Wet 'n' wild

The love story set on the doomed maiden voyage of the luxury liner bound from England to New York back in 1912, broke box office records and became the first film to make more than a billion dollars worldwide. A payback for the $350m reportedly spent on making and selling the film.

Kate amd Leonardo: An 'old-fashioned' love story

It also won a lot of awards. As well as best picture, it won best director for James Cameron and its total of eleven Oscars put it on a par with another epic, Ben Hur from 1959. So what made the film such a success?

Film critic Jonathan Romley said: "Its a film that sets out to grab its audience on every single front.

"I think that where it appeals to people is the romance - and the age-old pairing of sex and death, sex in a very chaste form and the death - well, we don't have to wince too much. But I think also there's something strangely morbid about it, in an old-fashioned romantic way."

But the makers of the thriller Hard Rain found out that you need more than a lot of water for a big hit. Much of the film was shot in waist-high water as the story unfolded of a town in the United States that has to be evacuated to avoid flooding from a torrential downpour. Christian Slater's character is trying to keep $3m dry, but Morgan Freeman's bad guy wants the money. It was an effective thriller but it didn't really win people over.

A monster hit ... not

Godzilla: Where did he go?

Then there was the flop that was Godzilla. The film about a massive lizard-like monster that descends on New York, proved that there's more to a hit than a massive budget.

Godzilla first appeared in 1954 as a Japanese film. In the 1998 version, the monster was generated by a computer, rather than a man in a rubber suit.

Neil Rosen of New York One News said: "Here you have this monster that is 30 storeys tall and he's meant to be hiding somewhere in New York! It's ridiculous! He's stomping all over the city, wrecking buildings, squashing landmarks and all of a sudden he disappears ... like where could he go?"

Pass the popcorn, Mrs Peel

Film-makers also realised that there's more to a movie than just a reworking of an old story. As with Godzilla, so too with The Avengers.

The eagerly awaited movie version of the cult British television series of the 1960s and 1970s The Avengers, was a big disappointment.

The Avengers: An expensive flop

In Britain film critics were denied their usual chance to review the film before it opened to the public. The film company was accused of trying to protect a dud film from bad reviews, hoping that at least a first wave of people would go to see The Avengers.

At the time the film critic Quentin Cooper said: "You've got a title that has resonance for people - we remember the television series. You've got two box office stars, Uma Thurman and Ralph Fiennes. You know that you're going to get a certain number of bottoms on seats. But as it turns out, of course, this film is so unmitigatedly bad that it will lose big money."

The Spielberg magic

So, it's not easy to hit the box office formula - but Stephen Spielberg is one man who has a pretty good strike rate. His main film this year was Saving Private Ryan.

Saving Private Ryan: Spielberg's successful World War II epic

The director said: "What we attempted to do in Saving Private Ryan was to get closer to the experiences of people who actually fought in Normandy on Omaha and Utah beaches and just tried to be honest to their experience and communicate that to today's audiences, not as powerfully as I could possibly be, but as realistically and honestly as I could be."

Politics in the cinema

While Saving Private Ryan tried to recreate scenes to present an honest story of war, a series of political films have tried other ways of revealing the truth.

One of these is Primary Colors which tells the story of a womanising senator who is trying to win votes as a presidential candidate while fending off a series of scandals. Of course, the lead character of Jack Stanton played by John Travolta has a pointed resemblance to Bill Clinton.

Primary Colors: John Travolta as the southern senator Jack Stanton

The film Wag the Dog goes even further as a satire - in this one the American president is trying to restore his reputation after being accused of making sexual advances towards a young girl. The president's advisers decide that the only way to get him re-elected is to stage a war. Robert De Niro is the political consultant who calls in a Hollywood producer played by Dustin Hoffman to create a war.

Dustin Hoffman says there's a serious message behind the movie. "Why does a dog wag its tail? Because if the dog didn't wag the tail, the tail would wag the dog.

"And in this sense the metaphor is that we are at a time now when the tail is wagging the dog - it's out of control. And for all we know we could have a war that was communicated to us over the television, that we could just computer generate ... it's possible."

Siege mentality

Other films also hit the headlines in the US for their subject matter. One was The Siege starring Bruce Willis, which is about a group of Arab militants who try to hold New York to ransom with a series of bomb attacks.

In response the authorities impose martial law and the Arab-American population of the New York borough of Brooklyn is moved to a detention camp. Arab and Muslim groups have condemned the film as racist in the way it portrays them as villains and said that Hollywood should stop stereotyping Arabs.

UK audiences will have to wait until the film is released on 8 January.

Bruce Willis: Raising a few hackles in 1998

The film's director Edward Zwick said the film is actually portraying Arab-Americans as victims of prejudice. But Amy Taubin, who writes for New York's Village Voice newspaper, said film-makers in politically correct America have come up against a tricky problem.

"They need to have a villain. That's partly why Saving Private Ryan was such a successful movie - because nobody could deny the Nazis were villains, they set a standard of villainy that can't be denied.

"But I think the degree to which movie companies are sensitive depends on who their stockholders are ... In truth I don't think anyone making The Siege cared whether or not they offended Arab-Americans because it didn't matter to their bottom-line, to their profits."

But then again maybe it's just Bruce Willis to whom people object - he's also the star of another movie that's caused offence - this time it's Armageddon and it was the Russians who were upset.

The Russians think the American film ridicules their Mir space station which is shown as a smashed up wreck of tangled wires and pipes, with only a drunk and crazed cosmonaut in charge. His way of fixing things is to smash them with a spanner. The Communist member of parliament Alexei Podboryovskin said the film was "insulting for the Russians".

Having got used to being the bad guys in Hollywood movies, it seems the Russians just don't want to be the buffoons.