Vincent Canby

Honeymoon in Vegas is a virtually nonstop scream of benign delirium, pop entertainment as revivifying as anything you're likely to see this year. It's a romantic farce in which the explosion of the epically earnest and funny central situation creates shock waves that leave no person or thing untouched. Even the film's bit players and extras are funny.

It's not really awful, but it's not much fun. It's pretty to look at and it contains a number of good performances, but there is something exhausting about its neat balancing of opposing manners and values.

Racing With the Moon demonstrates such intelligence and wit that the result is an unexpected pleasure.

Jean de Florette has the delicacy or something freshly observed. It's so good that one needn't be ashamed of escaping into its idealized if harsh and rocky world.

James Bridges's smashingly effective, very stylish suspense melodrama.

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.

Cute is the operative word for the movie, which stars some good actors doing material that is not super.

Outland is what most people mean when they talk about good escapist entertainment. It won't enlarge one's perceptions of life by a single millimeter, but neither does it make one feel like an idiot for enjoying it so much.

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.

Its moods don't quite mesh and its aerial sequences are so vivid—sometimes literally breathtaking—that they upstage the human drama, but the total effect is healthily romantic. It's the kind of movie that enriches dreams even though its story seems sort of strung-out, like a first draft, and includes moments that slip into bathos.

What makes The Hunger so much fun is its knowing stylishness, which Mr. Scott, who makes his theatrical film debut here, has brought to movies from a career in commercials and documentaries.

It takes a long while for The Paper Chase to disintegrate, and there are some funny, intelligent sequences along the way, but by the end it has melted into a blob of clichés.

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.

Kubrick's harrowing, beautiful and characteristically eccentric new film about Vietnam, is going to puzzle, anger and (I hope) fascinate audiences as much as any film he has made to date... A film of immense and very rare imagination.

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.

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]

The Last Detail is one superbly funny, uproariously intelligent performance, plus two others that are very, very good, which are so effectively surrounded by profound bleakness that it seems to be a new kind of anti-comedy. You'll laugh at it, not through your tears but with a sense of creeping misery.

Jacques Tati's most brilliant film, a bracing reminder in this all-too-lazy era that films can occasionally achieve the status of art.

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!"

Dracula has the nervy enthusiasm of the work of a precocious film student who has magically acquired a master's command of his craft. It's surprising, entertaining and always just a little too much.

Postcards From the Edge seems to have been a terrifically genial collaboration between the writer and the director, Miss Fisher's tale of odd-ball woe being perfect material for Mr. Nichols's particular ability to discover the humane sensibility within the absurd.

Woody Allen's marvelous new comedy, Alice, confirms Mr. Allen's safe arrival on a whole new plateau of film-making.

A couple of professional actors, Ben Johnson and Andrew Prine, head the cast, but the film looks nonprofessional in every other respect.

I suspect that another, tougher director might have made something quite interesting of the same script.

For those who take Mr. King seriously, this is high-proof King corn, which is to say it has a kick to it even though it hasn't much taste.

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.

Plausibility is not always important, but in a film as bereft of distinctive style and wit as Coma, it helps to believe in something. It can even help if one is offended. The aftereffect of Coma is a catlike yawn, benign and bored.

A foul-mouthed, bumpercrunching farce that is often funnier in theory than in fact but, even so, is a movie that has more laughs in it than any film of the summer except "Airplane!" It wipes out "The Blues Brothers," "Caddyshack," "Up the Academy," "Where the Buffalo Roam" and just about every other recent comedy aimed, I assume, at an otherwise television-hooked public.

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.

Wild Style lacks a lot of the style of the people in it, but it never neutralizes their vitality.

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

Although Mr. Petri quite consciously makes movies about ideas, he has, in his "Investigation," made a movie in which the ideas, and the man who seethes with them, have the shock and impact of the most fundamental kind of melodrama.

A most genial surprise, a comic update of cold war espionage movies that, because of the New Orleans location, has the enhanced charm of a stolen holiday...This movie is a breeze.

Horton Foote's funny, exquisitely performed film adaptation of his own play, directed for the screen by Peter Masterson. The Trip to Bountiful is almost as unstoppable as Carrie Watts.

My Name Is Nobody is terribly knowing. It has the manner of a buff who knows absolutely everything about a subject most other people haven't time for, but it's also very entertaining.

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'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.

Blake Edwards's frequently hilarious new film, “10,” is the story of George's desperate efforts to come to terms with life in Southern California even though he knows he's inadequate.

Much of the movie is occupied by people as they race one another down Mulholland Drive, but because most of the races are run at night, they aren't as exciting as they might be.

Delon is fine and the movie has the cool delicacy and preci sion one ordinarily associates with something no more philosophical than a Swiss watch. Melville, however, is a philosopher and “The Godson” is as much parable as fascinating melodrama.

Kramer vs. Kramer is densely packed with such beautifully observed detail. It is also superbly acted by its supporting cast, including Jane Alexander, Howard Duff and George Coe.

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.

Two actors who do have good material, and make the most of it, are Courtney Vance, as the platoon's snappish, highly articulate medic, and Dylan McDermott, as the platoon's exhausted sergeant. Mr. Vance is particularly fine. The narrative picks up weight and momentum every time he comes on the screen. Also good is Tegan West, who plays yet another young, raw lieutenant who must depend on the patience of his men.

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

Cross of Iron is Mr. Peckinpah's least interesting, least personal film in years, a hysterically elaborate, made-in-Yugoslavia war spectacle, the work of international financiers and a multinational cast, most of whom are supposed to be Germans although they sound like delegates to an international PEN convention.

It's a dazzling testament to the civilizing effects of several different arts, witty, joyous and so beautiful to look at that it must seem initially suspect to those of us who have begun to respond to spray-painted subway graffiti as the fine art of our time.

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.

Missing is Mr. Costa-Gavras's most beautifully achieved political melodrama to date, a suspense-thriller of real cinematic style, acted with immense authority by Jack Lemmon, as Charles Horman's father, Ed Horman, and Sissy Spacek as Charles's wife, Beth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Of all Olivier's Shakespearean films, Richard III is, to my way of thinking, the most satisfying, the most surprising and - it has to be said - the funniest. [24 Apr 1981, p.C6]

Jeanne Dielman... has been described as minimalist, though I don't see how any film this long and so packed with information could be equated with minimalism as defined in painting. The manner of the film is spare, but the terrible, obsessive monotony of the life it observes is ultimately as melodramatic as, say, Roman Polanski's ''Repulsion.''

the film that Mr. Annaud and his producer, Claude Berri, have made is something of a triumph. It's tough, clear-eyed, utterly unsentimental, produced lavishly but with such discipline that the exotic locale never gets in the way of the minutely detailed drama at the center.

Mr. Frears and Mr. Kureishi have composed Sammy and Rosie as if they were building a giant bonfire in a mock celebration of the achievements of contemporary British society and, by extension, of the civilized world. They throw everything on -love, death, sex, politics, violence. A lot of stuff doesn't easily burn, but there's also plenty that does.

All sorts of macabre things have gone on, and are still going on just offscreen, in Jonahan Demme's swift, witty new suspence thriller.[14 February 1991]

It's a rich slice of Americana that would seem to belong to an earlier, pre-television era, except that television comes to play a large part in Delbert's story. It's also about an aspect of life in rural America that's seldom seen by people who drive through it, and seldom if ever glimpsed in movies.

Student Bodies just slowly topples over as you watch it, like a stand-up comedian in the act of failing.

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.

A little bit of Into the Night is funny, a lot of it is grotesque and all of it has the insidey manner of a movie made not for the rest of us but for moviemakers on the Bel Air circuit who watch each other's films in their own screening rooms.

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

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

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

Airport '77 looks less like the work of a director and writers than like a corporate decision.

Class of 1984 is sort of crudely funny. The movie's idea of punk culture is also picturesque. But it quickly gets worse and worse until it achieves a degree of awfulness that, though rare, isn't much fun.

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]

Though a lot of the dialogue would seem absurd even on daytime soap opera, the movie keeps coming up with scenes so arresting or eccentric you are aware of the wicked intelligence behind them.

Mr. Brooks has a couple of major defects to be successful in this kind of project. He is a man with no great feeling for comedy of any sort, and his reactions to the lunacies of contemporary life are trivial.

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

A good, stylish mixture of the kind of hokey horror and science-fiction elements in which Mr. King specializes.

THE most irresistible thing about the characters in Ruthless People, a conspicuously overconsuming, Beverly Hills update of O. Henry's classic Ransom of Red Chief, is that they all try with such earnestness to live up to their ruthless reputations. It also has a uniformly splendid cast of comic actors - the best to be seen outside of any recent Blake Edwards movie. Its screenplay, by the newcomer Dale Launer, is packed with wonderfully vulgar, tasteless lines that perfectly reflect the sensibilities of Sam and Barbara Stone.

The enthusiastic Zucker, Zucker & Abrahams style of movie parody is too rarely seen to prompt much head-shaking about gags that don't work. The entire film is justified by those gags that do succeed, beginning with a pre-credit sequence that is possibly one of the most blithely hilarious six or seven minutes of film stock ever exposed to light.

Unashamedly rousing, invigorating but very clear-eyed evocat ion of values of the oldfashioned sort that are today more easily satirized than celebrated...It's an exceptional film, about some exceptional people.

A remarkably fine film about the muddle of emotions that separates the child from the adult.

Though it means to be a romantic suspense-thriller, it has the self-consciously enigmatic manner of a high-fashion photograph, the kind that's irresistible to amateur artists who draw mustaches on the perfectly symmetrical faces of pencil-thin models in sables.

Mr. Wallace clearly has a fondness for the cliches he is parodying and he does it with style.

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

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.

Protocol is a breezy, not entirely unpredictable comedy that was made to order for the gifted Goldie Hawn by Buck Henry, the writer, Herb Ross, the director, and Miss Hawn herself, who is the film's executive producer. [21 Dec 1984, p.C25]

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.

The movie, which was shot in Morocco, looks lovely and remote (how did we ever once settle for those black-and-white Hollywood hills?) and has just enough romantic nonsense in it to enchant the child in each of us.

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.

With the exception of Miss D'Angelo and Lauren Hutton and Elizabeth Ashley, who make cameo appearances, almost everything in Paternity is tired and perfunctory. This is especially true of Mr. Reynolds.

Exhuasting without being much fun.

One of the most candid, most fascinating portraits ever made of a motion picture director at work.

Funny Farm is good-natured even when it's not funny...As a comedy style, it has the impatience of a child who plants radish seeds and then pulls up the first tiny sprouts to see how they're doing.

It’s such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what’s called cinema verite or direct cinema.

These sequences—the dogfights over Dover, the disintegration of planes in mid-air, the graceful tactics of evasion—are more than just technically stunning. They also are beautiful, in the completely impersonal way that the spectacle of machines—working well and seemingly with wills of their own—can be beautiful. Unfortunately, something less than one-third of the film takes place in the air.

One of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment. [16 Mar 1972]

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

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.

As much as I admire all of these, especially "Vertigo," I can't imagine that any one of them will top the feelings of exhilaration that are prompted by Rear Window, this most bittersweet of Hitchcockian suspense-romances. Make no mistake about it: Rear Window is as much of a romance as it is a brilliant exercise in suspense.

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.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is an American comedy of the sort of vitality that dazzles European film critics and we take for granted. It's full of attachments and associations to very particular times and places, even in the various regional accents of its characters. It's beautifully written (by Robert Getchell) and acted, but it's not especially neatly tailored. [29 Jan 1975]

No Way Out has the exuberance of something freshly conceived. It's so effective, in fact, that when it's all over, you might want to sit through the beginning again just to see if the end is justified by the means. I suspect that it is.