film. But surely the audience for "women's pictures" (and women looking for decent parts in films for that matter), deserve more to look forward to than an eternity being miserable in nice clothes and deciding whether to have a boyfriend or not?

I will always regret not seeing this film at the cinema, because the trailer failed to get across what a gem it is. It looked like it would just be a basic Star Trek parody, but it's so much more than that.

After its theatrical run my local video rental place (remember them?) praised this film to the skies and pretty much demanded I watch it. I gave in, rented it, and what a blast I had. It has since become a huge favourite, to be pulled down from the shelf and watched whenever you need a few laughs.

The idea could not have been better executed. The stars of an old sci- fi TV show have been typecast and now survive on the convention circuit signing autographs and fielding obscure technical questions about the show from ardent fans dressed in space fleet uniform. Tim Allen is exactly right as the egotistical former captain based on Kirk/Shatner, with the wonderful Alan Rickman as a Shakespearean actor frustrated that he's only remembered as a Spock-like alien defined by his latex make-up and Grapthar's Hammer catchphrase. Sigourney Weaver is equally confined as a bright, strong actress whose only role in the original show was to look pretty and talk to the ship's computer - all the more ironic as Weaver herself wrote the book on iconic and powerful female sci-fi characters in the Alien series. The cast is rounded out nicely by various classic types from Star Trek shows like the former child star, salt of the earth engineering officer and (beautifully) Sam Rockwell as the guy who gets killed as soon as the away team get into trouble on an alien planet.

The captain is approached by an odd, awkward group saying they are aliens in trouble who need his help and, assuming it's another paid personal appearance request for fans, he goes along with them. Then he finds that this is a real group of aliens who think the show is real and want him to deal with a real galactic threat. Keen for a chance to do more than sign old photographs and be mocked by detractors of sci fi, he ropes in his old cast mates to try and be space heroes for real.

What follows is a marvellous comedy in which actors struggle to adapt when the cardboard sets and fake technology are replaced with a real ship based on their show, and in which all the logic and tropes from sci fi television drive the workings of the real universe. The beauty of it is that it's not just a spoof of how sci fi plays out, but a sideways look at what it's like to be in those films and shows, and to be a fan of them. It hits its comic targets perfectly and the self- aware humour is just right - "Did you guys even WATCH the show?" As well as that the world in space is well done, with good special effects and action. Best of all its tone is good-natured, celebrating the world of Star Trek with no sneering.

While there are extra pleasures for fans who've watched every series and film in the Star Trek universe, this is a treat for anyone with a basic knowledge of the series and sci fi fandom. It's a real joy to watch at any time for any audience.

Cinema audiences are getting sick of all the reboots, remakes and recycling of classic films and franchises, with good reason. They are equally weary of CGI-laden effects for the sake of it, and endless safe, homogeneous blockbusters.

Add to that the way even venerable film series like Die Hard have been reduced to PG-13/12A fodder where the hero can't even say his own curse-laden catchphrase any more, and you would be forgiven for not expecting too much from 70-year old George Miller returning to his old Mad Max character after a three-decade absence. The film industry today can't do justice to the adrenaline overload of the Road Warrior, right?

Wrong.

Somehow George Miller got One Hundred and Fifty Million Actual Dollars to make an R-rated action film, filled the screen with insanity and grotesques, and delivered on all the empty words other filmmakers have used before like "breathing new life into a classic franchise," "genuine reboot," "practical effects instead of CG weightlessness" and "great action, great story." Just for good measure, he made it into something of a feminist action film and picked up 6 Oscars. In another year he might have had a shot at two more, Best Director and Cinematography. By some utter anomaly it lost out on Best Visual Effects as well. So you can safely say this has been a success.

The film plays out as more or less two unbroken hours of full-on action, mostly on fast-moving machinery, the likes of which you will never see elsewhere. Amid the flame, dust, flying bullets and broken bodies flying through the air you also get a coherent story, told mostly through the kinetic forward motion of the action. This is pure cinema, absolutely brilliant, succeeding on every level. It's not everyone's taste to be based around extended car chases, and some complained about the minimal dialogue of Max who some thought was sidelined by the other lead characters. But in my humble opinion it is entirely consistent with Mad Max 2, where Mel Gibson had just 16 lines of dialogue and the story of the other characters' struggle was seen through his eyes.

This is absolutely essential viewing, if nothing else just to wonder at the thrills, violence, apocalyptic worlds and cannibalised motor vehicles flying across the screen. It's so wild, at a preview screening a member of the audience stood up in the middle of an action sequence, turned to Miller and shouted "How the hell did you do that?" It was fellow action director Robert Rodriguez.

You really can't afford to miss this film.

This would be a pretty unremarkable film which would be swiftly forgotten if it wasn't for the fact that the whole thing is a little strange.

It's an international production which has dusted off the old "rich business guy should spend more time with this kids" storyline for another use, and not done it very well. Freaky Friday has been ripped off, along with pretty much every absent father themed kids film and every animal themed kids film. Your typical high achieving American tycoon spends too much time away from his family, and accidentally buys some sort of magic cat that he swaps places with in contrived and farcical circumstances, to learn An Important Lesson.

It's pretty bad and hasn't hung around long at the box office, so what? Right?

Except it's stranger than that. For a film aimed at kids, and quite young and undemanding kids at that, it spends A LOT of time on a boardroom debate over whether the business should remain privately owned with its founder holding a majority share or go public, and whether they should focus on big prestige projects or concentrate on profitability and efficiency a little more. Surely this is just not something the kids in the cinema have come to see? Maybe I'm not giving today's youngsters enough credit and they are really ready for more corporate-themed stories. Or maybe the same middle-aged executives who never tire of estranged parental relationship stories think kids are as interested in the business world as they are. Aside from this there's a few themes that don't sit well with the kiddie audience, and some really odd attitudes to animals on show.

The other thing that's strange about this is the people they've got making it. Barry Sonnenfeld directs, but really doesn't give it any of his usual touches, and the cast includes Kevin Spacey, Christopher Walken and Jennifer Garner. I cannot begin to imagine what attracted them to the project. Their presence made the film bearable, and my daughter found it diverting enough (and there are a few entertaining moments). But it's still a bit weird to see quite an interesting cast turn up and delivery a completely perfunctory film like this.

It's mostly harmless though, and won't do permanent harm to the reputation of any of the people involved. I just can't for the life of me understand how it got made.

From 1974 to 1988, John Carpenter had a run of thirteen films which gained him an iconic reputation as a film-maker. Every single film he directed in that period has stood the test of time very well, although apart from "Halloween" they arguably did not get as much acclaim or success as they deserved when they were released. 1987's Prince of Darkness is perhaps his most overlooked and underrated film, a return to his independent film-making roots and a who's-who of all his greatest influences.

Bruised by his experiences on bigger-budget projects in a mainstream Hollywood system that didn't really know what to do with his films, Carpenter followed up (the now deservedly loved) Big Trouble In Little China with a B-movie horror where he had complete control. The only tension on set was that between the wild imagination of his script and the limits of his budget, but that was territory he could navigate like no one else. The premise owes a debt to one of Carpenter's idols, the British science fiction pioneer Nigel Kneale, whose Quatermass series of films and television shows created the now familiar template of scientists discovering uncontainable horrors. It also has a healthy dose of HP Lovecraft, another of the director's touchstones, as well as his traditional nods to Howard Hawks and George Romero. But as always this is not imitation or pastiche, rather it is a case of a genuinely individual talent showing his roots and influences.

The premise of the film is a fanciful meeting point between religion and science. Physicists who are on the cusp of making breakthroughs at a quantum level discover something sinister they can't explain, and a priest from an order tasked with guarding an ancient, terrible secret realises it can no longer be kept quiet. Demonic, evil, possessed powers are leaking into this world from another dimension, which depending on your point of view is either a universe of antimatter threatening to collapse our reality into oblivion, or a supernatural evil come to fulfil ancient prophecies.

The priest and the scientists (a mixture of grizzled old professors and younger students) meet to study a container, millions of years old, full of a mysterious and frightening living substance in an abandoned church in LA. The whole area is full of unease and chilling threat, from the swarms of insects around the area to the crowd of eerily silent street people who gather, led unnervingly by the singer Alice Cooper. From there the situation soon gets out of control and gory, grisly and genuinely frightening horrors follow the team around the church. Two things John Carpenter could always do better than most are suspenseful horror atmosphere and a building under siege, and here you get both for your money. The film builds up to a powerful climactic showdown, and does a really nice job of leaving the story buzzing around your head for a good while after the closing credits.

This is one of my favourite John Carpenter films, a worthy addition to his horror output alongside the more celebrated Halloween and The Thing. It has enough ideas to fill half a dozen movies, a bit wildly thrown together at times but enough of it sticks to make for a compelling story. As you'd expect, the director makes light of budget limitations and builds a really creepy, nasty atmosphere. Not for the first time, he uses things that are unsettling by themselves - sudden swarms of insects, urban decay in the worst parts of town, being stuck all night in an old building - to build up the sense of dread then unleash the main threat. On top of that he takes some wildly imagined horrors and gives you just enough context and exposition to suspend your disbelief. By the end you are truly gripped, and may not look at mirrors the same way again...

Perhaps the only place Carpenter's limited budget shows is in the lack of star power from the two lead actors, who don't make centre stage their own as well as the unknowns who powered his earlier Assault on Precinct 13. But there's able supporting work from Donald Pleasance, Victor Wong and Dennis Dun, and vivid shocks and gore effects throughout.

Overall, this is vintage Carpenter, and striking horror.

Sorcerer got a bad rap for a long time. An extremely arduous production that ran over budget only to be steamrollered at the box office by Star Wars, it marked the beginning of the end for 70s auteur films and the start of the modern blockbuster era. When Easy Riders, Raging Bulls told the story of the era, Sorcerer was portrayed as the epitome of a director who had got too big for his boots making a monument to his hubris.

It's true that Friedkin got out of hand on this film (insisting on going on location to reshoot inserts that only required a close up of a truck mileometer), and that the film didn't find a big audience in 1977 and would find it even harder to find one now. What's been forgotten is that this is nonetheless a brilliant film, and the fact that films like this don't get made any more is to be mourned rather than celebrated.

Now available in a pristine remastered version that looks amazing on Blu Ray, and hopefully to be rereleased for at least a limited cinema run, this is a classic of downbeat 70s cinema and of sheer naked suspense. The protagonists are deliberately difficult to root for, and their world is a squalid desperate one. Much of it is still current now; one of the men taking refuge in South America is an Arab terrorist on the run, another a disgraced banker guilty of wholesale fraud. The crisis that sets off the story involves international oil operations using cheap labour in dangerous conditions, and political unrest among the locals amid corruption and military dictatorship.

As a huge oil well fire rages and desperate men recruited to transport ageing, unstable nitroglycerine in trucks 200km through the jungle, the pasts of the men selected threaten to catch up with them, then become irrelevant as they realise the danger of their situation. Only one truckload is needed, but they send two as there is a good chance one of them will be destroyed by their own dangerous cargo.

The film builds up an almost unbearable level of tension, as the trucks crawl through treacherous jungle where any bump or knock could blow them sky high. The men sweat buckets through their grimy pores, clinging on for dear life inches from huge drops, literally crawling across broken bridges, all for the pay off and legal work papers that will alleviate their horrendous twilight existence. Roy Scheider is the perfect leading man for this story, a study in twitchy fear and determination, and is brilliant here.

The story builds to a tremendous finale and some classic 70s bleakness, leaving you breathless. This is Friedkin on top form, with everything from the visuals, sound, direction and acting in perfect service of the story, and haunting musical score from Tangerine Dream. This film is well worth seeking out on the region- free blu ray that was released in 2014, and if the opportunity arises to see this in the cinema you must not pass it up.

I haven't liked any M Night Shyamalan film since Unbreakable, and the quality of his output seems to have been on a downward spiral ever since then. Reliance on twist endings that got more lame with each outing soon got tired, then he dispensed with the twists and concentrated just on making films that were really terrible.

So it was that I only ended up watching this film by accident. It was my daughter's choice of film and I'd agreed to see this and was in the car on the way to the cinema before I found out it was an M Night production, and in my seat before I realised it was a Found Footage film. These were the only genuine feelings of shock and dread that came out of the experience.

This film is just very poor. It combines many things that have had their day and have become tiresome - M Night twisty plot lines, people who don't put the camera down even when they're in danger, manufactured attempts at scares by going quiet and then turning the sound up - and doesn't do any of them well.

The plot is predictable and preposterous, and relies on what Roger Ebert used to call the Idiot Plot, a story that can only take place if no one has or uses common sense. The shocks are pretty feeble and there's no real sense of believable danger. M Night also seems to believe in a world where it's not just scary horror film old people who are scary, but in fact all old people. We're expected to believe that reasonably intelligent people (who know about films) would think that old people behaving exactly like scary characters in horror films are just regular creepy old people.

Apparently M Night financed the film himself in order to have total creative control so he has no one but himself to blame how badly this film has turned out. The inexplicable good press this is getting and the reasonable box office performance means he will probably be encouraged to make more films, which is actually quite depressing.

I watched the 2012 remake of Total Recall on a kind of double bill with Rock of Ages, an event which I like to call "Bryan Cranston Is Better Than This" night. I'm a fan of the Schwarzenegger version, but as a fan also of source author Philip K Dick I was more than happy to see someone do another version bringing more of the original twisty paranoia to the screen. This is not that version.

Arnie did a perfectly good version of this story, taking the basic mind- bending, identity crisis story and fashioning a vehicle for the big Austrian to crack heads and director Paul Verhoeven to mix bloody violence with sly satire. With the modern fashion for straight-ahead action films to stick to PG-13 rated run-jump-shoot, a minimum of story and character and absolutely no sex or swearing, it seems unlikely that another action movie version of this story would improve on the original. To be successful you're looking at either going back to the hard sci-fi roots of the original novella on a lower budget, or putting it in the hands of someone who makes big budget blockbusters with substance. In other words, you want to give Duncan Jones forty million dollars to make this, or give Christopher Nolan or Peter Jackson two hundred million dollars to make this. What we get instead is Len Wiseman at the helm of a $125 million popcorn movie, doing exactly what the executives tell him to do.

Evidently, what the executives wanted was to pillage better films for the sets, costumes, style, action and ideas of the film. Ridley Scott's peerless Dick adaptation Blade Runner is predictably stolen from on an industrial scale to portray a grungy dystopian future. But that's a bit 1982, so they give it a CGI effects airbrushing stolen from Spielberg's Minority Report (another superior version of a Dick story). And now I know what you're thinking. It's about a man who can't remember his past, with people out to kill him, who keeps showing flashes of his lethal spy abilities while running at full pelt and trying to find the truth as he goes. Only an idiot wouldn't try and distance himself from The Bourne.... Well, you'd be wrong. The fight scenes, breathless running in and out of windows and wide-eyed who am I acting scream "Matt Daaaaamon" like the director's cut of Team America. They could of course have got Matt Damon to play this role, so similar is it to Jason Bourne. Of course, Matt Damon also has a pretty decent Philip K Dick film under his belt, so he might have seen doing this film as treading over familiar ground. Which is what watching the film feels like.

So it's derivative and over-familiar in the way it looks. It still has the opportunity to do something with the story, an opportunity it completely spurns. The world is divided into the haves in an overcrowded future version of Britain, and have nots The Colony, formerly Australia, a giant ghetto inexplicably shrouded in gloomy rainclouds for no other reason than the film's desire to be Ridley Scott lite. They are joined by an improbably high speed transport link through the centre of the earth, and closed in with the rest of the earth more or less uninhabitable. Plenty of opportunities to crank up some Dickian confusion and paranoia, maybe even throw in some echoes of Britain's colonial past or even the murky present day issues of immigration and Western exploitation. Nope. It's all just a perfunctory setup for the moment Colin Farrell goes to Rekall, there's a problem with his memory and now he has to run and jump through a lot of windows. He can't trust his wife and friends, the authorities are after him, he has to make common cause with rebels he only half remembers... But it's all been done miles better a hundred times before.

It becomes an object lesson in how to make an inferior version of other films. The bits that are left over from the original Total Recall pale next to the 1990 version – Arnie (not exactly Farrell's match as an actor) was genuinely scared and confused, and when his memory was being messed with you saw his struggle through the veins throbbing in his forehead. Here it's just a few slick nods to the original and then another run-jump-shoot sequence. Other actors like Cranston and Jessica Biel are just as underused. The grim Blade Runner sequences just look like a reasonably good night out in Tokyo – you certainly can't taste the acid rain or feel the despair of the people, and the part where Farrell dolefully plays the piano and tries to make sense of his past is just an insult. The scenes with the resistance are just thrown in for five minutes before the next helping of run-jump-shoot, and aren't even as good as their equivalent scenes in the Running Man.

In the end what you get is a really routine version of much better films, for people who for some reason don't want to be properly engaged or excited by films and would rather just zone out for a couple of hours. I ended up just trying to think of witty alternative titles that reference all the films they've stolen from – The Blade Minority, Bourne Runner – but I could just as easily have done some paperwork or caught up on some emails while this was on and got just as much out of it.

My advice is to watch the science fiction films the makers of this movie have borrowed from wholesale, from the original film. Otherwise if you happen to know a real Rekall centre, and can have your memory wiped, you could then watch this film and it might seem fresh. Then again you might still feel a nagging sensation of deja vu...

I watched this film with very low expectations, based on reviews and a general suspicion of jukebox musicals. Frankly I only bothered because I was curious to hear how Mary J Blige would sound singing rock classics. As it turned out, Rock of Ages was every bit as terrible as I expected.

It was a sign of things to come that with all the other things that could potentially go wrong, Rock of Ages manages to stumble in the first few minutes with an English actor failing to do an English accent. Russell Brand's attempt at a Birmingham accent is dreadful - I don't suppose in a film like this anyone takes things seriously enough to hire a dialogue coach. Apparently the accent this was a nod to Ozzy Osbourne.

Unfortunately the film as a whole was carrying out its own tribute to Ozzy, as like him the plot proceeded to stumble painfully from one fiasco to the next. Obviously you're not meant to take the story that seriously since it just has to tee up the songs. But having given us a storyline, and a few actors presumably not hired for their singing ability like Bryan Cranston, Alec Baldwin and Paul Giamatti, why did the storyline have to be such a load of utter cack? We get a duplicitous mayor, a Washington wife determined to close down rock and roll, a superstar who's lost his edge and an oily manager who compromises the spirit of Rock; but they're just kind of thrown in and left there, like a chef deciding to serve fish but instead of cooking anything up, just grabbing a couple of trout out of the tank and leaving them to flop around on your table. I'm not saying it has to be Shakespeare, but a bit of actual storytelling would have made it a little more entertaining. As opposed to completely unentertaining.

Clearly though, the songs are what everyone has turned up for. As a fan of a lot of the rock music of the 80s I was hoping there would be good selection of songs to enjoy. But sadly, (and the film is perhaps saddled with the song choices of the original show), it manages to sidestep almost every decent song of the era. Instead we get most of the worst, most rancid, unlistenable dreck served up in that decade, with only a few decent tracks featured at all. We are treated to three (My God! THREE!) songs by the appalling Poison, two songs from Twisted Sister's worst album, a never-ending parade of MOR garbage by Foreigner and their ilk and the insipid More Than Words. The song that inspired the show's title, Rock of Ages, doesn't feature at all, which isn't that brilliant a song but it's Stairway to Heaven and Whole Lotta Love rolled into one compared to most of the songs that did make it in. Frankly, when the defenders of the Rock and Roll flame choose as their anthem the indefensible "We Built This City" by Starship, I felt like picking up a placard and joining the joyless Church harridans on the other side of the barricade.

In terms of individual performances, Mary J Blige (the cause of my original curiosity) sounds great but isn't given any good songs to sing. Tom Cruise in theory was a good choice for an eye-catching guest star role but is usually so unsettling when he's on screen that I had to look away several times. His rendition of Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive (possibly the best song in the film) is like something Christian Bale might have improvised as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, only to be discarded as just too disturbing for audiences to handle. He has a couple of decent moments: I did chuckle at Cruise being disrupted by a fan jumping in to kiss him at a crucial moment, and everyone patiently waiting until she finishes and faints dead away. But there aren't enough of them.

The lead actors are bland and forgettable, giving it the usual jazz hands and perky expressions you can expect to see in High School Musical, Glee or an X Factor live final. Unfortunately this just increases the feeling that you're watching a bad variety show rather than a big Broadway/West End Musical. This isn't helped by the insistence on irritating mash-ups of two or occasionally three songs at a time. And when they're mostly crap songs they don't sound any better being sung over the top of other crap songs. The signature tune of the show, Don't Stop Believing, has been covered and "reimagined" so many times that it just goes in one ear and out the other here.

I wasn't expecting much but far too often I couldn't help cringing, hands over my face, at the embarrassing spectacle on display. Yes it's cheesy and a bit of nostalgic enjoyment of old rock songs would have been fine, but there are hardly any genuinely good rock songs here. They haven't bothered to open out the show as a film at all, and the tone of the film is just wrong. It would have been great to infuse a celebration of the music (and feature more of the actual people who made the original music), with some knowing humour. They could have made it into a late night classic, doing for classic rock what The Blues Brothers did for classic rhythm and blues. But the kind of wit and skillful handling needed to make that happen is glaringly absent here, leaving in its place just a hefty slice of grim karaoke featuring the most flavourless radio-friendly crimes against proper rock music.

If you take the metal out of hair metal, all you have left is smelly leather trousers and a hole in the ozone layer - and this is what Rock of Ages feels like.

This was Sam Peckinpah's only war film, having made his name with Westerns and then crime thrillers. The transition is seamless though, not only because some of his Westerns contained military characters and war as their backdrop, or the opportunity it gives him for gripping bloody action, but perhaps most crucially because it enables him to explore his favourite themes in a new setting.

As usual with Peckinpah, foremost among the themes of this film are men, their loyalty to one another, a team of hard-bitten old stagers fighting a losing battle buffeted by forces beyond their control, and sticking to your code in a brutal world. James Coburn is brilliant as Steiner, ably supported by a range of character actors as his comrades in the trenches, with a great international cast providing their support, including James Mason, David Warner and Maximilian Schell as Steiner's antagonist, the ambitious but devious Stransky.

To Peckinpah's eternal credit though, while telling his story of rough men in a rougher world, he gives a superbly detailed account of the squalor, fear, brutality and futility of the war on the Russian front. Although not blessed with the budget and technical advances of later classics like Saving Private Ryan, it gets across the scale of the fighting, and also captures the atmosphere perfectly. The Peckinpah style is very suited to the subject, shooting at different speeds, not flinching from depicting bloody action and alternating between tension, explosive violence and the daily life of the men.

This is a very hard-hitting account of the way with a number of scenes that are quite difficult to watch, and the overall tone is grim. However, the story is more than compelling enough to have you on the edge of your seat watching Steiner's platoon struggle, no longer for victory but just for survival.

Unfortunately it was also beset by the problems which Peckinpah's films frequently encountered. The director's own alcohol and personal problems made filming difficult at times, the international co-production had financial difficulties and as usual, the producers disagreed with Peckinpah on final cut and the theatrical version is not exactly what Peckinpah intended to show. Having said that, having scoured the world (my latest DVD version is the South Korean release) for the complete version, it's pretty close to what Peckinpah wanted to put out, resulted in a tremendous film and did well enough to spawn a sequel. It still begs the question though: why did those behind the scenes in films treat Peckinpah the way they did? Yes, he was difficult and didn't compromise, but every director's cut of his films was far superior to the producer/executive's version, with the money and time he needed he always delivered, and I would go as far as to say he was never wrong about what should go in a film.

Cross of Iron is perhaps the last film he made where in spite of any problems most of his vision made it to the screen, and the last where he was at the top of his game. For anyone interested in Peckinpah, the cinema of the seventies or good war films, it's truly unmissable.