Search: Directed by John Boorman

Deliverance works brilliantly as both film entertainment and in exposing and critiquing the condition of the white middle-class American male in the wake of Vietnam and all that.

Excalibur is a film whose sheer scale does justice to its subject in a way nothing else has come close to.

Brendan Gleeson does a wonderful job as Cahill, bringing out his humour, sweetness and, to some extent, paranoia.

Impressionistic direction, bolstered by Lalo Schifrin's evocative scoring, expertly conveys the alternately claustrophobic-agorophobic relationships between the two men and the environment.

Anchoring the audience with a perennial fence-sitter allows more room for the inevitable impact of the characters' stories, without the weight of an absolute ideological argument.

A movie with this kind of pedigree should not be a mess. And yet it is. Horribly so.

Far from being a roaring, sinewy beast with a lot of bite that the title might suggest, John Boorman's latest has more in common with a lumbering white elephant.