Vincent Canby

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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
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    • 95 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    Don't Look Now
    A fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you're looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn't burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you've been had.Not only do you probably have better things to do, but so, I'm sure, do most of the people connected with the film.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    The Godfather: Part II
    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.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    After Hours
    After Hours is not, ultimately, a satisfying film, but it's often vigorously unsettling.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Night of the Living Dead
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    King Lear
    The most depressing thing about this Godard work is that it seems so tired, familiar and out of date.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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Name of the Rose
    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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Three Colors: Blue
    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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Double Life of Veronique
    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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Dragnet
    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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Homicide
    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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    The Bad News Bears
    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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Exorcist
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Little Drummer Girl
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Night Moves
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Once Upon a Time in the West (re-release)
    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)
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Jumpin' Jack Flash
    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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    Something Wild
    Something Wild is often "Something Wrong."
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Paris, Texas
    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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    Tora! Tora! Tora!
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    Mikey and Nicky
    Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Nine 1/2 Weeks
    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]
    • The New York Times
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Life, Translated
    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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Children of a Lesser God
    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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
    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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Day of the Jackal
    The details are minutely observed and, to me, just a bit boring.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Deliverance
    An action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    Gung Ho
    It's more cheerful than funny, and so insistently ungrudging about Americans and Japanese alike that its satire cuts like a wet sponge.
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