Roger Moore was introduced as James Bond in this 1973 action movie featuring secret agent 007. More self-consciously suave and formal than predecessor Sean Connery, he immediately re-established Bond as an uncomplicated and wooden fellow for the feel-good 70s. Live and let Die also marks a deviation from the more character-driven stories of the Connery years, a deliberate shift to plastic action (multiple chases, bravura stunts) that made the franchise more of a comic book or machine. If that's not depressing enough, there's even a good British director on board, Guy Hamilton (Force 10 from Navarone). The story finds Bond taking on an international drug dealer (Yaphet Kotto), and while that may be superficially relevant, it isn't exactly the same as fighting supervillains on the order of Goldfinger. -Tom Keogh.

After starring in the now-legendary Dollars trilogy of spaghetti Westerns for Italian director Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood became a box-office star and imported the style of those classic shoot-em-ups for this 1967 Western directed by Ted Post, with whom Eastwood had worked during their days on the television series Rawhide. Eastwood plays an innocent rancher who is mistaken for a cattle rustler and sentenced to hang by an angry mob. When he is saved from the noose by a passing lawman, he embarks on a renegade campaign of vengeance against the men who attempted to lynch him. Hang 'Em High offers a number of memorable moments and stylistic flourishes, and features a superb supporting cast of Western veterans, including Ben Johnson, Ed Begley, Pat Hingle, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, LQ Jones, and the "Skipper" himself, Alan Hale Jr Made just three years before Dirty Harry, the film marked a turning point for Eastwood, who would soon move into a prolific period of contemporary thrillers. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

In his 19th screen outing The World is Not Enough, Ian Fleming's super-spy is once again caught in the crosshairs of a self-created dilemma: as the longest-running feature-film franchise, James Bond is an annuity his producers want to protect, yet the series' consciously formulaic approach frustrates any real element of surprise beyond the rote application of plot twists or jump cuts to shake up the audience. This time out, credit 007's caretakers for making some visible attempts to invest their principal characters with darker motives-and blame them for squandering The World is Not Enough's initial promise by the final reel. By now, Bond pictures are as elegantly formal as a Bach chorale, and this one opens on an unusually powerful note. A stunning pre-title sequence reaches beyond mere pyrotechnics to introduce key plot elements as the action leaps from Bilbao to London. Pierce Brosnan undercuts his usually suave persona with a darker, more brutal edge largely absent since Sean Connery departed. Equally tantalising are our initial glimpses of Bond's nemesis du jour, Renard (Robert Carlyle), and imminent love interest, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), both atypically complex characters cast with seemingly shrewd choices and directed by the capable Michael Apted. The story's focus on post-Soviet geopolitics likewise starts off on a savvy note, before being overtaken by increasingly Byzantine plot twists, hidden motives and reversals of loyalty superheated by relentless (if intermittently perfunctory) action sequences. Bond's grimmer demeanour, while preferable to the smirk that eventually swallowed Roger Moore whole, proves wearying, unrelieved by any true wit. The underlying psychoses that propel Renard and Elektra eventually unravel into unconvincing melodrama, while Bond is supplied with a secondary love object, Denise Richards, who is even more improbable as a nuclear physicist. Ultimately, this world is not enough despite its better intentions. [+]

Let's see-he has been Han Solo in three films and Indiana Jones in three more. So why shouldn't Harrison Ford take on a new continuing character in Tom Clancy's CIA analyst Jack Ryan? In this film, directed by Phillip Noyce, Ford picked up the baton when Alec Baldwin, who played Ryan in The Hunt for Red October, opted for a Broadway role instead. In this film, Ryan and his family are on vacation when Ryan saves a member of the British royal family from attack by Irish terrorists. The next thing he knows, the Ryan clan has been targeted by the same terrorists, who invade his Maryland home. The film can't shed all of Clancy's lumbering prose, or his techno-dweeb fascination with spy satellites and the like. But no one is better than Ford at righteous heroism-and Sean Bean makes a suitably snakey villain. -Marshall Fine.

Based freely on the classic novels by C. S. Forester, Hornblower is a series of TV films following the progress of a young officer through the ranks of the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars. The series greatest asset is the handsome and charismatic Ioan Gruffudd in the lead role, surely a major star in the making. For television films the production values are very good, though as Titanic, Waterworld and The Perfect Storm demonstrated, filming an aquatic adventure is a very expensive business, and it is clear that the Hornblower dramas simply make the best of comparatively small budgets. No more faithful to Forester's books than the 1951 Gregory Peck classic Captain Horatio Hornblower, the real inspiration seems to have come from the success of Sharpe, starring Sean Bean, which likewise featured a British hero in the Napoleonic Wars. Nevertheless, while rather more easy going than the real British navy of the time, the Hornblower saga delivers an entertaining adventure, greatly enhanced by the presence of such guest stars as Denis Lawson, Cheri Lunghi, Ronald Pickup and Anthony Sher. "The Frogs and the Lobsters" provides a tough, complex and surprisingly violent drama concerning an attempt to mount a royalist counter-offensive against Revolutionary France. -Gary S Dalkin.

The 1951 John Huston classic, set in Africa during World War I, garnered Humphrey Bogart an Oscar for his role as a hard-drinking riverboat captain in Africa, who provides passage for a Christian missionary spinster (Katharine Hepburn). Taking an instant, mutual dislike to one another, the two endure rough waters, the presence of German soldiers, and their own bickering to finally fall into one another's arms. The African Queen is classic Huston material-part adventure, part quest-but this time with a pair of characters who'd all but given up on happiness. Bogart (a longtime collaborator with Huston on such classics as The Maltese Falcon and Key Largo) and Hepburn have never been better, and support from frequent Huston crony Robert Morley (Beat the Devil, also featuring Bogart) adds some extra dimension and colour. -Tom Keogh The African Queen, John Huston's 1951 classic set in Africa during World War I, garnered Humphrey Bogart an Oscar for his role as a hard-drinking riverboat captain who provides passage for a Christian missionary spinster (Katharine Hepburn). Taking an instant, mutual dislike to one another, the two endure rough waters, the presence of German soldiers, and their own bickering to fall finally into one another's arms. Based on CS Forester's novel, this is classic Huston material-part adventure, part quest-but this time with a pair of characters who'd all but given up on happiness. Bogart (a long-time collaborator with Huston on such classics as The Maltese Falcon and Key Largo) and Hepburn have never been better, and support from frequent Huston crony Robert Morley adds some extra dimension and colour. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com On the DVD: A trailer, a gallery of contemporary posters and stills, plus some text biographies of the principals, simply whet the appetite for the main extra feature here: an audio commentary by veteran cinematographer Jack Cardiff. [+]

Proudly billed as "the fourth film by Quentin Tarantino", Kill Bill, Volume 1 is actually half of it (if you include his chunk of Four Rooms it's really the fourth and a quarterth). If Jackie Brown achieved a certain maturity beyond callous cool, then this is his Mr Hyde's trash picture, which relishes all the things in cinema that are supposed to be bad for you. The opening Shaw Brothers logo and cheesy "our feature presentation" card, redolent of rancid Kia-Ora and stale Wrestlers, sets this up as defiantly a movie-geek's movie, whose touchstones are spaghetti Westerns, comic books, kung fu/samurai quickies and second-hand vinyl albums. If Kill Bill was a dog-eared paperback, it'd be confiscated by a teacher. Tarantino's favoured flashback-and-forth structure means we begin with a shuffle between past and present as the Bride with No Name (Uma Thurman) is shown being apparently murdered at the climax of a Texas wedding chapel massacre and alive again tracking down the second person on her to-kill list. The bulk of the film takes place between these plot points as the Bride carries a vengeance feud to the first of her enemies, yakuza queenpin O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). Like its soundtrack-everything from Nancy Sinatra to the RZA, with the Green Hornet theme along the way-it's an eclectic picture, with sequences done as a gruesome anime, particularly genocidal stretches in black and white, and segues from cheerful kung fu massacre to Kurosawa-look poised duelling. Tarantino holds back on his trademark motormouth pop culture references; in fact, much of the film is in sub-titled Japanese. You have to lock your brain into trash-film mode to get the most out of it, but its cliffhanger fade-out-unlike the dispiriting "to be continued" at the end of Matrix Reloaded-makes you want to come back. It's not a spoiler to reveal that Bill (a barely glimpsed David Carradine) hasn't been killed yet, and Thurman needs to take out Daryl Hannah and Michael Madsen before she gets to him. [+]