An exercise programme designed to identify an individuals body shape.

Neil Simon's curious comedy The Out-of-Towners concerns a pair of non-New Yorkers (Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis) having a hellish visit to the Big Apple on the eve of a job interview for Lemmon's character. Made in 1970 and directed by Arthur (Love Story) Hiller, this hectic film almost seems ahead of its time when compared to more recent misery-piled-on-misery comedies such as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. The couple in this film endure everything that can go wrong on a trip, including being forced to spend the night in a mugger-happy Central Park. The strange element in Simon's script, though, is that Lemmon's character is so unpleasant. A middle-class, uptight guy who can't believe that New Yorkers in the service profession don't perform their jobs slavishly, he's kind of a one-note joke that quickly wears thin. It was remade with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn in 1999. --Tom Keogh

When Warner Brothers was unable to secure the rights to Richard Preston's terrifying non-fiction book The Hot Zone (purchased by a rival studio), they took the basic idea of a fatal virus on the loose in the US, added Dustin Hoffman and director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot) and produced an unusual thriller--a surprise hit--called Outbreak. The other picture, slated to star Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, fell through. The premise of Outbreak, which owes something to Elia Kazan's 1950 plague-scare movie, Panic in the Streets, is as terrifying as it is timely. As developers slash their way deeper into the previously unexplored tropical rainforests, they are exposed to radically new forms of life, including diseases, that in these days of commonplace international travel could turn into deadly epidemics almost before we know it. Hoffman's character and his estranged wife (Rene Russo) are disease experts called in to identify the unknown killer, which was carried into the country by an illegally smuggled monkey. The best sequence shows the disease spreading--through recycled air on a passenger jet or a sneeze in a crowded cinema. The final chase is pretty conventional but the cast is terrific, including Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Donald Sutherland, Cuba Gooding Jr., J.T. Walsh and Zakes Mokae. --Jim Emerson

Outland is another in a long line of Westerns retooled for science fiction. Writer-director Peter Hyams (Capricorn One, 2010, Timecop) re-stages High Noon in outer space, with Sean Connery as O'Neil, the marshal for a settlement on one of Jupiter's moons. While investigating the deaths of some miners, O'Neil discovers that mine boss Peter Boyle has been giving his workers an amphetamine-like, work-enhancing drug that keeps them productive for months--until they finally snap and go berserk. When Boyle sends killer henchmen to neutralize the lawman, O'Neil is unable to get the miners to back him up. Outland is no classic but it offers solid suspense in an otherworldly atmosphere. It also stars Frances Sternhagen, James B. Sikking (Howard on television's Hill Street Blues) and John Ratzenberger (later to become famous as Cliff on the sitcom Cheers). --Jim Emerson