Vincent Canby

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.

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.

The movie seems to want to be a James Bond sort of adventure in black drag, but it's more reminiscent of Batman.

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.

Miss Kinski is a major problem. She's a beauty, all right, but she appears to have no flair whatever for comedy of this sort, or maybe of any sort.

Robert Mulligan's Summer of '42 is a memory movie, written, directed and acted with such uncommon good humor that I don't think you'll be put off by its sweet soft-focus, at least until you start analyzing it afterwards.

Hammett, the first major American movie by Wim Wenders, isn't quite the mess one might expect, considering the length of time it's been in production and the number of people who seem to have contributed to it. It's not ever boring, but heaven only knows what it's supposed to be about or why it was made. One answer would serve both questions.

Red Heat is a topically entertaining variation on the sort of action-adventure nonsense that plays best on television. Mr. Hill's touch is heavy when he takes himself seriously. However, he has a real gift for instantly disposable fantasy.

Less a movie than an extended sketch, and it's to the credit of Mr. Ritt, his stars and Gary Devore, the screenwriter, that the movie is so much fun, even given its occasional soggy patches.

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

A Walt Disney comedy based on the old magic-formula story that's served the company well through thick (The Absent-Minded Professor) and thin (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes). The new film, which opened at theaters throughout the city yesterday, is nowhere near as funny as the first but a lot better than the second.

Clash of the Titans is profligate in its use of talented people who are not particularly at home in this sort of film, though they all pay serious attention to their work.

Buck and the Preacher, Sidney Poitier's first film as director as well as star, is a loose, amiable, post-Civil War Western with a firm though not especially severe Black Conscience.

The characters don't motivate the drama in any real way. They are cut and shaped to fit it, and if the cast of Black Sunday were not so good, and if Mr. Frankenheimer were a less able director, the movie would be unendurably boring.

Where Eagles Dare is the ultimate metaphor. It encapsulates human experience into an ordered, comprehensible melodrama that is both absurd and entertaining.

Miss Duvall is superb - genteely ladylike one minute, a woman of volcanic passions the next.

One of the nicer things that can be said about The Fox and the Hound is that it breaks no new ground whatsoever. This is a pretty, relentlessly cheery, old-fashioned sort of Disney cartoon feature, chock-full of bouncy songs of an upbeatness that is stickier than Krazy-Glue and played by animals more anthropomorphic than the humans that occasionally appear.

It is absurd, sentimental, pretty, never quite as funny as it intends to be, but quite acceptable, if only as a seasonal ritual.

Though Psycho II is essentially camp entertainment, Mr. Perkins plays Norman as legitimately as possible, and sometimes to real comic effect. His new Norman doesn't seem as much rehabilitated as reconstituted, but as what? That's the point of the film.

A perfectly adequate though not really comparable - sequel to Stanley Kubrick's witty, mind- bending science-fiction classic, ''2001: A Space Odyssey.'

Lethal Weapon 3 isn't that much worse than the two earlier films.

Desert Hearts has no voice or style of its own. It's as flat as a recorded message from the telephone company.

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)

Though publicized as a breakthrough into adult comedy for Mr. Reitman (''National Lampoon's Animal House,'' ''Meatballs,'' ''Ghostbusters''), this new film is less a true adult comedy than a teen-age comedy populated by adults who are functioning in an adult world.

Entertainingly slapdash.

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.

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.

Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously is a good, romantic melodrama that suffers more than most good, romantic melodramas in not being much better than it is.