Vincent Canby

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.

Under Fire, which was written by Ron Shelton and Clayton Frohman, from a story by Mr. Frohman, means well but it is fatally confused.

An elaborate, expensive‐looking, ludicrously jingoistic historical‐adventure that comes out so firmly in favor of Teddy Roosevelt's “Big Stick” policy, 70 years later, that it could also be a put‐on.

Mr. Donner has obvious difficulty coordinating the various elements of the overall vision.

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

Pat Garrett and Billy the kid suggest either that he (Peckinpah) has begun to take talk about his genius too seriously (it can happen to the best) or that he has fallen in with bad company.

If Striking Distance were a book, it could be called a good read. Instead, it's a painless watch.

The movie is a big, costly, phony exercise in myth‐making, machismo, romance-of-the-open-road nonsense and incredible self‐indulgence.

It's not that Oliver and Company is not up to par. It actively denies its own unique heritage. [18 Nov 1988, p.C8]

James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet is a brisk, entertaining contemporary melodrama about the kind of sleazy characters who populated California crime literature 35 years ago. That's no surprise, since the screenplay, adapted by Robert Redlin and Mr. Foley, is based on Jim Thompson's novel, published in 1955.

Except for Mr. Lloyd, the film is so sweet-natured and bland that it is almost instantly forgettable.

Single White Female is Mr. Schroeder's bid to compete in the mass market, and there's no reason he shouldn't succeed. The film is smooth, entertaining and believably sophisticated. It has far more sound psychological underpinnings than other movies of its type.

The Object of Beauty might have been practically perfect escapist entertainment if the screenplay had been as smooth as the cast. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg has written some attractive characters and a lot of bright lines, but he needs a script doctor. He has let the plot confuse things.

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.

Huston's affection for life's eccentrics, as well as its rejects and misfits, is Legendary—so much so that it has sometimes seemed as if he had cast his films as if running a mission. In Fat City he has kept himself under control. The result is one of the three or four most beautifully acted films seen so far this year.

Fat Man and Little Boy is so confused, so stunningly ineffective, that General Groves's hawkish statements are more persuasive than the dove-ish apprehensions expressed by the scientists. Even the sight of a scientist dying horribly of radiation poisoning fails to be moving.

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."

The special effects aren't bad, and there are fewer decapitations than in Conan the Barbarian. Mr. Fleischer seems to want this film to be funnier than was the first one, directed by John Milius, but Mr. Schwarzenegger, a body builder who can lift freight trains, can't easily get his tongue into his cheek.

Gotcha is about as devoid of personality as it's possible for a narrative movie to be.

It's aggressive in its ineptitude. It grates on the nerves like a 78 rpm record played at 33 rpm.

A big, convoluted, entertainingly dizzy romantic mystery melodrama.

A very well made, disorienting movie about inarticulated despair and utter hopelessness. It reminds me a lot of ''Over the Edge,'' Jonathan Kaplan's bleak, bitter picture of teen-age life in an architecturally perfect, California housing development. Unlike ''Over the Edge,'' however, The Boys Next Door is less interested in causes than in effects, which Penelope Spheeris, the director, turns into the photographic record of a grim, vivid, joyless ride to hell.

All of the performances are limited by the material and, in the case of Mr. Stoltz, by Michael Westmore's quite spectacular makeup. The exception - and the film's best sequence - occurs when Rusty's very middle-class, well-meaning parents, played by Estelle Getty and Richard Dysart, come to visit. In these few, brief minutes, Mask becomes specific and interesting. Otherwise it's the kind of story that would work better as a television feature.

Watching the film is like listening to someone use a lot of impressive words, the meanings of which are just wrong enough to keep you in a state of total confusion, but occasionally right enough to hold your attention. What is he trying to say? It takes a little while to realize that maybe the speaker not only doesn't know but doesn't even care to think things out.

Bergman creates a stunning picture not only of personal anxiety but also of the fury that may exist just below the surface of any perfect state.

There are some pleasant things in Saint Jack, but there are few surprises, except for the fact that either the movie's editor or Mr. Bogdanovich, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Howard Sackler and Paul Theroux (based on the novel by Mr. Theroux), hasn't found a simple way to indicate the passage of time.

One-fourth of the film is so brilliant—and so brilliantly acted by Dustin Hoffman—that it helps cool one's impatience with the rest of the film, which is much more fancily edited and photographed but no more profound than those old movie biographies Jack L. Warner used to grind out about people like George Gershwin, Mark Twain and Dr. Ehrlich.

The structure of the movie is so loose that a narrator (Victor Jory) must be employed from time to time to explain the plot, as if it were a serial. Most surprising in a movie that obviously cost a good deal of money is the sloppy matching of exterior and studio photography with miniature work for special effects.

Meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy.

More problematical is the tone of the film, which attempts to be both compassionate and goofy, though the events are funny only if they are seen as farcical.

Fool for Love has several exceptional things going for it, namely the performances by Mr. Shepard as Eddie, Kim Basinger as May and Harry Dean Stanton as the Old Man.

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.

Miss Streep dives into this thimble-sized comedy and makes one believe - at least, while she is on the screen - that it is an Olympic-sized swimming pool of wit.

Attention must be paid when a movie is as aggressively awful as Harry and the Hendersons, though it's so pin-headed that it could be the last of its inbred line. It's not likely to spawn.

Heroes, co-starring Henry (The Fonz) Winkler and Sally (The Flying Nun) Field, brings to the motion-picture theater all of the magic of commercial television except canned laughter. Well, no truly rotten movie is perfect. Harrison Ford, who may be one of the most-seen movie actors of the day because of his role in Star Wars, is effective in a supporting role too small to make the picture worth seeing.

Mr. Boorman takes these myths very seriously, but he has used them with a pretentiousness that obscures his vision.

''The Color of Money'' isn't ''Mean Streets'' or ''Raging Bull.'' It is, however, a stunning vehicle - a white Cadillac among the other mainstream American movies of the season.

A cheerful, inoffensive fantasy in which such attractive live actors as Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy play second fiddle to machinery that, in this case, means No. 5, designed by Syd Mead and engineered and realized by Eric Allard.

A consistently engrossing melodrama, modest in its aims and as effective for the cliches it avoids as for the clear eye through which it sees its working-class American lives.

An expensive stylistically bankrupt suspense melodrama.

There are some comparatively calm spots in the film, here and there, but they don't count. If anything, they allow you to catch your breath. Sleeper is terrific.

It's a see-through movie composed of a lot of clanking, silly, melodramatic effects that, like rib-tickling, exhaust you without providing particular pleasure, to say nothing of enlightenment.

It's not giving away state secrets to report that Rocky finds that success has made him fat and that to triumph again, he has to learn to be ''hungry.'' Rocky's problem is thus not that of America in the 80's but more like America in the affluent 60's and early 70's.

Come the end of the year, Above the Law may well rank among the top three or four goofiest bad movies of 1988.

A charming, witty meditation upon fakery, forgery, swindling and art, a movie that may itself be its own Exhibit A.

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.

The trouble with My Life as a Dog is that too often it imposes an alien sensibility upon the boy, requiring that he behave in a way that adults can too easily identify as charming. My Life as a Dog is a movie with a split point of view.

Unlike most teen-age movies, which attempt to impose some kind of adult order and significance on the events they recall, House Party has the light touch, rude wit and immediacy of rap as improvised by someone in top form.

The result is a movie that is both spooky and sexy.

A fragmented, far from‐great movie, and it won't change cinema history, but in its own odd fashion it celebrates humdrum lives without ever resorting to patronizing artifice.

Life Is Sweet, a title that should not be taken as irony, demands that the audience accept its meandering manner without expectations of the big dramatic event or the boffo laugh. It is very funny, but without splitting the sides.

The scenery is pretty but the movie never makes one wish to be in it. Mr. Russell, a good, reliable actor, prompts a few smiles as the raffish, impossibly self-assured sailor who is always half tight. Mr. Short and Ms. Place also are attractive in spite of the dim material.

The film, written by John Elder and directed by Terence Fisher, is not without its intentional giggles. Compared with "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein," however, it is very straight and solemn, chock full of the old horror film values we don't see much of any more.

With their remarkable contributions, ''Baron Munchausen'' is full of moments that dazzle, just for the fun of seeing the impossible come to life on the screen. What the Folies-Bergere once was for the foot-weary tourist, ''Baron Munchausen'' is for the television-exhausted child. Nothing much happens, but you can't easily tear your eyes away from it.

The events in ''Manon of the Spring'' are no more wildly melodramatic than those in ''Jean de Florette'' but, without the indoctrination provided by ''Jean,'' the second film functions as a mean-spirited review of the first.

Its grossness—its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences.

Ms. Pfeifer is lovely, the visual focal point of the film, but also much more. With her soft voice, her reserve and her quickness of mind, her Ellen has emotional weight. She's the film's heart and conscience. [17 Sept 1993, p.C1]

The Europeans isn't simply pretty, it's so relentlessly pretty it becomes almost boring to watch.

A good-natured lowbrow farce about two southern California garbage men who dream of opening their own surf shop.

The former lead singer of the Supremes is on-screen from start to finish, which is to say almost endlessly, but her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché.

Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a prize for demolishing a building in record time. The opening is good: stylish video images of a night football game played in a torrential rain, climaxed by the only scene in the film that has legitimate shock. After that, the brutality and the pace don't slacken, but interest does.

Diamonds Are Forever is great, absurd fun, not only because it recalls the moods and manners of the sixties (which, being over, now seem safely comprehensible), but also because all of the people connected with the movie obviously know what they are up to.

Desperately Seeking Susan, based on a good screenplay by a new writer named Leora Barish, is a terrifically genial New York City farce in which the lives of two very different young women become tangled in an Orlon web of lies, half-truths and cross purposes. Full of funny, sharply observed details, reflected in Santo Loquasto's witty production design as well as in all of the dozens of individual performances. The cast is virtually a Players Guide to the variety of performing talent available in New York.

In its stripped-down, cannily cinematic way, it's one of the most imaginative Australian films yet released in this country. It has no pretensions to do anything except entertain in the primitive, occasionally jolting fashion of the first nickelodeon movies, whose audiences flinched as streetcars lumbered silently toward the camera.

As cheerful and painless as not going to the dentist.

The film is technically sophisticated and emotionally retarded.

Shaft is not a great film, but it's very entertaining.

Topaz is not only most entertaining. It is, like so many Hitchcock films, a cautionary fable by one of the most moral cynics of our time.

Crowley has a good, minor talent for comedy-of-insult, and for creating enough interest, by way of small character revelations, to maintain minimum suspense.

Possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam War since Michael Herr's vigorous and hallucinatory book "Dispatches."

As in his last film, "Sorcerer," Mr. Friedkin seems bent on supplying us with more sociological information than is entirely necessary, whereas more information about the heist itself would have been welcome.

In much the way that Raymond stays detached, the performance seems to exist outside the film but, instead of illuminating Rain Man, it upstages the work of everyone else involved. [16 Dec 1988, p.C12]

I'm told by someone whose opinion I respect that the novel was very moving and very sad. The movie is not. It's science-fiction without gadgets, a horror film without thrills.

Thieves Like Us is such an engaging, sharply observed account of a long-lost time, and of some of the people who briefly inhabited it, that I hope it doesn't get confused with other films that seem, superficially anyway, to have covered the same territory.

Airport, the film version of Arthur Hailey's novel, is the sort of movie most people mean when they say Hollywood doesn't make movies the way it used to. This isn't just because Airport resembles any number of old Grand Hotel movies. Rather it's because it evokes our nostalgic feelings, not only for the innocence of old movies but also for the innocent old times in which we saw them.

As Lucy Honeychurch, Miss Bonham Carter gives a remarkably complex performance of a young woman who is simultaneously reasonable and romantic, generous and selfish, and timid right up to the point where she takes a heedless plunge into the unknown.

The Trail of the Pink Panther is less a conventional comedy than an uproarious retrospective devoted to the particular achievements of the Edwards-Sellers collaboration. Some of the routines seem totally new to me, and others are familiar, but either way, most of them are huge fun, and a couple approach greatness.

Because both Miss Redgrave and Miss. Jackson possess identifiable intelligence, Mary, Queen of Scots is not as difficult to sit through as some bad movies I can think of. It's just solemn, well-groomed and dumb.

It's full of film knowledge and is amazingly elaborate for a low-budget movie. The only problem is that it's not funny. One smiles at the inspiration of the jokes, though not at their execution.

Considering the dreary circumstances, the performances are quite good, especially those of Mr. Scott, who can do this sort of thing before breakfast; Timothy Hutton, an Oscar winner for Ordinary People; Sean Penn, as the one cadet at Bunker Hill with a grain of sense; Tom Cruise, as a murderously gung-ho cadet, and Evan Handler, as a cadet who remains a humane civilian at heart.

Such a vulnerable movie that if it were a little less sappy, one might feel compelled to protect it, as if it were someone under 7 or over 65 -- that portion of the public for which it is intended.

Bracing...Withnail and I isn't social history. It's about growing up, almost as if by accident. It's also genuinely funny.

The sort of comedy that leaves you exhausted, though not from laughing.

It's a frenetic farce that takes the form of a folksy study of Smalltown, U.S.A., where there is no problem that can't eventually be solved on top of a bed, in a bath.

What's missing from the film is any urgent interior meaning, and this it may be because of the distractions of the exterior details. It may also be because the conflicts that rage within Lancelot — between duty and desire, courtly love and physical love — simply aren't complex enough to bring out the best in Mr. Bresson.

Valiant Southern sheriff. Effective, unsurprising.

The Escape Artist represents a lot more talent than is ever demonstrated on the screen.

Like "Blood Simple," it's full of technical expertise but has no life of its own... The direction is without decisive style. [11 Mar 1987, p.C24]

Mr. Blake's screenplay and Mr. Costner's direction of it are, with the exception of three memorable sequences, commonplace. The film is painstakingly composed of small details of frontier and tribal life that should be riveting. Most of the time they aren't.

A tricky, cheerful, aggressively friendly Walt Disney fantasy for children who still find enchantment in pop-up books, plush animals by Steiff and dreams of independent flight.

Though big of budget, A League of Their Own is one of the year's most cheerful, most relaxed, most easily enjoyable comedies. It's a serious film that's lighter than air, a very funny movie that manages to score a few points for feminism in passing.

Though Mr. Hanson ("Bad Influence," "The Bedroom Window") is a slick movie maker, he is not an especially persuasive one here.

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is the most barren comedy I've seen in years, maybe ever.

Resourceful and valiant though unsuccessful attempt to revive the kind of animated feature identified with the Golden Age of Walt Disney. If The Secret of N.I.M.H. had had a screenplay to equal its great visual qualities, it might have become a classic in its own right.

The Lawn Mower Man depends mostly on a lot of colorful video-game-like special effects. They are very loud but, after a while, the noise and the lights induce a torpor that is quite soothing.

Robert Benton has made one of the best films in years about growing up American.

The best things in the production are the garishly absurd sets. The costumes, including the gold lame athletic supporters worn by the members of Ming's palace guard, suggest an adolescent's fever dream. The pacing is so funereal that this Flash Gordon seems far longer and far less funny that the 15-chapter serial, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), which starred Buster Crabbe. [05 Dec 1980, p.C8]