Vincent Canby

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

The dialogue reports funny things instead of showing them. The movie remains in a limbo halfway between the informed anarchy of Monty Python comedy stripped of all social and political satire, and the comparatively genteel comedy of "The Lavender Hill Mob." [15 July 1988, p.C8]

An often comically inept, unsuccessfully vicious nonthriller about a beautiful young woman, her live-in lover and the crazy Peeping Tom who pursues the young woman neither wisely nor well.

It's a movie that contains a certain amount of unseemly gore and makes no sense whatsoever.

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.

My mind wasn't simply wandering during the film - it was ricocheting between the screen and the exit sign.

It is spectacularly out of touch, a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice, small characters purloined from a ''young-adult'' novel by S.E. Hinton, the woman who wrote the novel on which ''Tex'' was based.

It's aggressive in its ineptitude. It grates on the nerves like a 78 rpm record played at 33 rpm.

Weightless. It is also, unfortunately, without much point at all... A movie of random effects and little accumulative impact.

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.

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

As performers, they both are so aggressive, so creepy and off‐putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize with a twist ending that betrays, I think, its life‐affirming pre tensions.

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]

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.

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

It's apparent that someone connected with They Came From Within has an impertinent sense of humor even though the film is so tackily written and directed, so darkly photographed and the sound so dimly recorded, that it's difficult to stay with it.

Return of the Jedi doesn't really end the trilogy as much as it brings it to a dead stop. The film...is by far the dimmest adventure of the lot.

The best things in the production are the garishly absurd sets. The costumes, including the gold lame athletic supporters worn by the members of Ming's palace guard, suggest an adolescent's fever dream. The pacing is so funereal that this Flash Gordon seems far longer and far less funny that the 15-chapter serial, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), which starred Buster Crabbe. [05 Dec 1980, p.C8]

The Thing is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.

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.

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.

Written and directed by Walter Hill, who once wrote and directed a good movie, Hard Times, with Charles Bronson. This one is not good. It is Awful Movie. It is Pretentious Movie. It is Silly Movie. It talks just like this.

The Package is a feeble attempt to keep the old-fashioned cold-war thriller alive in this era of glasnost...Mr. Davis has directed what may be the worst movie Gene Hackman has ever made.

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.

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.

The screenplay is ridiculous, and Mr. Eastwood's direction of it primitive, which is surprising because he has shown himself capable in such films as ''The Outlaw Josey Wales'' and ''The Gauntlet.''

Meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy.

Fat Man and Little Boy is so confused, so stunningly ineffective, that General Groves's hawkish statements are more persuasive than the dove-ish apprehensions expressed by the scientists. Even the sight of a scientist dying horribly of radiation poisoning fails to be moving.