Vincent Canby

It is high comedy of a sharp, bitter kind, and Michael Murphy is fine as the weasel husband named Martin, but Miss Clayburgh is nothing less than extraordinary in what is the performance of the year to date.

It goes beyond the impartiality of journalism. It has the manner of an official report on the spiritual state of a civilization for which there is no hope.

Mr. Crichton's previous films as a director — "Westworld" and "Coma" — are skillful and, each in its own way, entertaining, but they give no hint of the amplitude he displays in this visually dazzling period piece. With Sean Connery as the gang's elegant leader, the sort of mastermind who denies his body nothing, Lesley-Anne Down as his magnificent moll, and Donald Sutherland as his locksmith —"the best screwsman in England" — The Great Train Robbery is classy entertainment of the sort I associate exclusively with movies.

It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny. It's his most blatant variation to date on a Hitchcock film ("Vertigo"), but it's also a De Palma original, a movie that might have offended Hitchcock's wryly avuncular public personality, while appealing to his darker, most private fantasies.

The Big Chill represents the best of mainstream American film making. It's a reminder that the same people who turn out our megabuck fantasies are often capable of working even more effectively on the small, intimate scale of The Big Chill.

Falling Down is the most interesting, all-out commercial American film of the year to date, and one that will function much like a Rorschach test to expose the secrets of those who watch it.

Unlike any other film Truffaut has ever made, yet only Truffaut could have made it. It is a lovely, pure film. And it may be a classic.

Very beautiful and the first truly interesting, American-made western in years.

One of the few good, truly funny American political comedies ever made.

Miss Denis's mastery of film-making technology, which is something that can be learned, is equaled by her splendid control of narrative, a more elusive talent. She is astonishing. There are no dark corners in the story. Everything that happens is vivid and clear, though subject to the kind of speculation that tantalizes and rewards.

GREASE is not really the 1950's teen-age movie musical it thinks it is, but a contemporary fantasy about a 1950's teen-age musical—a larger, funnier, wittier and more imaginative-than-Hollywood movie with a life that is all its own. It uses the Eisenhower era — the characters, costumes, gestures and particularly, the music—to create a time and place that have less to do with any real 50's than with a kind of show business that is both timeless and old-fashioned, both sentimental and wise. The movie is also terrific fun.

As played by Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks's funniest, most cohesive comedy to date, this Dr. Frankenstein is a marvelous addled mixture of young Tom Edison, Winnie-the-Pooh, and your average Playboy reader with a keen appreciation of beautiful bosoms.

Network can be faulted both for going too far and not far enough, but it's also something that very few commercial films are these days. It's alive. This, I suspect, is the Lumet drive. It's also the wit of performers like Mr. Finch, Mr. Holden, and Miss Dunaway.

The performances—which have a lot to do with the right casting, particularly in the smaller roles—are impeccable. Paul Newman maintains an easy balance between star and character-actor. The leading-man authority is there, but it's given comic perspective by the intensity of the character and by its tackiness, evident even in the clothes he wears.

Nothing Miss Close has done on the screen before approaches the richness and comic delicacy of her work as the Marquise. [21 Dec 1988, p.C22]

So entertaining, so flip and so genially irreverent that it seems to announce the return of the great gregarious film maker whose "Nashville" remains one of the classics of the 1970's.

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge is wise and funny and just a little bit scary. Though it's an adaptation, it has the manner of a true original.

Greystoke is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable films of its kind I've ever seen.

An intelligent, beautifully acted adaptation.

Like the lovely, extravagantly overemphasized nineteen-thirties' costumes and production designed by Tony Walton, Murder on the Orient Express is much less a literal re-creation of a type of thirties movie than an elaborate and witty tribute that never for a moment condescends to the subject.

A witty, romantic, psychological horror film and it's almost as rewarding as a successful analysis...The fun is not in logic but watching how Mr. De Palma successfully tops himself as he goes along, and the fun lasts from the sexy, comic opening sequence right through to the film's several endings.

A huge, initially ambivalent but finally adoring, Pop portrait of one of the most brilliant and outrageous American military figures of the last one hundred years.

It seems to me that by describing horror with such elegance and beauty, Kubrick has created a very disorienting but human comedy, not warm and lovable, but a terrible sum- up of where the world is at... Because it refuses to use the emotions conventionally, demanding instead that we keep a constant, intellectual grip on things, it's a most unusual--and disorienting--movie experience.

Smashingly funny...This To Be or Not to Be scarcely misses a comic beat right from the opening sequence.

Mr. Lean's Passage to India, which he wrote and directed, is by far his best work since The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia and perhaps his most humane and moving film since Brief Encounter.

Allen has made a movie that is, in effect, a feature-length, two-reel comedy—something very special and eccentric and funny.

The dialogue sounds as if it had been gathered by means of microphones hidden in diners, buses, waiting rooms, restrooms, motels and park benches. Sometimes it is hilariously banal, with never a word wasted.

Dog Day Afternoon is a melodrama, based on fact, about a disastrously illplanned Brooklyn bank robbery, and it's beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer.

Not only the best movie to feature an Egyptian blowgun in several years, but also one of the few really stylish and entertaining American movies of 1985.

Barry Lyndon is another fascinating challenge from one of our most remarkable, independent-minded directors.

The Dark Half is an exceptionally entertaining film of its kind. Only Stanley Kubrick has ever adapted a King novel (The Shining) in such a way that the ending remains as satisfyingly spooky as the beginning.

Invigorating.

Though small in physical scope, Reservoir Dogs is immensely complicated in its structure, which for the most part works with breathtaking effect. [23 Oct 1992]

A profoundly simple, profoundly moving film.

This ravishing and witty spectacle invades the mind through eyes that are dazzled without ever being anesthetized

The manners and methods of big-city newspapering, beautifully detailed, contribute as much to the momentum of the film as the mystery that's being uncovered. Maybe even more, since the real excitement of All The President's Men is in watching two comparatively inexperienced reporters stumble onto the story of their lives and develop it triumphantly, against all odds.

One of John Huston's most original, most stunning movies. It is so eccentric, so funny, so surprising and so haunting that it is difficult to believe it is not the first film of some enfant terrible instead of the 33d feature by a man who is now in his 70's and whose career has had more highs and lows than a decade of weather maps.

Steven Spielberg's giant, spectacular Close Encounters of the Third Kind...is the best—the most elaborate—1950's science fiction movie ever made, a work that borrows its narrative shape and its concerns from those earlier films, but enhances them with what looks like the latest developments in movie and space technology.

All of this is by way of being the prelude to the film's extended, funny and moving final sequence, a spectacular feast, the preparation and execution of which reveal Babette's secret and the nature of her sustaining glory.

American Pop is a dazzling display of talent, nerve, ideas (old and new), passion and a marvelously free sensibility. The man may well be a genius, though that sort of pronouncement will have to wait on time.

The movie is perfectly cast, from Trintignant and on down, including Pierre Clementi, who appears briefly as the wicked young man who makes a play for the young Marcello. The Conformist is flawed, perhaps, but those very flaws may make it Bertolucci's first commercially popular film. (Review of Original Release)

Though House of Games is not of the dramatic heft of the playwright's ''American Buffalo'' and ''Glengarry Glen Ross,'' the screenplay is the first true Mamet work to reach the screen, and the direction illuminates it at every turn. Both Miss Crouse and Mr. Mantegna and the supporting actors, including Mike Nussbaum, J. T. Walsh and Steve Goldstein, are splendidly in touch, not only with character but also with the sense of the film.

"E.T." is as contemporary as laser-beam technology, but it's full of the timeless longings expressed in children's literature of all eras.

Arthur is a terrifically engaging, high-spirited screwball comedy about Arthur's more or less accidental salvation, largely through the love of a good, very poor but equally daffy young woman named Linda Marolla (Liza Minnelli).

How each frees the other is the stuff of Free Willy, which is as engaging as such films can be without offering rude surprises.

Even the special effects are more to the point of the comedy than they were in the first film. For some reason, this appears to leave more room for the sort of random funny business that Mr. Murray and his friends do best, or to which they react with most aplomb.

A tough-talking street melodrama, both shocking and sorrowful, acted by Paul Newman and a huge cast with the kind of conviction that can't be ignored.

Murder by Death is as light and insubstantial as one could wish.

A Brief History of Time is a kind of adventure that seldom reaches the screen, and it's a tonic.

The action sequences are what the film is all about, and these are remarkably well done, including a climactic, largely bloodless shootout among helicopters and jet fighters over Los Angeles.

A rich, gaudy cinema trip.

The Distinguished Gentleman is an easy, breezy romp of a movie, a low comedy of highly entertaining order.

Moonraker begins with one of the funniest and most dangerous (as well as most beautifully photographed and edited) sequences Bond has ever faced.

A good old-fashioned adventure movie that is so stuffed with robust incidents and characters that you can relax and enjoy it without worrying whether it actually happened or even whether it's plausible.

Though it's set within the world of the seriously down-and-out in Los Angeles and is about people who are at the end of their ropes, Barfly somehow manages to be gallant and even cheerful. It has an admirably lean, unsentimental screenplay by Charles Bukowski, the poet laureate of America's misbegotten.

Don't go to Winter Kills looking for some solemn explanation of the way things are or of how they got this way, or even of what happens in the film itself. It's a comedy, logical response to our times, a film whose reality depends on one's willingness to go along with the uproarious imaginations of Mr. Richert and Mr. Condon.

Basically decent, intelligent and sweet. It's a fanciful romantic comedy whose wildest and craziest notion is that Los Angeles, for all of its eccentricities, is a great place to live.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Dick Tracy has just about everything required of an extravaganza: a smashing cast, some great Stephen Sondheim songs, all of the technical wizardry that money can buy (plus the knowledge of how and when to use it), and a screenplay (credited to Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.) that observes the fine line separating true comedy from lesser camp.

The dancing itself, especially the dirty dancing, choreographed by Kenny Ortega, looks very contemporary, or, at least, as contemporary as "Saturday Night Fever," but it has a drive and a pulse that give the filim real excitement. [21 Aug 1987, p.C3]

The trip, however, is well worth the effort for anyone whose sensibilities have been worn numb by the idiocies of most conventional films.

Target is far more accomplished than anything Chris would have seen on television in the 1970's. However, its narrative shape is so familiar and its automobile chases so spectacularly choreographed that the humanity of the characters, carefully established at the start, gets lost -ground down - by the obligatory mechanics of melodrama.

Mr Demme has a special talent for locating the humor and pathos within the commonplace experiences of American life.

Poltergeist often sounds as if it had been dictated by an exuberant twelve-year-old, someone who's sitting by a summer campfire and determined to spin a tale that will keep everyone else on the edges of their knapsacks far into the night.

Bombay is a place of noise, restless movement and no privacy whatsover. It is squalor accepted as the natural order of things, and thus accommodated. Miss Nair does not share this fatalism, but in ''Salaam Bombay!'' she allows us to examine it without panic, and without patronizing it. She is a new film maker to watch.

Sweetie looks like a small movie, and in every measurable way it is, but it possesses remarkable strength and tenacity.

The Turning Point is entertaining, not for discovering new material, but for treating old material with style and romantic feeling that, in this day and age, seem remarkably unafraid.

Mr. Branagh has made a fine, rousing new English film adaptation of Shakespeare's ''Henry V,'' a movie that need not apologize to Laurence Olivier's 1944 classic.

It has a soul of its own, which reflects the changes, for good and evil, in American life in the last 40 years.

Ozu's recognition of the wall of skin separating the mind of the character from the viewer is an integral part of his philosophy. It amounts to a profound respect for their privacy, for the mystery of their emotions. Because of this—not in spite of this—his films, of which Late Spring is one of the finest, are so moving.

The film is not only a treasure in itself—witty, sophisticated an often beautifully funny, though it means to be “serious,” as Chaplin says—it's also a rare opportunity to see what Chaplin is like as a filmmaker when he is not contemplating his own image.

VENGEANCE IS MINE, directed by Shohei Imamura, a Japanese director largely unknown in this country, is chilly without being austere, the sort of confounding movie that tells us too much and not enough.

Neither Mr. Attenborough nor John Briley, who wrote the screenplay, are particularly adventurous filmmakers. Yet in some ways their almost obsessively middle-brow approach—their fondness for the gestures of conventional biographical cinema—seems self-effacing in a fashion suitable to the subject. Since Roberto Rossellini is not around to examine Gandhi in a film that would itself reflect the rigorous self-denial of the man, this very ordinary style is probably best.

It demonstrates the kind of intelligence and thought one doesn't often find in a movie aimed at the action-adventure crowd. This is evident as much in what the film doesn't do and say as in what is actually seen on the screen.

Any movie that attempts to mix together love, Cuban revolution, the C.I.A., Jewish mothers, J. Edgar Hoover and a few other odds and ends (including a sequence in which someone orders 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches) is bound to be a little weird—and most welcome.

A fascinating, vivid movie, not quite comparable to any other movie that I can immediately think of. Nor is it easily categorized.

Glory is celebratory, but it celebrates in a manner that insists on acknowledging the sorrow. This is a good, moving, complicated film.

Top Secret! comes nowhere near ''Airplane!'' but in its own cheerful, low-pressure way, it's about as amiable an entertainment as you will find this summer.

A very engaging, loose-limbed sort of comedy. It's written, directed and acted with amiability, which doesn't disguise the bitterness immediately beneath the surface but, like Eddie himself, absorbs it.

The movie itself is anything but anticlimactic. By putting his cameras on the cycles, Brown achieves audience-participation effects with speed that amount to marvelous delirium.

If you think about Jaws for more than 45 seconds you will recognize it as nonsense, but it's the sort of nonsense that can be a good deal of fun, if you like to have the wits scared out of you at irregular intervals.

An enchanted lark about wiseguys and those hustlers who think they are wiseguys, but aren't.

Taking Mr. Bright's excellent screenplay, Ms. Davis, whose background is in music videos, has made a remarkably rich melodrama with a strong narrative line and vivid characters. There's no waste space in this movie. Every second of its 97 minutes counts.

A lot of the other period details aren't too firmly anchored in time, but the film is so good-natured, so obviously aware of everything it's up to, even its own picturesque frauds, that I opt to go along with it. One forgives its unrelenting efforts to charm, if only because The Sting itself is a kind of con game, devoid of the poetic aspirations that weighed down "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

A big, convoluted, entertainingly dizzy romantic mystery melodrama.

The Gods Must Be Crazy is so genial, so good-natured and, on occasion, so inventive in its almost Tati-like slapstick routines, that it would would seem to deny the existence of any racial problems anywhere.

The great satisfaction of Mad Dog and Glory is watching Mr. De Niro and Mr. Murray play against type with such invigorating ease. Each is the other's straight man, a relationship that is hilariously set up in the initial encounter of the cop and the hoodlum.