Vincent Canby

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]

Part ghost story, part revenge Western, more than a little silly, and often quite entertaining in a way that may make you wonder if you have lost your good sense. The violence of the film (including a couple of murders by bull-whipping) is continual and explicit. It exalts and delights in a kind of pitiless Old Testament wrath.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is as aimless as its dimly seen characters, who talk a lot of dreadful, cute-tough dialogue but are never recognizable except as the actors who play them. Even that factor isn't much help in enjoying the film.

The beauty of the sport, especially the ultimate grace of a player of Pele's extraordinary caliber, is captured in a series of slow-motion shots that communicates something of the appreciation and excitement that can be experienced only by a true aficionado. The form of the film is conventional, but the manner in which it has been executed is not.

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 Knightriders is absurd when you get right down to it, its absurdities are often fun and far less offensive than the solemnities that Mr. Boorman has dished up at far greater expense.

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.

Hardware is a sci-fi-horror film of such dopiness that it seems certain to become a cult classic somewhere. Movies that are so insistently silly often have the effect of seeming to expand the mind after midnight, which may have something to do with metabolism if not with controlled substances.

It's not as funny as "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie," but it is less pushy than "Meatballs." It is not as thickly stocked with outrageous moments as "Animal House," yet it is far easier to take than "Where the Buffalo Roam."

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.

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

My mind wasn't simply wandering during the film - it was ricocheting between the screen and the exit sign.

With Still Smokin', Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong are scraping the bottom of their barrel and finding only bits and pieces of the characters and comedy routines that were so successful in their earlier films, including ''Up in Smoke,'' ''Nice Dreams'' and ''Cheech and Chong's Next Movie.'' [7 May 1983, p.16]

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.

Assault on Precinct 13 is a much more complex film than Mr. Carpenter's Halloween, though it's not really about anything more complicated than a scare down the spine. A lot of its eerie power comes from the kind of unexplained, almost supernatural events one expects to find in a horror movie but not in a melodrama of this sort.

Paradise is The Blue Lagoon with camels.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is comparatively mild Billy Wilder and rather daring Sherlock Holmes, not a perfect mix, perhaps, but a fond and entertaining one.

NEIL JORDAN'S Mona Lisa is classy kitsch. It's as smooth and distinctive (and, ultimately, as insubstantial) as the old Nat (King) Cole recording of the song, which gives the film its title and a lot of its mood. It's also got high style, so you needn't hate yourself for liking it.

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

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.

It is spectacularly out of touch, a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice, small characters purloined from a ''young-adult'' novel by S.E. Hinton, the woman who wrote the novel on which ''Tex'' was based.

The January Man is well titled. It's a big-budget mainstream production that, in spite of its first-rate writer, director and cast, manages to fail in just about every department.

As directed by Ms. Foster, the film has a kind of purity of purpose and control that is very rare in mass-market movies. It avoids a lot of sentimental nonsense. It is also sparely (and well-) written by Scott Frank.

Frogs, which is not to be confused with The Birds for an instant, is an end-of-the-world junk movie, photographed rather prettily in Florida and acted by Milland as if he were sight-reading random passages from the dictionary.

The surfing footage is fairly routine until the film's climax, a contest featuring some spectacular shots of surfers seen beneath the overhang of breaking waves. Otherwise, the surfing, writing, direction and performances are of a caliber to interest only undiscriminating adolescents.

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]

Gadget-happy American moviemaking at its most ponderously silly.

Gene Kelly, who directed two classic musicals with Stanley Donen, here acts like a caretaker of a big, valuable property. He and Michael Kidd, his choreographer, have protected everything Gower Champion gave the original, and added nothing to the heritage of the musical screen except statistics.

Entertainingly slapdash.

He has taken a Shakespearean romantic comedy, the sort of thing that usually turns to mush on the screen, and made a movie that is triumphantly romantic, comic and, most surprising of all, emotionally alive.

Hoffa is an original work of fiction, based on fact, conceived with imagination and a consistent point of view.

Marvelously well-acted...Quite simply it's one of the most entertaining, most intelligent and most thoroughly satisfying commercial American films in a very long time.

It's not a question of too little, too late, but of too much, too long.

Just Another Girl on the IRT means to be instructive about teen-age pregnancies, but what it's saying is none too coherent.

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.

Mr. Ritter is an engagingly comic actor, but the women in his life are so uncharacterized, in the writing, casting and the playing, that the comedy fizzles. All that's left is a movie about a seriously alcoholic writer making a mess of things.

The three stars are good actors, but they have nothing much to work with. Their biggest challenge is to make the audience believe they are blood relatives, a question that would be quickly dismissed if the script were more compelling.

Prepare yourself for something very special...Here's a severely beautiful, mysterious movie that, as if by magic, liberates the romantic imagination. [16 Oct 1993]

Big, expensive, ultimately ridiculous movie that appears to have been constructed to be a Love Story on wheels.

Mr. Sargent and Mr. Zinneman have amplified the story with solemn care, in good taste (which is not always desirable), and have come forth with a film that is both well-meaning and on the side of the angels but with the exception of a half-dozen scenes, lifeless.

Rope is not merely a stunt that is justified by the extraordinary career that contains it, but one of the movies that makes that career extraordinary.

The most moving, the most intelligent, the most humane--oh, to hell with it!--it's the best American film I've seen this year.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail...is a marvelously particular kind of lunatic endeavor.

It is galvanizing because of Al Pacino's splendid performance in the title role and because of the tremendous intensity that Mr. Lumet brings to this sort of subject. (Review of Original Release)

It's meant as a tiny bit of praise to say that the movie, which was made in southern California, looks as if it had been shot in Spain or Yugoslavia. It looks both big and cheap.

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

The excitement of Down by Law comes not from what it's about. Reduced to its plot, it is very slight. But the plot isn't the point. The excitement comes from the realization that we are seeing a true film maker at work, using film to create a narrative that couldn't exist on the stage or the printed page of a novel.

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.

It's an unfunny horror-filmparody with a cast headed by Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss and Severn Darden , directed and written by Howard R. Cohen, who shouldn't be trusted to park the cars of such people, much less make a movie with them.

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

Midway solemnly cross-cuts between the war councils, chart rooms and communications offices on the American side and those on the Japanese side, with characters, who often have to be identified by subtitles, laboriously trying to give us all of the exposition necessary to make the battle coherent. There's no way to act such roles.

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

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.

The must-miss movie of the summer. It's a witless retread of the earlier, far funnier road-movie collaborations of Mr. Needham and Mr. Reynolds.

Movies like The Towering Inferno appear to have been less directed than physically constructed. This one is overwrought and silly in its personal drama, but the visual spectacle is first rate. You may not come out of the theater with any important ideas about American architecture or enterprise, but you will have had a vivid, completely safe nightmare.

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.

Manages to be both prissy and prurient at the same time, as well as goofily romantic and nasty. To this extent, I suppose, it is an accurate reflection of Miss Hinton's sentimental fiction about earnest, inarticulate young readers.

Though special-effects experts in Japan and around the world have vastly improved their craft in the last 30 years, you wouldn't know it from this film.

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.

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.

The director, the star and the writer make a fine team in this often riotous tale.

An American Tail looks good but the tale itself, as conceived by David Kirschner for the screenplay by Judy Freudberg and Tony Geiss, is witless if well-meaning. It's mostly bland, though every now and then it rises to express its own brand of kiddie-bigotry.

The direction by Michael Caton-Jones, the Englishman whose first theatrical feature was Scandal, is undistinguished here, but the material is not great.

The reason the film prompts laughter, and finally elation, is not because it's jolly or has any feel-good words to live by. It's because of the utterly demonic skill with which these foulmouthed characters carve one another up in futile attempts to stave off disaster.

At its best, Black Rain has the glitzy quality of an extremely long and clever television commercial. One can't be sure what is being sold, but the eye isn't bored.

Sneakers is jokey without being funny, breathless without creating suspense, in part because of the feeble plot.

Warlock is unexpectedly entertaining, having been concocted with comic imagination by D. T. Twohy, who wrote the screenplay, and Steve Miner, the director.