Vincent Canby

Select another critic »
The New York Times
For 925 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 43% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Vincent Canby's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Victor Victoria
Lowest review score: 0 Revolution
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 405 out of 925
  2. Mixed: 405 out of 925
  3. Negative: 115 out of 925
925 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    The 'Burbs
    So little goes on that it might be argued that The Burbs means to be a comment on the vacuity of popular entertainment in the television age, though it's much more an example of it. The film does nothing for the reputation of anyone connected with it, including Mr. Hanks, who deserves the Oscar nomination he has just received for his work in Big. This time he's attempting to act a role in a screenplay whose pages are blank.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 10 Vincent Canby
    Blame It on Rio
    Though the scenery can't be faulted, there's not a single funny or surprising moment in the movie. However, Blame It on Rio is not simply humorless. It also spreads gloom. It's one of those unfortunate projects that somehow suggests that everyone connected with the movie hated it and all of the other people involved.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Le Pont du Nord
    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]
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Class
    The movie can't make up its mind whether it's a lighthearted comedy, set in what appears to be a posh New England-style prep school just outside Chicago, or a romantic drama about a teen-age boy who has a torrid affair with his roommate's mother. Either way it's pretty awful.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Tarzan the Ape Man
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 20 Vincent Canby
    Trespass
    With the exception of a running gag about the gangsters' use of cellular telephones, the film is singularly humorless. Though full of the kind of simulated violence achieved by special-effects artists, it's not too heavy on suspense. Everything in the screenplay seems arbitrary, including the firefighting jobs assigned to the two would-be treasure-seekers.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    The Bedroom Window
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Twins
    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 New York Times
    • 17 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Leprechaun
    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]
    • The New York Times
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Three Men and a Cradle
    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.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 20 Vincent Canby
    Death Wish II
    Even more foolish, more tacky and more self righteously inhumane than the 1974 melodrama off which it has been spun by the none-too-nimble fingers of Michael Winner, who directed the original film.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Race with the Devil
    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.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Solarbabies
    There are times when it appears that Solarbabies might be sending itself up. All of the time, it's an embarrassment.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Talk Radio
    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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    The Believers
    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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Conversation Piece
    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.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 0 Vincent Canby
    Revolution
    It's also a mess, but one that's so giddily misguided that it's sometimes a good deal of fun for all of the wrong reasons...It's so bad that one suspects there must be a good story behind it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Heaven's Gate
    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.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 20 Vincent Canby
    Harlem Nights
    Harlem Nights is not the disaster some people might have been expecting. Mr. Murphy has appeared in far worse films written and directed by people much more experienced.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Somewhere in Time
    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.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Student Bodies
    Student Bodies just slowly topples over as you watch it, like a stand-up comedian in the act of failing.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Vincent Canby
    Silver Bullet
    It's also not easy convincing the audience. The werewolf, when it finally comes onto the screen, looks less like a wolf than Smokey Bear with a terrible hangover.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    The Mack
    Even as action melodrama of a Shaft sort, the film is inept, so confused that occasionally it seems surreal.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Season of the Witch
    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]
    • The New York Times
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Untamed Heart
    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.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Body of Evidence
    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.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Twilight Zone: The Movie
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Not Without My Daughter
    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.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 20 Vincent Canby
    Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
    This one, set in a bucolic halfway house for disturbed children, is not entirely without Grand Guignol humor, but almost. It appears to have been paced by a metronome - a joke followed by a murder followed by a joke followed by a murder, until all but one of the featured played have been exterminated...It's worth recognizing only as an artifact of our culture.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Vincent Canby
    Hardware
    Hardware is a sci-fi-horror film of such dopiness that it seems certain to become a cult classic somewhere. Movies that are so insistently silly often have the effect of seeming to expand the mind after midnight, which may have something to do with metabolism if not with controlled substances.
prev
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »