With a script by Fernando DiLeo, Fulci's first Spaghetti is a solid and dependable revenge story starring Franco Nero (in the same year he made Django). As ever, Fulci's love of a nifty storytelling device - especially anything involving camera trickery - and his gleeful depiction of violence, elevate his work. The first hour or so here is uneven and familiar - Nero's prospector gets summoned home where a welathy rancher has taken his family's land and taken over the town with a gang of thugs controlled by his psychotic, whip-lashing son Junior. There are some twists and revelations and

Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Katey Holmes, Morgan Freeman, and more all worked on this forgotten game.

Maybe Robert Duvall's greatest performance, and that is saying something. His chemistry with Tommy Lee Jones - in what is maybe his greatest performance, too - is moving and convincing. The novel is a masterpiece and this does it justice, which is sort of miraculous. Incredible cast, beautifully adapted, awesome Poledouris score: if you think you don't like Westerns, this will convert you.

It's not just that this is like Heat, as so many reviews say. Heat, at this point, is one of the most influential American movies, the Urtext for a whole strain of epic crime sagas, its echoes present in films from The Dark Knight through Widows and Den of Thieves to Syriana. Layton here takes Don Winslow's story - and Winslow, as a writer, is very much a Michael Mann fan - and dresses it up in Michael Mann style: the godlike view of Los Angeles as an operating system to be navigated and hacked, the cool, sterile sheen to

Maybe not as many gags land as in Airplane or even The Naked Gun but these all land so hard, and I think this is beloved of ZAZ fans because it repays repeat viewings better - the songs, the backward sequence, the entire resistance passage... Kilmer, often portrayed as a pompous asshole later in his career, is hilariously committed and great in the musical sequences (no wonder he'd go on to play Elvis and Jim Morrison) and we get a preunion with his Alfred Pennyworth, too. Watched with my 12 year old, who was delighted by it - and stunned

Late on in the post-Conan the Barbarian Italian Sword & Sorcery cycle, things got weird. This, for example, is directed by Ruggero Deodato, best known for Cannibal Holocaust, has a much bigger budget than most Italian heroic fantasy movies, written by James Silke, a hacky screenwriter on a bunch of classic American mid-'80s action schlock and produced by Golan and Globus, the duo behind a bunch of that decade's genre classics. But all of that is pretty much undone by the novelty casting of body-building twins Peter and David Paul, who make their Barbarian brothers a lunkheaded pair of lovable doofuses,