Cinematic visions of the future - especially when their due date has passed - are particularly fun to watch. And Escape From New York, just released on a special-edition, two-disc DVD, is no exception.

Here, Kurt Russell does a bad Clint Eastwood impersonation as Snake Plissken, hardboiled criminal who's hired as a last-minute taskmaster to get the U.S. president (Donald Pleasence) out of Manhattan (a city that's now a maximum-security prison!).

Apart from being what is arguably director John Carpenter's last truly great feature, Escape From New York is just exquisitely dated camp. The World Trade Center figures centrally as a set piece, there are feminist terrorists crashing planes into the side of a building and there are even gay underworld figures (who, while holding Pleasence hostage, forcibly dress him up in drag!).

But my fave moments, without any doubt, were the ones where Ernest Borgnine appears, devouring all the scenery as a constantly grinning, slightly-mentally-deficient cabbie. A truly hysterical turn, in a film that offers some solid suspense sequences as well. » Matthew Hays