Vincent Canby

As an actress (Derek) displays the sort of fausse naivete that is less erotic than perfunctorily calculated, in the manner of an old-fashioned, pre-porn-era stripteaser who might have started her act dressed like Heidi. This isn't Tarzan, the Ape Man. It's ''Little Bo Peep.''..The kind of movie that might seem funny when seen after several martinis. Viewed stone-sober, it's a movie of more squirms than screams.

The only thing The Bedroom Window seems to be about is movie making - that is, it's about putting pieces of film together to create momentary effects that needn't signify anything at all. Sometimes this is called ''pure cinema.'' Sometimes, in fact, it's pure nonsense.

In Twins, which is supposed to be funny, the former Mr. Universe and pint-sized Danny DeVito play twins, the result of a genetic experiment that went awry. To the extent that Twins is carried by anybody, it is carried by Mr. DeVito. Mr. Schwarzenegger is dead weight. [9 Dec 1988, p.C18]

The title character in the new horror film titled Leprechaun is supposed to be fiendish but, though the movie's body count is respectable, he seems to be no more than dangerously cranky. That may be because the setting is rural North Dakota, which doesn't suit leprechauns, or because the screenplay and direction are amateurish, which doesn't suit films of any kind. [09 Jan 1993, p.17]

Three Men and a Cradle is almost totally charmless. It's funny in the way of someone who, in attempting to explain a joke, thoroughly destroys the humor, which, I assume, is mostly the fault of Coline Serreau, who wrote and directed it.

This is a ridiculous mishmash of a movie for people who never grew up, which is not so say it's for children. One would think that Mr. Fonda and Mr. Oates had better things to do, but perhaps not. American movie production is in a bad state.

There are times when it appears that Solarbabies might be sending itself up. All of the time, it's an embarrassment.

A mess of a movie that comes complete with a conventional beginning, middle and end, and long, spongy flashbacks...a nearly perfect example of how not to make a movie of a play.

An absurd, especially cheerless movie about child-sacrificing devil-worshippers who've slipped out of Africa and, via East Harlem, have come down into midtown Manhattan to infiltrate the ranks of the white establishment. In addition to everything else that's wrong, The Believers is more than a little bit racist.

Conversation Piece is a disaster, the kind that prompts giggles from victims in the audience who, willingly, sit through it all feeling as if they were drowning in three inches of water.

Nothing in the movie works properly. For all of the time and money that went into it, it's jerry-built, a ship that slides straight to the bottom at its christening. Heaven's Gate is something quite rare in movies these days - an unqualified disaster.

The screenplay is priceless (funny) and it's Mr. Reeve who sets the film's tone. Unfortunately, his unshadowed good looks, granite profile, bright naivete and eagerness to please - the qualities that made him such an ideal Superman - look absurd here.

Student Bodies just slowly topples over as you watch it, like a stand-up comedian in the act of failing.

Even as action melodrama of a Shaft sort, the film is inept, so confused that occasionally it seems surreal.

Hungry Wives has the seedy look of a porn film but without any pornographic action. Everything in it, from the actors to the props, looks borrowed and badly used. [12 Dec 1980, p.8]

Untamed Heart is to the mind what freshly discarded chewing gum is to the sole of a shoe: an irritant that slows movement without any real danger of stopping it.

Body of Evidence ranks with the Edsel. It's not going anywhere. As a movie, it looks as if it wanted to be Basic Instinct, though it winds up more like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS.

The film, which opens today at the Sutton and other theaters, is composed of a prologue, written for the movie, plus four separate stories, each of them either based directly on a script from the television series or suggested by one. A lot of money and several lives might have been saved if the producers had just rereleased the original programs.

It's a seriously intended movie that goes grossly comic when it means to be most solemn. It's a tale of mother love and freedom that is both mean and narrow.

It's another example of the ever-widening gap between the real world and the fantasies of a kind of artistic temperament more concerned with random self expression than with the expression of coherent feelings or ideas about love, alienation, outrage, politics or even of movie-making. It shrivels the imagination instead of enriching it. [7 Oct. 1981]

Paradise is The Blue Lagoon with camels.

Mr. Ritter is an engagingly comic actor, but the women in his life are so uncharacterized, in the writing, casting and the playing, that the comedy fizzles. All that's left is a movie about a seriously alcoholic writer making a mess of things.

It's meant as a tiny bit of praise to say that the movie, which was made in southern California, looks as if it had been shot in Spain or Yugoslavia. It looks both big and cheap.

The must-miss movie of the summer. It's a witless retread of the earlier, far funnier road-movie collaborations of Mr. Needham and Mr. Reynolds.

Given the premise, which is said to be inspired by the song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, virtually everything that happens can be predicted from the opening frame.

As written, directed and played, Miller is as much of a nonentity as Beckett. Their initial enmity and subsequent reconciliation have no more dramatic impact than the battle scenes, which look as if they were planned by amateurs. The two central characters remain as vague as their targets, who are briefly seen at a distance through gun sights.

Fire Birds has one director (David Green), two writers (Nick Thiel and Paul F. Edwards) and many laughs, all of them unintentional.

The film tries to cover too much ground, even though Calder Willingham's script eliminates or telescopes events and characters from the Berger novel.