While the standards of good taste are very much of its time, this crime thriller is a ride of fender mangling car chases, over-the-top punch ups and nutso action

Nonstop gonzo mayhem is on show in this pulp shocker from 1980, beginning with an amazingly reckless, fender-mangling, passerby-endangering car chase which more or less takes up the first 20 minutes. It’s a gritty New York sleazesploitation crime thriller with some gobsmackingly over-the-top punch-ups and shootouts; some of the attitudes to ethnicity and sexual politics can only be described as of their time. Those who prefer 21st-century standards of good taste had better look away now.

A racist paedophile (Cliff Gorman) has kidnapped the 15-year-old daughter of divorced ex-cop Sean Boyd, played by James Brolin. This sweaty creep is demanding a million-dollar ransom, but he’s got the wrong girl. He thinks that his prisoner – whom he dresses up in a diaphanous blue gown belonging to his dead mom, and at one point kisses tenderly on the lips – is the daughter of a property magnate that he blames for moving so-called undesirables into his Bronx apartment building, with a view to forcing out existing tenants so he can knock the whole thing down for a new development. (We glimpse a New York Daily News headline: “Carter Tours The S Bronx Slums”.)

Praise be for The Sound of Music, Ordinary People and It’s a Wonderful Life! But the sinfully twee and queasy Life is Beautiful must be renounced

Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful.

These are a few of his fav-our-ite films … Pope Leo’s that is. This white-bread movie playlist has been released in advance of His Holiness’s “meeting with the world of cinema” on Saturday, part of a longstanding Vatican policy of engaging with creatives.

The pope has, according to a Vatican statement “expressed his desire to deepen the dialogue with the world of cinema, and in particular with actors and directors, exploring the possibilities that artistic creativity offers to the mission of the Church and the promotion of human values.” The pope will chat with movie notables including Cate Blanchett, Spike Lee, George Miller, Gus Van Sant and Giuseppe Tornatore.

The Oscar-winning actor’s autobiography combines vulnerability with bloody-mindedness and belligerence

It’s the greatest entrance in movie history – and he doesn’t move a muscle.

FBI rookie Clarice Starling must walk along the row of cells until she reaches Dr Lecter’s reinforced glass tank, where the man himself is simply standing, his face a living skull of satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting blue prison jumpsuit – immobile, that is, until such time as he launches himself against the glass, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A billion true-crime documentaries have since revealed that actual serial killers are very boring, with nothing like Anthony Hopkins’s screen presence.

Full-tilt chase sequences, a punk aesthetic and a sugar-rush soundtrack, means there is plenty of enjoyment to be had as Edgar Wright goes back to King’s original 1982 novel

Edgar Wright, that unstoppable force for good in cinema, has revived the sci-fi thriller satire last seen in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger; it now stars Glen Powell and is adapted directly from the original 1982 novel written by Stephen King under his “Richard Bachman” pen-name, a futurist nightmare set in that impossibly distant year of 2025. The resulting film is never anything but likable and fun – though never actually disturbing in the way that it’s surely supposed to be and the ending is fudged and anticlimactic.

Yet there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had. Wright accelerates to a sprint for some full-tilt chase sequences; there’s a nice punk aesthetic with protest ’zines being produced by underground rebels; and Wright always delivers those sugar-rush pop slams on the soundtrack, including, of course, the Spencer Davis Group’s Keep on Running. It’s a quirk of fate that The Running Man arrives in the same year as The Long Walk, also from a King book: a similar idea, only it’s walking not running.