Vincent Canby

I don't automatically object to contemporary allusions, but I prefer to find them myself, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller is so busy pointing them out to us that the effect is to undercut its narrative drive and the dignity of its fiction.

The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was...Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing, and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems.

After Hours is not, ultimately, a satisfying film, but it's often vigorously unsettling.

Night of the Living Dead is a grainy little movie acted by what appear to be nonprofessional actors, who are besieged in a farm house by some other nonprofessional actors who stagger around, stiff-legged, pretending to be flesh-eating ghouls.

The most depressing thing about this Godard work is that it seems so tired, familiar and out of date. The movie's 1960's-ish worship of film as an end in itself, which was a mark of so many earlier, more ebullient Godard movies, now is lifeless.

The movie is full of the kind of atmosphere that can be created by elaborate sets, dim lighting and misty landscapes, though it has no singular character or dominant mood.

Blue doesn't seduce the viewer into its very complex, musically formal arrangements. The narrative is too precious and absurd. The interpretation it demands seems dilettantish.

The Double Life of Veronique doesn't end. About three-quarters of the way through, it starts to dissolve, like mist, so that by the time it is actually over the screen seems to have been blank for some time.

Mr. Aykroyd and Mr. Hanks play well together, but the funniest performance in the film is that of Dabney Coleman, as the smut king (who lisps). Somewhat less diverting are the car chases and the time out necessary to explain the throwaway story.

Here is an American film, in Japanese with English subtitles, written, directed and photographed by Americans, made in Japan with a Japanese cast, which attempts to reveal the spiritual mysteries of a quintessentially Japanese phenomenon. That it doesn't succeed is almost a foregone conclusion. What is surprising, however, is that Mishima is as tolerable as it is, given all the strikes against it.

Homicide, which refers to metaphorical as well as literal murder, may be Mr. Mamet's most personal and deeply felt work. It's also his most blunt and despairing. Both "House of Games" and "Things Change" deal with conspiracies of some sort. Yet the scam that is the center of this film is unconvincing.

Has a number of other virtues that make it a surprisingly painless adventure. Among these are the screenplay by Bill Lancaster, Burt's son, who has the talent and discipline to tell the story of The Bad News Bears almost completely in terms of what happens on the baseball diamond or in the dugout.

The care that Mr. Friedkin and Mr. Blatty have taken with the physical production, and with the rhythm of the narrative, which achieves a certain momentum through a lot of fancy, splintery crosscutting, is obviously intended to persuade us to suspend belief. But to what end? To marvel at the extent to which audiences will go to escape boredom by shock and insult.

What the film demonstrates most obviously is that when there is this much plot on the screen, there isn't time for actors to develop anything much in the way of plausibility of characterization.

The Empire Strikes Back is not a truly terrible movie. It's a nice movie. It's not, by any means, as nice as "Star Wars." It's not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of, it's also silly.

An elegant conundrum, a private‐eye film that has its full share of duplicity, violence and bizarre revelation, but whose mind keeps straying from questions of pure narrative to those of the hero's psyche.

The biggest, longest, most expensive Leone Western to date, and, in many ways, the most absurd... Granting the fact that it is quite bad, Once Upon the Time in the West is almost always interesting, wobbling, as it does, between being an epic lampoon and a serious hommage to the men who created the dreams of Leone's childhood. (Review of Original Release)

The idea is funnier than the execution. Miss Goldberg is only funny when she is being foul-mouthed, which seems rude since no one else is allowed to respond in kind or degree.

Something Wild is often "Something Wrong."

Paris, Texas begins so beautifully and so laconically that when, about three-quarters of the way through, it begins to talk more and say less, the great temptation is to yell at it to shut up. If it were a hitchhiker, you'd stop the car and tell it to get out.

From the moment you read the ads for Tora! Tora! Tora! ("The Most Spectacular Film Ever Made!”), you are aware that you're in the presence of a film possessed by a lack of imagination so singular that it amounts to a death wish.

Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.

In 9 1/2 Weeks, he has created a work that might well qualify as a truly nouveau film. Here is a movie in which actors impersonating characters are blended into the decor so completely that they take on the properties of animated products, no more or less important than exquisitely photographed strawberries.[21 Feb 1986, p.C17]

Stuffed with plummy English accents and the most inauthentic classroom scenes since those of "Billy Madison," Life, Translated has a childlike innocence that seems targeted toward a preteenage audience.

Watching Children of a Lesser God, the screen adaptation of Mark Medoff's 1980 Broadway play, is like being on a cruise to nowhere aboard a ship with decent service and above-par fast-food. Everything has been carefully programmed so that there are no surprises, no discoveries, nothing to do except to sit -with eyes propped open - and applaud the crew's efficiency.

Mr. Almodovar's comic invention runs out too soon, leaving the audience to giggle weakly in anticipation of the big laughs and disorienting shocks that never arrive.

The details are minutely observed and, to me, just a bit boring.

An action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words.

It's more cheerful than funny, and so insistently ungrudging about Americans and Japanese alike that its satire cuts like a wet sponge.

A big, expensive Western that doesn't contain one moment that might be called genuine.

Firefox is only slightly more suspenseful than it is plausible. It's a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor.

Mr. Mann may well become a very good theatrical film maker but, among other things, he's going to have to learn how to edit himself, to resist the temptation to allow dialogue that is colorful to turn, all of a sudden, into deep, abiding purple. Time after time scenes start off well and slip into unintentionally comic excess.

Mr. De Niro and Mr. Grodin are lunatic delights, which is somewhat more than can be said for the movie, whose mechanics keep getting in the way of the performances. [20 July 1988, p.C15]

Peter Bogdanovich and his screenwriter, Alvin Sargent, who adapted Joe David Brown's novel, have set out to make a bittersweet comedy that is both in the style of thirties movies and about the thirties. They evoke the time (1936) and the place (rural Kansas and Missouri) so convincingly that their rather sweet formula story seems completely inadequate, even fraudulent.

Though Mr. Billingsley, Mr. Gavin, Miss Dillon and the actress who plays Ralphie's school teacher are all very able, they are less funny than actors in a television situation comedy that one has chosen to watch with the sound turned off.

Though the film was photographed on what appear to have been extremely difficult locations in Louisiana and Texas, it never once convinces you that it's anything but pretentious moviemaking.

White Nights is only tolerable when Mr. Baryshnikov is on screen, especially when he is dancing alone or with Mr. Hines, with whom he does a couple of ballet-tap numbers that are of an order of excellence that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

Mr. Lester's interpretation of The Three Musketeers looks like an evening in a bump-o-car arena, with magnificently costumed people in place of cars. The adventures are less swashbuckle than slapstick.

The sort of comedy that leaves you exhausted, though not from laughing.

A no-frills, no-imagination reworking of the story about the ventriloquist who is taken over by his dummy.

Is Blue Collar an action film or a meditation upon the American Dream? I suspect it wants to be both though it's not very serious at being either.

The screenplay, by Daniel Petrie Jr. and Jack Baran, has a number of funny lines and situations, but the end result looks fiddled with by people attempting to ''fix'' things.

A silly, jumbo-size sequel to the original film adaptation of Arthur Hailey's Airport.

Resourceful and valiant though unsuccessful attempt to revive the kind of animated feature identified with the Golden Age of Walt Disney. If The Secret of N.I.M.H. had had a screenplay to equal its great visual qualities, it might have become a classic in its own right.

The Last Emperor is like an elegant travel brochure. It piques the curiosity. One wants to go. Ultimately it's a let-down.

From the opening frames of John Frankenheimer's film version of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, you get the feeling that you're being taken on a guided tour of one of the greatest American plays ever written, instead of seeing a screen adaptation with a life of its own.

Unfortunately, the most moving aspect of The Killing Fields is not the friendship, which should be the film's core, but the fact that the friendship never becomes as inspiriting as the one Mr. Schanberg recalled in his own searching, unhackneyed prose.

It's a collection of occasionally vivid but mostly unfathomable incidents in which people are introduced and then disappear with the unexplained suddenness of victims of mob murders. [U.S. theatrical release]

It is an intelligent movie, but interesting only in the context of his other works.

The Hit' is a disappointing English underworld movie directed by Stephen Frears. Less a film noir than a film gris, partly because almost all of it takes place in sun- drenched Spain and because the characters talk too much. These guys don't have to use guns. All they have to do is open their mouths and bore each other to death.

Watching it is like spending a day at an amusement park, which is probably what Mr. Spielberg and his associates intended. It moves tirelessly from one ride or attraction to the next, only occasionally taking a minute out for a hot dog, and then going right on to the next unspeakable experience.

Within the limits and cliches of utterly predictable material, Mr. Coppola is still finally able to make this one from the heart.

The movie is a big, costly, phony exercise in myth‐making, machismo, romance-of-the-open-road nonsense and incredible self‐indulgence.

Most of the time, Peggy Sue Got Married is either underdeveloped or simply not thought through. The way the film gets Peggy Sue into and out of the past is no less lame than the explanation for Bobby Ewing's recent resurrection in "Dallas." So much key information is missing or left uncertified or undramatized that the film appears to have been edited by termites.

What's missing from the film is any urgent interior meaning, and this it may be because of the distractions of the exterior details. It may also be because the conflicts that rage within Lancelot — between duty and desire, courtly love and physical love — simply aren't complex enough to bring out the best in Mr. Bresson.

The focus of the movie is so wide, and the logistics of the production so heavy, that Oliver himself, dutifully played by 9-year-old Mark Lester, gets flattened out and almost lost, as if he had been run over by a studio bulldozer.

Loveliness, I'm afraid, is really what this movie is all about.

It's also very well written by Jerry Juhl and Jack Burns and directed by James Frawley ("Kid Blue," "The Big Bus") with a comic touch that never becomes facetious.

The Dark Crystal aims, I think, to be a sort of Muppet Paradise Lost but winds up as watered down J.R.R. Tolkien.

La Cage aux Folles is naughty in the way of comedies that pretend to be sophisticated but actually serve to reinforce the most popular conventions and most witless stereotypes.

Mr. Day-Lewis, Miss Binoche and Miss Olin (who was spectacular in Ingmar Bergman's ''After the Rehearsal'') are surprisingly fine -both modest and intense as lovers whose private lives are defined by public events.

Much of the laughter Mr. Brooks inspires is hopeful, before-the-gag laughter, which can be terribly tiring...Blazing Saddles has no dominant personality, and it looks as if it includes every gag thought up in every story conference. Whether good, bad, or mild, nothing was thrown out.

There is something eerily disconnected about Heaven Can Wait. It may be because in a time of comparative peace, immortality — at least in its life-after-death form — doesn't hold the fascination for us that it does when there's a war going on, as there was in 1941 when Here Comes Mr. Jordan was released and became such a hit. Or perhaps we are somewhat more sophisticated today (though I doubt it) and comedies about heavenly messengers and what is, in effect, a very casual kind of transubstantiation seem essentially silly.

All of the performances are limited by the material and, in the case of Mr. Stoltz, by Michael Westmore's quite spectacular makeup. The exception - and the film's best sequence - occurs when Rusty's very middle-class, well-meaning parents, played by Estelle Getty and Richard Dysart, come to visit. In these few, brief minutes, Mask becomes specific and interesting. Otherwise it's the kind of story that would work better as a television feature.

It all goes decisively wrong when Jerry Schatzberg, the director, and Garry Michael White, who wrote the screenplay, decide to saddle the pair with a poetic vision that suddenly makes everything needlessly phony.

The movie, which is simultaneously arrogant and timorous, has been unable to separate the important material from the merely colorful.

The film covers the main events of the Orton life in a manner that is nothing less than distracted. One has little understanding of the fatal intensity - and need - that kept Orton and Halliwell together.

Having been handed a script that, at its best moments, is a wan though benign reminder of the original version of The Thing, Mr. Schepisi seems uncertain whether to distract the audience's attention by decor or to send up the cliches of a certain kind of science-fiction. Unfortunately, he plays it straight most of the time. [16 May 1984, p.17]

Mr. Blake's screenplay and Mr. Costner's direction of it are, with the exception of three memorable sequences, commonplace. The film is painstakingly composed of small details of frontier and tribal life that should be riveting. Most of the time they aren't.

Attempts to be a kind of all American, slapstick Orpheus Ascending, a timeless myth about innocence and corruption told in the sort of outrageous and vulgar terms that Brian De Palma and Robert Downey do much better.

Under Fire, which was written by Ron Shelton and Clayton Frohman, from a story by Mr. Frohman, means well but it is fatally confused.

Monty Python's the Meaning of Life is funny but, being unreasonable, I wish it were funny from start to finish.

Truly, Madly, Deeply should be enchanting, but it isn't. Everyone pushes too hard, especially Mr. Minghella, the writer and director. There are a few amusing lines and a lot of terrible ones, including Nina's overwrought response, early in the film, when her sister wants to borrow Jamie's cello: "It's like asking me to give you his body!"

It's also full of lyrical slow-motion footage of women athletes' training - jogging, sprinting, running the high hurdles, throwing the shot, broad jumping and high jumping. These sequences are accompanied by not-great pop music that has been poured over the images in a way that suggests fudge sauce on top of fried chicken.

At its best, Light Sleeper is merely theoretical. Most of the time, though, it is artificial and laughably unbelievable. Even the dark, gritty Manhattan locations don't add authenticity.

The problem, I think, comes back to Mr. Stallone. Throughout the movie we are asked to believe that his Rocky is compassionate, interesting, even heroic, though the character we see is simply an unconvincing actor imitating a lug.

The events in ''Manon of the Spring'' are no more wildly melodramatic than those in ''Jean de Florette'' but, without the indoctrination provided by ''Jean,'' the second film functions as a mean-spirited review of the first.

It's a shapeless mass of film stock containing some brilliant moments and a lot more that are singularly uninspired.

It's the sort of picture that never wants to concede what it's about. It is, however, enchanted by the sound of its own dialogue, which is vivid without being informative or even amusing on any level.

You've a right to wonder why anyone would want to work so hard - with such an expenditure of imagination - to transform a play with such a distinctive voice into a movie that sounds like any number of others.

They want to show us everything, to give us our money's worth. In so doing, they've not just opened up the play, they've let most of the life out of it.

Ceddo is a folk tale presented as the kind of pageant you might see enacted at some geographic location made famous by history and now surrounded by souvenir stands. It's not cheap or gaudy, but it's an intensely solemn, slightly awkward procession of handsomely costumed scenes designed to pass on a lot of information as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Gremlins is far more interested in showing off its knowledge of movie lore and making random jokes than in providing consistent entertainment. Unfortunately, it's funniest when being most nasty.

The film is technically sophisticated and emotionally retarded.

It's neither funny nor solemn. It has the personality not of a particular movie but of a product, of something arrived at by corporate decision.

Andrew Klavan's screenplay, adapted from a novel by Simon Brett, comes up with funny lines now and then, but it never has any clear idea whether it is a black comedy, a satire or maybe even a psychological study of a serial killer.

With the exception of Miss Streep's performance, the pleasures of Out of Africa are all peripheral – David Watkin's photography, the landscapes, the shots of animal life – all of which would fit neatly into a National Geographic layout.

The Rookie is an astonishingly empty movie to come from Mr. Eastwood.

Like "Blood Simple," it's full of technical expertise but has no life of its own... The direction is without decisive style. [11 Mar 1987, p.C24]

The movie is mostly a series of automobile chases through Los Angeles, but there is also some humor.

It has its charms but not for a minute is it believeable, and it's certainly never embarrassingly moving in the schmaltzy way of such slick Hollywood kidflicks as Paper Moon and even The Champ. [01 Oct 1980, p.19]

It's also one of those movies that is itself so lethargic that one welcomes its so-called shock moments not because they are scary but because they indicate that not everyone behind the camera has been napping. You don't dread the possibility of something jumping out from behind the door. You long for it.

Though the movie looks beautiful, the elegant style occasionally works against it, showing it up. This happens in a striking close-up of Miss Keaton, sitting alone on a photogenically windswept ocean beach as she is supposed to be thinking sensitive poet-type thoughts. Yet the image is empty. It's not the actress. It's not the director, whose close-ups of Miss Keaton in Annie Hall burst with love, pride and affection.The movie that contains the image fails to invest it with any associations whatsoever.

At Close Range is never boring. There's something bold about the film's wealth of imagery, but it also so overstates the material of the screenplay that it eventually annihilates both it and the story, which might possibly have been moving and terrifying. This just looks like fancy movie making.

Phantom of the Paradise is an elaborate disaster, full of the kind of facetious humor you might find on bumper stickers and cocktail coasters.

Silent Running is no jerry-built science fiction film, but it's a little too simple-minded to be consistently entertaining.

Poison, which won the grand prize as the best fiction work at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is an imaginative film that, like the infectious Tom Graves, is eventually overwhelmed by its ambitions. The movie needs to evoke more than the ghost of Genet to give it resonance.

Mr. Cassavetes's use of exaggerated slapstick gestures to underscore the loneliness and fears of his characters is more interesting in theory than funny or moving in actual fact.